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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume I (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume I (of 8)
+       Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2005  [eBook #17037]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME I (OF 8)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
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+
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+      illustration caption in this text.
+
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME I
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+EARLY ENGLAND, 449-1071
+FOREIGN KINGS, 1071-1204
+THE CHARTER, 1204-1216
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;
+_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.
+_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.
+London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895
+
+
+
+
+I Dedicate this Book
+
+TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS
+MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
+AND
+WILLIAM STUBBS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    Volume I
+
+        Book I--Early England--449-1071
+
+            Authorities for Book I
+
+            Chapter I--The English Conquest of Britain--449-577
+
+            Chapter II--The English Kingdoms--577-796
+
+            Chapter III--Wessex and the Northmen--796-947
+
+            Chapter IV--Feudalism and the Monarchy--954-1071
+
+        Book II--England under Foreign Kings--1071-1204
+
+            Authorities for Book II
+
+            Chapter I--The Conqueror--1071-1085
+
+            Chapter II--The Norman Kings--1085-1154
+
+            Chapter III--Henry the Second--1154-1189
+
+            Chapter IV--The Angevin Kings--1189-1204
+
+        Book III--The Charter--1204-1307
+
+            Authorities for Book III
+
+            Chapter I--John--1204-1216
+
+LIST OF MAPS
+
+
+    Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1.png)
+
+    The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2.jpg)
+
+    England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3.jpg)
+
+    The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4.jpg)
+
+    Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5.jpg)
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+BOOK I
+EARLY ENGLAND
+449-1071
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I
+449-1071
+
+
+For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are scant and
+imperfect. The only extant British account is the "Epistola" of Gildas, a
+work written probably about A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and
+inflated, but his book is of great value in the light it throws on the
+state of the island at that time, and above all as the one record of the
+conquest which we have from the side of the conquered. The English
+conquerors, on the other hand, have left jottings of their conquest of
+Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of
+the compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,"
+annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical
+intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or
+the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a
+fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation
+("Historia Britonum") which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light
+on the conquest of the North.
+
+From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded by a
+wonderful combination of historical and archæological knowledge in
+constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South-Western
+Britain which must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.
+
+This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of the account
+given in my text; and I can only trust that it may soon be embodied in
+some more accessible form than that of a series of papers in the
+Transactions of the Archæological Institute. In a like way, though
+Kemble's "Saxons in England" and Sir F. Palgrave's "History of the
+English Commonwealth" (if read with caution) contain much that is worth
+notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution of the English people
+and the changes introduced into it since their settlement in Britain must
+be mainly drawn from the "Constitutional History" of Professor Stubbs.
+
+Bæda's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum," a work of which I have
+spoken in my text, is the primary authority for the history of the
+Northumbrian overlordship which followed the Conquest. It is by copious
+insertions from Bæda that the meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the
+West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which they at present
+appear in the part of the English Chronicle which concerns this period.
+The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, with those of Cuthbert by an anonymous
+contemporary and by Bæda himself, throws great light on the religious and
+intellectual condition of the North at the time of its supremacy. But
+with the fall of Northumbria we pass into a period of historical dearth.
+A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved among the meagre annals
+of Wessex in the English Chronicle: but for the most part we are thrown
+upon later writers, especially Henry of Huntingdon and William of
+Malmesbury, who, though authors of the twelfth century, had access to
+older materials which are now lost. A little may be gleaned from
+biographies such as that of Guthlac of Crowland; but the letters of
+Boniface and Alcwine, which have been edited by Jaffé in his series of
+"Monumenta Germanica," form the most valuable contemporary materials for
+this period.
+
+From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the English
+Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we have said, is a
+compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the Conquest of South Britain,
+and (2) Short Notices of the Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded by
+copious insertions from Bæda, and after the end of his work by brief
+additions from some northern sources. These materials may have been
+thrown together into their present form in Ælfred's time as a preface to
+the far fuller annals which begin with the reign of Æthelwulf, and which
+widen into a great contemporary history when they reach that of Ælfred
+himself. After Ælfred's day the Chronicle varies much in value. Through
+the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a Mercian Chronicle is
+imbedded in it: it then dies down into a series of scant and jejune
+entries, broken however with grand battle-songs, till the reign of
+Æthelred when its fulness returns.
+
+Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass of
+historical material for the age of Ælfred and his successors. The life of
+Ælfred which bears the name of Asser, puzzling as it is in some ways, is
+probably really Asser's work, and certainly of contemporary authority.
+The Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears the name of
+Æthelweard adds a little to our acquaintance with this time. The Laws,
+which form the base of our constitutional knowledge of this period, fall,
+as has been well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
+Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the earlier laws of
+Æthelberht and Ine, "mainly of the nature of amendments of custom." Those
+of Ælfred, Æthelred, Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the
+Confessor, "aspire to the character of Codes." They are printed in Mr.
+Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes of England," but the extracts given
+by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly
+bears on our constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters and other
+documents belonging to this period has been collected by Kemble in his
+"Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici," and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in
+his "Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum." Dunstan's biographies have been
+collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series published by the
+Master of the Rolls.
+
+In the period which follows the accession of Æthelred we are still aided
+by these collections of royal Laws and Charters, and the English
+Chronicle becomes of great importance. Its various copies indeed differ
+so much in tone and information from one another that they may to some
+extent be looked upon as distinct works, and "Florence of Worcester" is
+probably the translation of a valuable copy of the "Chronicle" which has
+disappeared. The translation however was made in the twelfth century, and
+it is coloured by the revival of national feeling which was
+characteristic of the time. Of Eadward the Confessor himself we have a
+contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard for the Master of the Rolls)
+which throws great light on the personal history of the King and on his
+relations to the house of Godwine.
+
+The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of St. Quentin, a
+verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and continued by
+William of Jumièges, a contemporary of the Conqueror. William's work in
+turn served as the basis of the "Roman de Rou" composed by Wace in the
+time of Henry the Second. The primary authority for the Conqueror himself
+is the "Gesta Willelmi" of his chaplain and violent partizan, William of
+Poitiers. For the period of the invasion, in which the English
+authorities are meagre, we have besides these the contemporary "Carmen de
+Bello Hastingensi," by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the pictures in the
+Bayeux Tapestry. Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and
+confused but honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious
+movement in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his
+account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary
+authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for
+northern matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his
+remarkable combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of
+course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief documents for the
+early history of Anjou have been collected in the "Chroniques d'Anjou"
+published by the Historical Society of France. Those which are authentic
+are little more than a few scant annals of religious houses; but light is
+thrown on them by the contemporary French chronicles. The "Gesta
+Consulum" is nothing but a compilation of the twelfth century, in which a
+mass of Angevin romance as to the early story of the Counts is dressed
+into historical shape by copious quotations from these French historians.
+
+It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our earlier history when
+historical criticism has done more than has yet been done for the
+materials given us by Ireland and Wales. For Welsh history the "Brut y
+Tywysogion" and the "Annales Cambriæ" are now accessible in the series
+published by the Master of the Rolls; the "Chronicle of Caradoc of
+Lancarvan" is translated by Powel; the Mabinogion, or Romantic Tales,
+have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest; and the Welsh Laws collected
+by the Record Commission. The importance of these, as embodying a
+customary code of very early date, will probably be better appreciated
+when we possess the whole of the Brehon Laws, the customary laws of
+Ireland, which are now being issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to
+which attention has justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine ("Early History
+of Institutions") as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest antiquity.
+
+The enormous mass of materials which exists for the early history of
+Ireland, various as they are in critical value, may be seen in Mr.
+O'Curry's "Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History"; and they
+may be conveniently studied by the general reader in the "Annals of the
+Four Masters," edited by Dr. O'Donovan. But this is a mere compilation
+(though generally a faithful one) made about the middle of the
+seventeenth century from earlier sources, two of which have been
+published in the Rolls series. One, the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the
+Gaill," is an account of the Danish wars which may have been written in
+the eleventh century; the other, the "Annals of Loch Cé," is a chronicle
+of Irish affairs from the end of the Danish wars to 1590. The "Chronicon
+Scotorum" (in the same series) extends to the year 1150, and though
+composed in the seventeenth century is valuable from the learning of its
+author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The works of Colgan are to Irish church affairs
+what the "Annals of the Four Masters" are to Irish civil history. They
+contain a vast collection of translations and transcriptions of early
+saints' lives, from those of Patrick downwards. Adamnan's "Life of
+Columba" (admirably edited by Dr. Beeves) supplies some details to the
+story of the Northumbrian kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we find
+the "Book of Rights," a summary of the dues and rights of the several
+over-kings and under-kings, of much earlier date probably than the Norman
+invasion; and Cormac's "Glossary," attributed to the tenth century and
+certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned of legal and
+social details, and something of the pagan religion of Ireland.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN
+449-577
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Old England]
+
+For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England
+itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country
+which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay
+within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart
+of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its
+pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little
+townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
+waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
+broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
+sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
+outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
+of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
+side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
+Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
+North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
+kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
+of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
+branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
+them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
+speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
+indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
+people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
+common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
+conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
+them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The English Village]
+
+Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.
+But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them
+to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must
+have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their
+villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us
+in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
+fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the
+village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
+served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
+body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the
+townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social
+centre was the homestead where the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the
+first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and
+traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or æthel, each in its
+little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men
+sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in
+various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead,
+or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled
+round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the
+community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his
+wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
+reverence; and it was from him and his fellow æthelings that
+host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of
+war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition
+of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was
+equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
+"free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never
+bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and
+sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war
+which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless
+outrage.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Justice]
+
+Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had
+originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time
+when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of
+English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was
+being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The
+"blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first
+effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's
+life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye
+for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair
+damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong
+as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another
+custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the
+wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the
+wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus
+made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
+knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by
+all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been
+done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From
+this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
+wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess
+sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his
+kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from
+wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done.
+So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged
+before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in
+fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or
+his guilt that he had to stand or fall.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Land]
+
+As the blood-bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave
+their first forms to English society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
+side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honour and
+discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty
+of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they
+fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the
+soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick"
+or "ham" or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
+together in it. In this way the home or "ham" of the Billings was
+Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But
+in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of
+land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become
+everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly
+the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of
+the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession
+of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of
+absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later
+time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and
+pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free
+villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The
+meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
+spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common
+meadow was fenced off into grass-fields, one for each household in the
+village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and division were at an end
+again. The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
+both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, though
+even the plough-land was; subject to fresh division as the number of
+claimants grew greater or less.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Læt and Slave]
+
+It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or
+ceorl from the unfree man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.
+As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their
+earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the
+village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life,
+so the læt was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was
+denied, or in some cases perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
+had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom the læt
+was free enough. He had house and home of his own, his life and limb were
+as secure as the ceorl's--save as against his lord; it is probable from
+what we see in later laws that as time went on he was recognized as a
+member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at
+law, and called like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree
+as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in the common land
+of the village. The ground which he tilled he held of some freeman of the
+tribe to whom he paid rent in labour or in kind. And this man was his
+lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in the general
+social life of his fellow villagers, he had no rights as against his
+lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to
+render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as
+these services were done the land was his own. His lord could not take it
+from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for
+his services.
+
+Far different from the position of the læt was that of the slave, though
+there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a
+small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine
+drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
+unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and
+spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
+within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
+his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a
+father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case
+the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be
+willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as
+carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a
+freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
+is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
+clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
+shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
+sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
+such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
+if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
+master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
+slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
+guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
+damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
+master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and
+when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
+woman-slave she might be burned.
+
+[Sidenote: The Moot]
+
+With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
+last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
+villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
+while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
+tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
+body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
+tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
+justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
+freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
+chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
+in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
+to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
+with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
+elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
+ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
+stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
+looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
+that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
+tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
+learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
+the agreement, the "common sense," the general conviction to which
+discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
+expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
+laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
+by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
+persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such
+as those which have made England what she is. The "talk" of the village
+moot, the strife and judgement of men giving freely their own rede and
+setting it as freely aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of
+other men, is the groundwork of English history.
+
+[Sidenote: The Folk]
+
+Small therefore as it might be, the township or village was thus the
+primary and perfect type of English life, domestic, social, and
+political. All that England has been since lay there. But changes of
+which we know nothing had long before the time at which our history opens
+grouped these little commonwealths together in larger communities,
+whether we name them Tribe, People, or Folk. The ties of race and kindred
+were no doubt drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
+Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, from a common
+greed of conquest, a common need of defence. Its form at any rate was
+wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of
+every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head who
+existed only so long as war went on, was the leader whom the host chose
+to command it. Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's
+council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men
+of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the
+various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their
+name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to
+it. In historic times however the regularity of such a military
+organization, if it ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas varied
+with the varying customs of each district. But men, whether many or few,
+were still due from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
+called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers to the field.
+
+The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
+to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
+organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
+Germanic races and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future of
+mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
+villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
+of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
+whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
+pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
+gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
+bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
+separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
+and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
+its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
+for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
+village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
+hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
+arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
+the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
+representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
+of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
+proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
+freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
+clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
+of "Aye" or "Nay."
+
+[Sidenote: Social Life]
+
+Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England
+we know less than of their political life. But there is no ground for
+believing them to have been very different in these respects from the
+other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though
+their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from
+being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached
+the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and
+refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier
+Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been
+found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than the close of the
+third century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely modelled on
+Roman metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses
+afford a yet more conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
+But apart from these outer influences the men of the three tribes were
+far from being mere savages. They were fierce warriors, but they were
+also busy fishers and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in
+handling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which they
+hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling sword and spear.
+They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the
+"ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel
+might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose
+in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and
+dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or
+mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
+midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang
+the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of art
+and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings,
+amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved in their workmanship the
+deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden
+buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes with rough jewels
+and inlaid with enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
+the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like the honour in
+which the smith was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
+twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn
+by their form to be of English workmanship. It is only in the English
+pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find
+traces of utter rudeness.
+
+[Sidenote: Religion]
+
+The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German
+peoples. Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of
+the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of
+the north. The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god,
+the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
+the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first
+ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still
+recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German
+homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder,
+the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of
+peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
+maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday
+may commemorate an obscure god Sætere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet
+whom was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends
+her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these
+floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the death-goddess,
+whose memory lingered long in the "Weird" of northern superstition; or
+the Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us,
+"wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling
+javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or
+hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our
+nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and
+sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of
+Berkshire; Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of
+Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the
+purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at
+no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his
+own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and
+English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father
+offered to the gods of his hearth.
+
+[Sidenote: The English Temper]
+
+It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of
+flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
+The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have
+it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
+missionary of the days of Bæda and Boniface who gathered in the very
+homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil
+of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the
+hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
+their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with
+them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
+of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these fifty winters," sings the
+hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. "Lives
+there no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of them--dare in the
+war-strife welcome my onset! Time's change and chances I have abided,
+held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never sware I falsely
+against right. So for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I
+sit here, wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such a temper, strong
+with the strength of manhood and full of the vigour and the love of life,
+the sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a
+pathetic poetry. "Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness
+or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the fire ring thee, or
+the flood whelm thee, or the sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age
+o'ertake thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in darkness." Strong
+as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that encompassed him,
+that girded his life with a thousand perils and broke it at so short a
+span. "To us," cries Beowulf in his last fight, "to us it shall be as our
+Weird betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!" But the sadness with
+which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries of life and death had
+nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids men eat and drink for
+to-morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of his fate. The
+thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the thought of doom.
+"Well shall a man do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome
+renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death is better than life of shame!"
+cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife with
+the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life is short, the more cause to
+work bravely till it is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end of his
+life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!"
+
+[Sidenote: English Piracy]
+
+The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them
+to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of
+Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at
+heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with
+tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds
+parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance
+were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of
+fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness
+and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by
+personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense
+of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
+a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's "shield-play" and
+"sword-game"; the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush
+of the host and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons,
+helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
+broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of
+the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
+Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to
+their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
+Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we
+catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
+sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he plunged into the sea to
+meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy
+waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love
+he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English
+verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird"
+as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan" as its curved prow breasted
+the "swan-road" of the sea.
+
+Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general
+movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
+advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed
+faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of
+fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of
+vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one
+of the war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed,
+seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards
+fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
+waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
+knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
+Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
+harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
+admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
+making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
+vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
+boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
+broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
+fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
+either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
+"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is
+their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that
+live on the pillage of the world!"
+
+[Sidenote: Britain]
+
+Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and
+they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of
+the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
+English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy
+of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear
+as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
+This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island
+was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year
+before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
+and a century after Cæsar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its
+conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over
+the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the Roman
+frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work
+of civilization followed fast on the work of the sword. To the last
+indeed the distance of the island from the seat of empire left her less
+Romanized than any other province of the west. The bulk of the population
+scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung
+to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some
+traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilization
+rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was
+thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own
+municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a
+network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the island to
+the other, manners, language, political life, all were of Rome.
+
+For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
+Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
+prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports amongst which London held the
+first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
+corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
+province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
+Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But
+evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told at last on the
+province of Britain. Wealth and population alike declined under a
+crushing system of taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry,
+under a despotism which crushed out all local independence. And with
+decay within came danger from without. For centuries past the Roman
+frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the
+Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube
+or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled
+the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
+from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It was this mass
+of savage barbarism which broke upon the Empire as it sank into decay. In
+its western dominions the triumph of these assailants was complete. The
+Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered and
+colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians
+encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths
+ruled at last in Italy itself.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of Jute and Saxon]
+
+It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
+fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment the
+province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these
+its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants then
+bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon pirates, as
+we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
+thirty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but civil
+strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last
+on the fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom while striving
+to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. By the
+usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was drawn for this
+purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at
+their head. If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in
+the land which from that time they made their own, it is with this
+landing of Hengest's war-band that English history begins. They landed on
+the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No
+spot can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the
+tread of English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet
+itself, a mere lift of ground with a few grey cottages dotted over it,
+cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But
+taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
+white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay;
+far away to the left across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark
+the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly towards
+Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the national
+tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers; for the
+physical changes of the country since the fifth century have told little
+on its main features. At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of
+sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and through this inlet
+the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind to what
+was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.
+
+[Illustration: Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1t.png)]
+
+The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
+the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
+on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over
+when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
+have flocked from the Channel to their settlement in Thanet; the inlet
+between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won their
+first victory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at
+the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of the Cray
+drove the British forces in terror upon London; but the ground was soon
+won back again, and it was not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts
+which had gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive
+struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so terrible that
+from this moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems to have been
+abandoned, and it was only along its southern shore that the Britons held
+their ground. Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over, and
+with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which
+they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
+English conqueror was done.
+
+The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
+the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
+of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
+the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
+strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
+Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
+vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
+Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
+Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames and
+leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
+between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
+fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future
+landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of
+Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "Ælle and
+Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and
+slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left."
+But Hengest and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
+the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
+Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
+Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed to the great
+downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the
+strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory
+at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set the crown of the
+West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt around it checked
+any further advance; and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
+under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders as they pressed
+westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
+Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a long pause in the
+Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested a
+series of victories whose history is lost was giving to men of the same
+Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
+probable however that the strength of Camulodunum, the predecessor of our
+modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants a slow and
+doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled the East-Saxons to
+occupy the territory to which they have given their name of Essex a line
+of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Forests
+checked their further advance into the island.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of the Eagle]
+
+Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
+outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
+Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head, from
+the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
+unconquered: and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
+triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
+Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
+the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
+Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by the
+third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which was
+to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on the people which
+sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that they won. The
+Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of Northumbria
+and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by
+the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia. But it was not till the
+moment we have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto held
+the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the Humber and the
+Trent. This great river-line led like a highway into the heart of
+Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of British
+resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
+One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
+wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
+Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
+the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
+landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
+maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
+record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
+masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
+settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
+the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
+then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
+followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
+tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the predecessor of our
+Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
+body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
+occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
+the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
+to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
+Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
+was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
+was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
+for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
+Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make
+a fresh and desperate stand.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of West-Saxons]
+
+It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the
+West-Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive
+within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort
+of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march
+of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in 571 made them masters of the districts
+which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing along the upper
+valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from
+their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester,
+Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings
+to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at
+Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of
+the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the borders of
+Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently
+brought again to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing
+defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses
+still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, "the white
+town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green
+woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins
+where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the
+halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without light, without song,"
+their stillness broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has
+swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS
+577-796
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Britain becomes England]
+
+With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
+complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
+moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
+Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
+island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
+England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
+the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
+complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
+Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
+their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
+English sword had drawn all was now purely English.
+
+It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other
+provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by
+the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or
+the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of
+ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank,
+but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all
+but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to the
+point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom
+the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
+times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other
+Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
+they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the
+Roman civilization. Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank
+mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
+Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have
+familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to be found in the
+Imperial provinces of the West. What really made the difference between
+the fate of Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
+stubborn courage of the British themselves. In all the world-wide
+struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
+fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or
+Visigoth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
+popular revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric in
+Italy. But in Britain the invader was met by a courage almost equal to
+his own. Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fellows
+abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
+the English had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard fighting.
+
+This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural obstacles of the
+gravest kind. Elsewhere in the Roman world the work of the conquerors was
+aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal and Frank marched along
+Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed river or
+ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so doubtless with the English
+conquerors of Britain. But though Britain had long been Roman, her
+distance from the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any other
+province of the West. Socially the Roman civilization had made little
+impression on any but the townsfolk, and the material civilization of the
+island was yet more backward than its social. Its natural defences threw
+obstacles in its invaders' way. In the forest belts which stretched over
+vast spaces of country they found barriers which in all cases checked
+their advance and in some cases finally stopped it. The Kentishmen and
+the South-Saxons were brought utterly to a standstill by the
+Andredsweald. The East-Saxons could never pierce the woods of their
+western border. The Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the
+Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long and terrible struggle
+that the West-Saxons could hew their way through the forests which
+sheltered the "Gwent" of the southern coast. Their attempt to break out
+of the circle of woodland which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless
+for thirty years; and in the height of their later power they were thrown
+back from the forests of Cheshire.
+
+[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Britons]
+
+It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well as the moral
+circumstances of Britain that we can understand the character of its
+earlier conquest. Field by field, town by town, forest by forest, the
+land was won. And as each bit of ground was torn away by the stranger,
+the Briton sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly and fight for
+the next. There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant
+so impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the men who held it.
+Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like
+Anderida whose long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the
+most part the Britons were not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew
+back. Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slowness of the
+conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of its defence which
+distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of
+the Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the resistance of the Britons
+was greater than that of the other provincials of Rome so the forces of
+their assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy than attack by
+land, and the numbers who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or
+Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric or Chlodewig
+across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing in small parties, and but gradually
+reinforced by after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and
+fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of any joint action among the
+assailants told in the same way. Though all spoke the same language and
+used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
+Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and
+each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any
+collective enterprise.
+
+[Sidenote: The English settlement]
+
+Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a
+very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
+countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
+from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
+sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest
+of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of
+bitter warfare. But it was just through the length of the struggle that
+of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
+So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain
+had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
+Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the
+homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words
+mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave
+the main facts untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
+When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the
+invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land
+which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his
+English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire
+and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
+
+[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]
+
+For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to
+the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
+England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon
+the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they
+were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life,
+administrative order, still remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
+province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the
+past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with
+the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities.
+Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land
+remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The
+Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of
+priest and lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the coins which we dig
+up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a world
+which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its
+manners, its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of the
+completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than the religious
+change which passed over the land. Alone among the German assailants of
+Rome the English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to
+overthrow. The new England was a heathen country. Homestead and boundary,
+the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced
+Christ.
+
+As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us
+the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a
+conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse
+to the land over which it passed. But if the new England which sprang
+from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the
+arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away,
+it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had
+been destroyed. The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout
+the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by
+tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
+society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting
+for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the
+material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was
+impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
+sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home
+of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked
+the site of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the English in the
+conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
+society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of
+their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent
+upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
+to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the læt
+and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of
+conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.
+It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own
+language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village
+life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of
+kinship, its principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates or
+stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common
+temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the
+days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land
+in which we live. Their social and political organization remained
+radically unchanged. In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the
+wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the
+divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough
+groundwork of local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred
+warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the
+local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise
+uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their
+settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army
+organization which the process of distribution reflected. From the large
+amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been
+conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
+small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
+unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common property of the tribe as
+at a later time of the nation. What ground was actually occupied may have
+been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl
+and Ceorl gathered round them their læt and slave as in their homeland by
+the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the shores
+of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For distant and
+dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole
+after-life of Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay our
+Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our
+Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
+our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization,
+letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner
+mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the
+fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the
+mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now,
+passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The King]
+
+But though English society passed thus in its completeness to the soil of
+Britain, its primitive organization was affected in more ways than one by
+the transfer. In the first place conquest begat the King. It seems
+probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their
+own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace time with the
+customary government of village-reeve and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan,
+while it gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom it chose for
+each campaign. But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged
+against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader whom the
+various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Wessex or Mercia
+might follow; and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
+intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher position
+than that of temporary chieftains. It was no doubt from this cause that
+we find Hengest and his son Æsc raised to the kingdom in Kent, or Ælle in
+Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric among the West Saxons. The association of
+son with father in this new kingship marked the hereditary character
+which distinguished it from the temporary office of an ealdorman. The
+change was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than the modern
+conception of kingship would lead us to imagine. Hereditary as the
+succession was within a single house, each successive king was still the
+free choice of his people, and for centuries to come it was held within a
+people's right to pass over a claimant too weak or too wicked for the
+throne. In war indeed the king was supreme. But in peace his power was
+narrowly bounded by the customs of his people and the rede of his wise
+men. Justice was not as yet the king's justice, it was the justice of
+village and hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-moot.
+It was only with the assent of the wise men that the king could make laws
+and declare war and assign public lands and name public officers. Above
+all, should his will be to break through the free customs of his people,
+he was without the means of putting his will into action, for the one
+force he could call on was the host, and the host was the people itself
+in arms.
+
+[Sidenote: The Thegn]
+
+With the new English king rose a new order of English nobles. The social
+distinction of the eorl was founded on the peculiar purity of his blood,
+on his long descent from the original settler around whom township and
+thorpe grew up. A new distinction was now to be found in service done to
+the king. From the earliest times of German society it had been the wont
+of young men greedy of honour or seeking training in arms to bind
+themselves as "comrades" to king or chief. The leader whom they chose
+gave them horses, arms, a seat in his mead hall, and gifts from his
+hoard. The "comrade" on the other hand--the gesith or thegn, as he was
+called--bound himself to follow and fight for his lord. The principle of
+personal dependence as distinguished from the warrior's general duty to
+the folk at large was embodied in the thegn. "Chieftains fight for
+victory," says Tacitus; "comrades for their chieftain." When one of
+Beowulf's "comrades" saw his lord hard bested "he minded him of the
+homestead he had given him, of the folk right he gave him as his father
+had it; nor might he hold back then." Snatching up sword and shield he
+called on his fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. "I mind me of the
+day," he cried, "when we drank the mead, the day we gave pledge to our
+lord in the beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that we would
+pay him back our war-gear, our helms and our hard swords, if need befel
+him. Unmeet is it, methinks, that we should bear back our shields to our
+home unless we guard our lord's life." The larger the band of such
+"comrades," the more power and repute it gave their lord. It was from
+among the chiefs whose war-band was strongest that the leaders of the
+host were commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into kings, the
+number of their thegns naturally increased. The rank of the "comrades"
+too rose with the rise of their lord. The king's thegns were his
+body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his will. They were his
+nearest and most constant counsellors. As the gathering of petty tribes
+into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls in each realm, and in a
+corresponding degree diminished their social importance, it raised in
+equal measure the rank of the king's thegns. A post among them was soon
+coveted and won by the greatest and noblest in the land. Their service
+was rewarded by exemption from the general jurisdiction of hundred-court
+or shire-court, for it was part of a thegn's meed for his service that he
+should be judged only by the lord he served. Other meed was found in
+grants of public land which made them a local nobility, no longer bound
+to actual service in the king's household or the king's war-band, but
+still bound to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than those
+which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader of his tribe. In a word,
+thegnhood contained within itself the germ of that later feudalism which
+was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bernicians]
+
+But the strife between the conquering tribes which at once followed on
+their conquest of Britain was to bring about changes even more momentous
+in the development of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle
+were making themselves masters of central and southern Britain, the
+English who had landed on its northernmost shores had been slowly winning
+for themselves the coast district between the Forth and the Tyne which
+bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress seems to have been small till
+they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the "Flame-bearer," who
+found a site for his King's town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough;
+nor was it till the reign of his fourth son Æthelric that they gained
+full mastery over the Britons along their western border. But once
+masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their
+English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, whose first King Ælla
+was now sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the foreign markets
+with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history
+shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at
+Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay
+recalled the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their fair
+faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what
+country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked the trader who brought them.
+The slave-dealer answered "They are English," or as the word ran in the
+Latin form it would bear at Rome, "they are Angles." The deacon's pity
+veiled itself in poetic humour. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with
+faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the
+merchant, "from Deira." "_De irâ!_" was the untranslatable wordplay of
+the vivacious Roman--"aye, plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's
+mercy! And what is the name of their king?" They told him "Ælla," and
+Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in
+Ælla's land," he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should
+be brought to sing it.
+
+While Gregory was thus playing with Ælla's name the old king passed away,
+and with his death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems to have
+ceased. His children fled over the western border to find refuge among
+the Welsh, and Æthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph. A new age
+of our history opens in this submission of one English people to another.
+When the two kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of
+national formation began. If a new England sprang out of the mass of
+English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the
+gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common
+political head. The difference in power between state and state which
+inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which
+the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the
+kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main
+on a footing of equality. All had taken an independent share in the work
+of conquest. Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was
+recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.
+Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon
+kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of
+each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.
+It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were
+grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South
+and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In neither
+instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of
+one member of the group over the others; while north of the Humber the
+feeling between the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
+settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility rather than of
+friendship. But this age of isolation, of equality, of independence, had
+now come to an end. The progress of the conquest had drawn a sharp line
+between the kingdoms of the conquerors. The work of half of them was
+done. In the south of the island not only Kent but Sussex, Essex, and
+Middlesex were surrounded by English territory, and hindered by that
+single fact from all further growth. The same fate had befallen the East
+Engle, the South Engle, the Middle and the North Engle. The West Saxons,
+on the other hand, and the West Engle, or Mercians, still remained free
+to conquer and expand on the south of the Humber, as the Englishmen of
+Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north of that river. It was
+plain, therefore, that from this moment the growth of these powers would
+throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with an
+ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new arrangement of
+political forces. The greater kingdoms would in the end be drawn to
+subject and absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman and
+Briton would be added a struggle between Englishman and Englishman.
+
+[Sidenote: Kent]
+
+It was through this struggle and the establishment of a lordship on the
+part of the stronger and growing states over their weaker and stationary
+fellows that the English kingdoms were to make their first step towards
+union in a single England. Such an overlordship seemed destined but a few
+years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The victories of Ceawlin and
+Cuthwulf left it the most powerful of the English kingdoms. None of its
+fellow states seemed able to hold their own against a power which
+stretched from the Chilterns to the Severn and from the Channel to the
+Ouse. But after its defeat in the march upon Chester Wessex suddenly
+broke down into a chaos of warring tribes; and her place was taken by two
+powers whose rise to greatness was as sudden as her fall. The first of
+these was Kent. The Kentish king Æthelberht found himself hemmed in on
+every side by English territory; and since conquest over Britons was
+denied him he sought a new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at the
+head of the conquerors of the south. The break up of Wessex no doubt
+aided his attempt; but we know little of the causes or events which
+brought about his success. We know only that the supremacy of the Kentish
+king was owned at last by the English peoples of the east and centre of
+Britain. But it was not by her political action that Kent was in the end
+to further the creation of a single England; for the lordship which
+Æthelberht built up was doomed to fall for ever with his death, and yet
+his death left Kent the centre of a national union far wider as it was
+far more enduring than the petty lordship which stretched over Eastern
+Britain. Only three or four years after Gregory had pitied the English
+slaves in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as Bishop of the
+Imperial City in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to
+the faith; and an opening was given him by Æthelberht's marriage with
+Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris. Bertha like
+her Frankish kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop accompanied her
+from Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside
+the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for their worship. The king
+himself remained true to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no
+doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of
+a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the English people. The
+missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet, at the spot where
+Hengest had landed more than a century before; and Æthelberht received
+them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the
+eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of
+Canterbury. The king listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine
+as the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from Gaul rendered it
+in the English tongue. "Your words are fair," Æthelberht replied at last
+with English good sense, "but they are new and of doubtful meaning." For
+himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but with
+the usual religious tolerance of the German race he promised shelter and
+protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing
+before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in
+concert the strains of the litany of their Church. "Turn from this city,
+O Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy
+house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the
+jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had
+wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in
+the Roman market-place, "Alleluia!"
+
+
+[Sidenote: Christian England]
+
+It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest became
+yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
+landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
+the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
+missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as
+they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
+legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
+and the thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
+fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Æthelberht listened in the
+preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
+England, became a centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became
+again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its
+correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned
+with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed that union with the
+Western world which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new England
+was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
+art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors
+returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed
+never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the
+result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes
+of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their
+arrival.
+
+[Sidenote: Æthelfrith]
+
+A year passed before Æthelberht yielded to the preaching of Augustine.
+But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and
+the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their king. The new
+religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which
+Æthelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms. Sæberht, King of the
+East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to
+build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of
+London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Rædwald resolved to serve
+Christ and the older gods together. But while Æthelberht was thus
+furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to
+which Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing
+it out as the coming political centre of the new England. In 593, four
+years before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, Æthelric was
+succeeded by his son Æthelfrith, and the new king took up the work of
+conquest with a vigour greater than had yet been shown by any English
+leader. For ten years he waged war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a
+tract which stretched along his western border from Dumbarton to
+Carlisle. The contest ended in a great battle at Dægsastan, perhaps
+Dawston in Liddesdale; and Æthelfrith turned to deliver a yet more
+crushing blow on his southern border. British kingdoms still stretched
+from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn; and had their line remained
+unbroken the British resistance might yet have withstood the English
+advance. It was with a sound political instinct therefore that Æthelfrith
+marched in 613 upon Chester, the point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a
+kingdom which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked itself to the
+British states of what we now call Wales. Hard by the city two thousand
+monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settlements which were
+characteristic of Celtic Christianity, and after a three days' fast a
+crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to the field.
+Æthelfrith watched the wild gestures of the monks as they stood apart
+from the host with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay
+them in the coming fight. "Bear they arms or no," said the King, "they
+war against us when they cry against us to their God," and in the
+surprise and rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.
+
+With the battle of Chester Britain as a country ceased to exist. By their
+victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint,
+of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall, from the general body of
+their race. By Æthelfrith's victory at Chester and the reduction of
+southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of Britain was broken
+into two several parts. From this time therefore the character of the
+English conquest of Britain changes. The warfare of Briton and Englishman
+died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms against separate
+British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians and Strathclyde,
+of Mercia against the Welsh between Anglesea and the British Channel, of
+Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip to the Land's End. But
+great as was the importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of
+Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of England
+itself. The drift towards national unity had already begun, but from the
+moment of Æthelfrith's victory this drift became the main current of our
+history. Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its
+conquerors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of plunder;
+while the severance of the British kingdoms took from their enemies the
+pressure of a common danger. The conquests of Æthelfrith left him without
+a rival in military power, and he turned from victories over the Welsh,
+as their English foes called the Britons, to the building up of a
+lordship over his own countrymen.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Eadwine]
+
+The power of Æthelberht seems to have declined with old age, and though
+the Essex men still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of
+Mid-Britain shook it off. So strong however had the instinct of union now
+become, that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation.
+Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and South-English now owned
+the lordship of the East-English King Rædwald. The shelter given by
+Rædwald to Ælla's son Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian
+attack. Fortune however deserted Æthelfrith, and a snatch of northern
+song still tells of the day when the river Idle by Retford saw his defeat
+and fall. But the greatness of Northumbria survived its king. In 617
+Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men of Deira; and his conquest of
+Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which the Bernician
+conquest of Deira had first brought about. The greatness of Northumbria
+now reached its height. Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a
+genius for civil government which shows how utterly the mere age of
+conquest had passed away. With him began the English proverb so often
+applied to after kings: "A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from
+sea to sea in Eadwine's day." Peaceful communication revived along the
+deserted highways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes,
+and a cup of brass set beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some
+faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round this
+new "Empire of the English"; a royal standard of purple and gold floated
+before Eadwine as he rode through the villages; a feather tuft attached
+to a spear, the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the
+streets. The Northumbrian king became in fact supreme over Britain as no
+king of English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached to
+the Firth of Forth, and here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded a
+city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's burgh. To the west his
+arms crushed the long resistance of Elmet, the district about Leeds; he
+was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles
+of Anglesea and Man. South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the
+five English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons remained awhile
+independent. But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power when
+Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by Bæda tells something of the
+fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection of the south to
+the overlordship of Northumbria. In an Easter-court which he held in his
+royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy
+of Wessex, who brought a message from its king. In the midst of the
+conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and
+rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's war-band,
+threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the
+stroke that even through Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim.
+The king however recovered from his wound to march on the West-Saxons; he
+slew or subdued all who had conspired against him, and returned
+victorious to his own country.
+
+[Sidenote: Conversion of Northumbria]
+
+Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King's daughter as a wife,
+a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the
+Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall
+stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
+worn face, were long remembered in the North. Moved by his queen's
+prayers Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful
+from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on
+the new faith to which he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as now
+in the light it threw on the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the
+darkness of the future as of the past. "So seems the life of man, O
+king," burst forth an aged ealdorman, "as a sparrow's flight through the
+hall when one is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
+lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm without. The sparrow flies
+in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
+hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the
+darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
+sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. If this new
+teaching tell us aught certainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser
+argument told on the crowd. "None of your people, Eadwine, have
+worshipped the gods more busily than I," said Coifi the priest, "yet
+there are many more favoured and more fortunate. Were these gods good for
+anything they would help their worshippers." Then leaping on horseback,
+he hurled his spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the
+rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Penda]
+
+But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a struggle.
+Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with the death of
+Æthelberht. The young kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church
+where the Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist to the people,
+crying, "Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba," and on
+the bishop's refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of
+reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion; but Mercia, which had as
+yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as
+the champion of the heathen gods. Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of
+the old religion a chance of winning back his people's freedom and giving
+it the lead among the tribes about it. Originally mere settlers along the
+Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited
+them to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of their
+Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of expansion. Their
+fights along the frontier too kept their warlike energy at its height.
+Penda must have already asserted his superiority over the four other
+English tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured to attack
+Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and Magesætas
+on the Severn. Even with this accession of strength however he was still
+no match for Northumbria. But the war of the English people with the
+Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a season, and the
+Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had parted the two
+races till now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a
+joint attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place called the
+Heathfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and
+slain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oswald]
+
+Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line of Æthelfrith
+to its throne; and after a year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
+its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the north, and
+Oswald's first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian force
+gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged itself at the new King's
+bidding to become Christian if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon fell
+fighting on the "Heaven's Field," as after times called the field of
+battle; the submission of Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of
+Northumbria; and for seven years the power of Oswald equalled that of
+Eadwine. It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this
+struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in Bernicia the work of
+conversion which his victory began. Paulinus fled from Northumbria at
+Eadwine's fall; and the Roman Church, though established in Kent, did
+little in contending elsewhere against the heathen reaction. Its place in
+the conversion of northern England was taken by missionaries from
+Ireland. To understand the true meaning of this change we must remember
+how greatly the Christian Church in the west had been affected by the
+German invasion. Before the landing of the English in Britain the
+Christian Church stretched in an unbroken line across Western Europe to
+the furthest coasts of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan
+English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of this great
+communion and broke it into two unequal parts. On one side lay Italy,
+Spain, and Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to and remained in direct
+contact with the See of Rome, on the other, practically cut off from the
+general body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland. But the condition
+of the two portions of Western Christendom was very different. While the
+vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a
+bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders,
+drew from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since.
+Christianity was received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and
+letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and Biblical
+knowledge which fled from the Continent took refuge in its schools. The
+new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook confinement within the
+bounds of Ireland itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island,
+had not been half a century dead when Irish Christianity flung itself
+with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which was
+rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among
+the Picts of the Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern seas.
+An Irish missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the
+Apennines. The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its name another
+Irish missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing
+over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed as if the
+course of the world's history was to be changed, as if the older Celtic
+race that Roman and German had swept before them had turned to the moral
+conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was
+to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West.
+
+[Sidenote: Aidan]
+
+On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of Scotland an
+Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mission-station of Iona. It
+was within its walls that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his
+accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from
+among its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to his call obtained
+little success. He declared on his return that among a people so stubborn
+and barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was impossible. "Was it
+their stubbornness or your severity?" asked Aidan, a brother sitting by;
+"did you forget God's word to give them the milk first and then the
+meat?" All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to undertake the
+abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his bishop's
+see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne. Thence, from a monastery
+which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers poured
+forth over the heathen realms. Aidan himself wandered on foot, preaching
+among the peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his own court the
+King acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their efforts to
+convert his thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed began to blend
+itself with that of the warlike glory of Æthelfrith or the wise
+administration of Eadwine, and the moral power which was to reach its
+height in Ælfred first dawns in the story of Oswald. For after times the
+memory of Oswald's greatness was lost in the memory of his piety. "By
+reason of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the Lord he
+was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees." As he
+feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble of his
+war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor at his gate told him
+of a multitude that still waited fasting without. The king at once bade
+the untasted meat before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish
+be parted piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed
+it. "May this hand," he cried, "never grow old."
+
+Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his
+predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint
+likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the
+Picts calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain." His power was bent
+to carry forward the conversion of all England, but prisoned as it was to
+the central districts of the country heathendom fought desperately for
+life. Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was one
+continuous battle with the new religion; but it was a battle rather with
+the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than with the supremacy of the
+Cross. East-Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two
+powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from the Mercian rule.
+But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called the battle
+of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain. For a few years after his
+victory at the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathenism
+triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his overlordship as it had
+owned that of Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith which he had
+embraced but a few years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira
+seems to have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though distracted by
+civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused to yield. Year
+by year the Mercian king carried his ravages over the north; once he
+reached even the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bamborough.
+Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled down the cottages around,
+and piling their wood against its walls fired the mass in a fair wind
+that drove the flames on the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing,"
+cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Farne, as he saw the
+smoke drifting over the city, and a change of wind--so ran the legend of
+Northumbria's agony--drove back the flames on those who kindled them. But
+burned and harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the Cross. Oswiu, a
+third son of Æthelfrith, held his ground stoutly against Penda's inroads
+till their cessation enabled him to build up again the old Northumbrian
+kingdom by a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was never
+henceforth to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen in the
+renewal of Christianity throughout Britain. East-Anglia, conquered as it
+was, had clung to its faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again.
+Penda's own son, whom he had set over the Middle-English, received
+baptism and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the
+new belief appeared fearlessly among the Mercians themselves. Penda gave
+them no hindrance. In words that mark the temper of a man of whom we
+would willingly know more, Bæda tells us that the old king only "hated
+and scorned those whom he saw not doing the works of the faith they had
+received." His attitude shows that Penda looked with the tolerance of his
+race on all questions of creed, and that he was fighting less for
+heathenism than for political independence. And now the growing power of
+Oswiu called him to the old struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met
+Oswiu in the field of Winwæd by Leeds. It was in vain that the
+Northumbrian sought to avert Penda's attack by offers of ornaments and
+costly gifts. "If the pagans will not accept them," Oswiu cried at last,
+"let us offer them to One that will"; and he vowed that if successful he
+would dedicate his daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries in his
+realm. Victory at last declared for the faith of Christ. Penda himself
+fell on the field. The river over which the Mercians fled was swollen
+with a great rain; it swept away the fragments of the heathen host, and
+the cause of the older gods was lost for ever.
+
+[Sidenote: Oswiu]
+
+The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was followed by
+a long and profound peace. For three years after the battle of Winwæd
+Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu's name. The winning
+of central England was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for
+Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathendom was dead with Penda. "Being thus
+freed," Bæda tells us, "the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve
+the true King, Christ." Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the
+Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the
+missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated.
+Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he
+travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theodore
+with his own hands lifted him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry breaks
+out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of singers singing
+sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside St. Mary's Church
+where the bishop lay dying. Then "the same song ascended from the roof
+again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came." It was the soul
+of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to
+solace the last hours of Ceadda.
+
+[Sidenote: Cuthbert]
+
+In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost
+in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the new
+religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the
+Lowlands. Born on the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found
+shelter at eight years old in a widow's house in the little village of
+Wrangholm. Already in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
+which caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things,
+and a passing attack of lameness deepened the religious impression. A
+traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stopping his
+horse to tend Cuthbert's injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy's
+shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still famous as a
+sheepwalk, though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock. There
+meteors plunging into the night became to him a company of angelic
+spirits carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his longings
+slowly settled into a resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he
+made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an
+untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled
+in the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land of poetry
+and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
+Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.
+Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage
+and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to
+see the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and
+farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and
+there with clusters of wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
+which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about them.
+The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were for the most part
+Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their
+thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded
+to the king. But they retained their old superstitions side by side with
+the new worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on their
+heathen charms and amulets; and if trouble befell the Christian preachers
+who came settling among them, they took it as proof of the wrath of the
+older gods. When some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the
+construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at
+work on them out to sea, the rustic bystanders shouted, "Let nobody pray
+for them; let nobody pity these men; for they have taken away from us our
+old worship, and how their new-fangled customs are to be kept nobody
+knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wandered among listeners such as
+these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from whose
+roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Unlike his Irish
+comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from village to village;
+the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians listened willingly to one who was
+himself a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the rough
+Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Tweed. His patience, his
+humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and not
+less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for the
+hard life he had chosen. "Never did man die of hunger who served God
+faithfully," he would say, when nightfall found them supperless in the
+waste. "Look at the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him if He
+will"--and once at least he owed his meal to a fish that the scared bird
+let fall. A snowstorm drove his boat on the coast of Fife. "The snow
+closes the road along the shore," mourned his comrades; "the storm bars
+our way over sea." "There is still the way of heaven that lies open,"
+said Cuthbert.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Cædmon]
+
+While missionaries were thus labouring among its peasantry, Northumbria
+saw the rise of a number of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict
+ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model of
+the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person who sought
+devotional retirement. The most notable and wealthy of these houses was
+that of Streoneshealh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her
+abbey on the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern Sea. Hild
+was a Northumbrian Deborah whose counsel was sought even by kings; and
+the double monastery over which she ruled became a seminary of bishops
+and priests. The sainted John of Beverley was among her scholars. But the
+name which really throws glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from
+whose lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first great English song.
+Though well advanced in years, Cædmon had learned nothing of the art of
+verse, the alliterative jingle so common among his fellows, "wherefore
+being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for glee's sake to sing in
+turn, he no sooner saw the harp come towards him than he rose from the
+board and went homewards. Once when he had done thus, and gone from the
+feast to the stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there
+appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, 'Sing,
+Cædmon, some song to Me.' 'I cannot sing,' he answered; 'for this cause
+left I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with him answered,
+'However that be, you shall sing to Me.' 'What shall I sing?' rejoined
+Cædmon. 'The beginning of created things,' replied He. In the morning the
+cowherd stood before Hild and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike
+concluded 'that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord.'
+They translated for Cædmon a passage in Holy Writ, 'bidding him, if he
+could, put the same into verse.' The next morning he gave it them
+composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine
+grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on him the
+monastic life." Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into
+Cædmon's poem. "He sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of
+man, and of all the history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt and
+entering into the Promised Land; of the incarnation, passion, and
+resurrection of Christ, and of His ascension; of the terror of future
+judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven."
+
+[Sidenote: Synod of Whitby]
+
+But even while Cædmon was singing the glories of Northumbria and of the
+Irish Church were passing away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its
+fall. Only a few years after Penda's defeat the Mercians threw off
+Oswin's yoke and set Wulfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne. They were
+aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife which was now
+rending the Northumbrian realm. The labour of Aidan, the victories of
+Oswald and Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church.
+The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses whose foundation
+followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition,
+not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the
+instructions, not of Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims of
+supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by the see of
+Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in the
+North of England was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's queen brought with
+her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church to the Roman See; and the
+visit of two young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love of Rome
+into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of these, Benedict Biscop,
+returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from
+the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so
+hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great
+council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his
+realm should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial
+enough. Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish
+fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid
+pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the authority of
+Columba, the other to that of St. Peter. "You own," cried the king at
+last to Colman, "that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of
+heaven--has He given such power to Columba?" The bishop could but answer
+"No." "Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven," said Oswiu, "lest
+when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back
+on me, and there be none to open." The humorous tone of Oswiu's decision
+could not hide its importance, and the synod had no sooner broken up than
+Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of
+their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed away to
+Iona. Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which
+severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion
+Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after fortunes of
+England. Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical
+history of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid
+of that power of organization which was the strength of the Roman Church,
+the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the
+country as the basis of its government. Tribal quarrels and
+ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the
+clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no element
+save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast
+religious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of
+piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing
+influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a
+picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from
+such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the
+Synod of Whitby. But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
+danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have remained
+spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
+might be from its older greatness, it preserved the traditions of
+civilization, of letters and art and law. Its faith still served as a
+bond which held together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the
+Empire. To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, "to fight against the
+world." To repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation. Dimly as
+such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu's mind, it was the
+instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude
+of his youth and to link England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
+
+[Sidenote: Theodore]
+
+Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization undertaken by a
+Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to secure
+England to her sway as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more
+decisive step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly in the
+organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church of England, as we
+know it to-day, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
+Theodore. His work was determined in its main outlines by the previous
+history of the English people. The conquest of the Continent had been
+wrought either by races which were already Christian, or by heathens who
+bowed to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this
+oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire and their
+Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that survived of the
+Roman world. The Church everywhere remained untouched. The Christian
+bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his
+Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the German and his
+subjects, the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To
+the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that
+was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
+art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been driven out
+together. When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the very
+memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had
+passed away. The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a
+heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings,
+who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally
+followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first
+royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
+In this way realms which are all but forgotten are commemorated in the
+limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an
+obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of
+Mercia may be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of
+Lichfield. In adding many sees to those he found Theodore was careful to
+make their dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations. But
+he soon passed from this extension of the episcopate to its organization.
+In his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them
+round the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesiastical
+canons, Theodore did unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
+kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for the most
+part from mere accidents of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
+The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed by the three
+larger ones, and of these three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
+to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity which
+was to characterize the new England had thus already declared itself; but
+the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form and surrounded with
+divine sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
+The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds
+to the thought of a single throne for their one temporal overlord. The
+regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to primate, in the
+administration of the Church, supplied a mould on which the civil
+organization of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the councils
+gathered by Theodore were the first of our national gatherings for
+general legislation. It was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
+Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to come together in the
+Witenagemot of all England. The synods which Theodore convened as
+religiously representative of the whole English nation led the way by
+their example to our national parliaments. The canons which these synods
+enacted led the way to a national system of law.
+
+[Sidenote: Wulfhere]
+
+The organization of the episcopate was followed by the organization of
+the parish system. The mission-station or monastery from which priest or
+bishop went forth on journey after journey to preach and baptize
+naturally disappeared as the land became Christian. The missionaries
+turned into settled clergy. As the king's chaplain became a bishop and
+the kingdom his diocese, so the chaplain of an English noble became the
+priest and the manor his parish. But this parish system is probably later
+than Theodore, and the system of tithes which has been sometimes coupled
+with his name dates only from the close of the eighth century. What was
+really due to him was the organization of the episcopate, and the impulse
+which this gave to national unity. But the movement towards unity found a
+sudden check in the revived strength of Mercia. Wulfhere proved a
+vigorous and active ruler, and the peaceful reign of Oswiu left him free
+to build up again during fifteen years of rule (659-675) that Mercian
+overlordship over the tribes of Mid-England which had been lost at
+Penda's death. He had more than his father's success. Not only did Essex
+again own his supremacy, but even London fell into Mercian hands. The
+West-Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all their
+settlements to the north of that river were annexed to the Mercian realm.
+Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached even south of the Thames, for Sussex in
+its dread of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlordship,
+and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two outlying settlements of
+the Jutes--the Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras along the
+Southampton water--which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian
+arms. The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in hand
+with its military advance. The forests of its western border, the marshes
+of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by monastic
+colonies, whose success shows the hold which Christianity had now gained
+over its people. Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild western
+woodlands and in the yet wilder fen-country on the eastern border of the
+kingdom which stretched from the "Holland," the sunk, hollow land of
+Lincolnshire, to the channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters
+and reedy islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by
+flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either quarter the new faith made
+its way. In the western woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey
+round which gathered the town of Evesham, and the eastern fen-land was
+soon filled with religious houses. Here through the liberality of King
+Wulfhere rose the Abbey of Peterborough. Here too, Guthlac, a youth of
+the royal race of Mercia, sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes
+of Crowland, and so great was the reverence he won, that only two years
+had passed since his death when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over
+his tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site; the buildings rested
+on oaken piles driven into the marsh; a great stone church replaced the
+hermit's cell; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed the pools
+around them into fertile meadow-land.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ecgfrith]
+
+In spite however of this rapid recovery of its strength by Mercia,
+Northumbria remained the dominant state in Britain: and Ecgfrith, who
+succeeded Oswiu in 670, so utterly defeated Wulfhere when war broke out
+between them that he was glad to purchase peace by the surrender of
+Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased more hardly had not
+Ecgfrith's ambition turned rather to conquests over the Briton than to
+victories over his fellow Englishmen. The war between Briton and
+Englishman which had languished since the battle of Chester had been
+revived some twelve years before by an advance of the West-Saxons to the
+south-west. Unable to save the possessions of Wessex north of the Thames
+from the grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwealh, sought for compensation
+in an attack on his Welsh neighbours. A victory at Bradford on the Avon
+enabled him to overrun the country near Mendip which had till then been
+held by the Britons; and a second campaign in 658, which ended in a
+victory on the skirts of the great forest that covered Somerset to the
+east, settled the West-Saxons as conquerors round the sources of the
+Parret. It may have been the example of the West-Saxons which spurred
+Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon his British neighbours in the west
+which widened the bounds of his kingdom. His reign marks the highest
+pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies chased the Britons from the
+kingdom of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A
+large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the see of
+Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have seen
+before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new
+mission-station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of
+Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He remained
+there through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby,
+and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with
+endless disputes against which his patience and good humour struggled in
+vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
+of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for
+the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
+In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within
+deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence for
+his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne.
+He entered Carlisle, which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a
+moment when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of
+Ecgfrith's against the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had long
+been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of it owned
+Ecgfrith's supremacy. In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
+subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed on
+Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which
+had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy,
+setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept
+the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved
+the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over a Roman fountain
+which still stood unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
+bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen falling from the old
+man's lips. "Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril
+of the fight is over and done." "Watch and pray," he said, when they
+questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a
+solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had
+turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that
+Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on
+the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.
+
+[Sidenote: Mercian greatness]
+
+The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts
+pressed on the kingdom from the north Æthelred, Wulfhere's successor,
+attacked it on the Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace
+which left him master of Middle-England and free to attempt the direct
+conquest of the south. For the moment this attempt proved a fruitless
+one. Mercia was still too weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping
+from Northumbria's hands, while Wessex which seemed her destined prey
+rose at this moment into fresh power under the greatest of its early
+kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king whose reign covered the long period from
+688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war which Cenwealh and
+Centwine had begun. He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the
+Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier of his new
+conquests by a fort on the banks of the Tone which has grown into the
+present Taunton. The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole
+district which now bears the name of Somerset. The conquest of Sussex and
+of Kent on his eastern border made Ine master of all Britain south of the
+Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king Ceolred in a bloody
+encounter at Wanborough in 715 seemed to establish the threefold division
+of the English race between three realms of almost equal power. But able
+as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife
+that was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the
+disgust which drove him from the world. He had feasted royally at one of
+his country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his queen bade
+him turn back thither. The king returned to find his house stripped of
+curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the dung of cattle, while
+in the royal bed where he had slept with Æthelburh rested a sow with her
+farrow of pigs. The scene had no need of the queen's comment: "See, my
+lord, how the fashion of this world passeth away!" In 726 he sought peace
+in a pilgrimage to Rome. The anarchy which had driven Ine from the throne
+broke out in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to Æthelbald,
+the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian realm. Æthelbald took up with
+better fortune the struggle of his people for supremacy over the south.
+He penetrated to the very heart of the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege
+and capture of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For
+twenty years the overlordship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain
+south of the Humber. It was at the head of the forces not of Mercia only
+but of East-Anglia and Kent, as well as of the West-Saxons, that
+Æthelbald marched against the Welsh on his western border.
+
+[Sidenote: Bæda]
+
+In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King found grounds for
+a hope that Northern Britain would also yield to his sway. But the dream
+of a single England was again destined to be foiled. Fallen as
+Northumbria was from its old glory, it still remained a great power.
+Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Aldfrith and
+Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of Western Europe. No
+schools were more famous than those of Jarrow and York. The whole
+learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar.
+Bæda--the Venerable Bede as later times styled him--was born nine years
+after the Synod of Whitby on ground which passed a year later to Benedict
+Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the
+Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent
+in an offshoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his friend
+Ceolfrid. Bæda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole life in the
+same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order
+and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or
+teaching, or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more
+touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English
+scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the
+tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned
+for Englishmen in the story of Bæda. While still young he became a
+teacher, and six hundred monks besides strangers that flocked thither for
+instruction formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how among
+the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the monk, Bæda could have
+found time for the composition of the numerous works that made his name
+famous in the West. But materials for study had accumulated in
+Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and the
+libraries which were forming at Wearmouth and York. The tradition of the
+older Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into that
+path of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his fame.
+Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came to him from the school
+which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded beneath the walls of
+Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from a
+Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop.
+Little by little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole
+range of the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him,
+"the father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic
+culture was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and
+Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
+him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses from the Æneid break
+his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of
+the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of
+spring. His work was done with small aid from others. "I am my own
+secretary," he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my own librarian." But
+forty-five works remained after his death to attest his prodigious
+industry. In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most
+important among these were the commentaries and homilies upon various
+books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings of the Fathers.
+But he was far from confining himself to theology. In treatises compiled
+as textbooks for his scholars, Bæda threw together all that the world had
+then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, in
+philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopædic
+character of his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He
+loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last
+work was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost
+the last words that broke from his lips were some English rimes upon
+death.
+
+But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which
+immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English
+Nation," Bæda was at once the founder of mediæval history and the first
+English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that
+follows the landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own
+personal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail
+and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he
+owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and Nothelm. What he owed to no
+informant was his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no story of
+his own telling is so touching as the story of his death. Two weeks
+before the Easter of 735 the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
+and loss of breath. He still preserved however his usual pleasantness and
+gay good-humour, and in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his
+lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his own English tongue broke
+from time to time from the master's lip--rude rimes that told how before
+the "need-fare," Death's stern "must go," none can enough bethink him
+what is to be his doom for good or ill. The tears of Bæda's scholars
+mingled with his song. "We never read without weeping," writes one of
+them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and still master and
+pupils toiled at their work, for Based longed to bring to an end his
+version of St. John's Gospel into the English tongue and his extracts
+from Bishop Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read a lie," he answered
+those who would have had him rest, "or to work to no purpose after I am
+gone." A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, but
+he spent the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his
+scholars, "Learn with what speed you may; I know not how long I may
+last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again the old man
+called his scholars round him and bade them write. "There is still a
+chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning drew on, "and it is
+hard for thee to question thyself any longer." "It is easily done," said
+Bæda; "take thy pen and write quickly." Amid tears and farewells the day
+wore on till eventide. "There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear
+master," said the boy. "Write it quickly," bade the dying man. "It is
+finished now," said the little scribe at last. "You speak truth," said
+the master; "all is finished now." Placed upon the pavement, his head
+supported in his scholar's arms, his face turned to the spot where he was
+wont to pray, Bæda chanted the solemn "Glory to God." As his voice
+reached the close of his song he passed quietly away.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Æthelbald]
+
+First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first
+among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English
+literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered
+round him for instruction he is the father of our national education. In
+his physical treatises he is the first figure to which our science looks
+back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar's life was broken by the growing
+anarchy of Northumbria, and by threats of war from its Mercian rival. At
+last Æthelbald marched on a state which seemed exhausted by civil discord
+and ready for submission to his arms. But its king Eadberht showed
+himself worthy of the kings that had gone before him, and in 740 he threw
+back Æthelbald's attack in a repulse which not only ruined the Mercian
+ruler's hopes of northern conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
+Already goaded to revolt by exactions, the West-Saxons were roused to a
+fresh struggle for independence, and after twelve years of continued
+outbreaks the whole people mustered at Burford under the golden dragon of
+their race. The fight was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the
+Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a decisive victory freed Wessex
+from the Mercian yoke. Æthelbald's own throne seems to have been shaken;
+for three years later, in 757, the Mercian king was surprised and slain
+in a night attack by his ealdormen, and a year of confusion passed ere
+his kinsman Offa could avenge him on his murderers and succeed to the
+realm.
+
+But though Eadberht might beat back the inroads of the Mercians and even
+conquer Strathclyde, before the anarchy of his own kingdom he could only
+fling down his sceptre and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne.
+From the death of Bæda the history of Northumbria became in fact little
+more than a wild story of lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was
+swept away by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its
+turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by
+famine and plague. An anarchy almost as complete fell on Wessex after the
+recovery of its freedom. Only in Mid-England was there any sign of order
+and settled rule. The crushing defeat at Burford, though it had brought
+about revolts which stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had made, was
+far from having broken the Mercian power. Under the long reign of Offa,
+which went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all but its old dominion.
+Since the dissolution of the temporary alliance which Penda formed with
+the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with the Britons in the west had been
+the one great hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under Offa Mercia
+braced herself to the completion of her British conquests. Pushing after
+779 over the Severn, and carrying his ravages into the heart of Wales,
+Offa drove the King of Powys from his capital, which changed its old name
+of Pengwern for the significant English title of the Town in the Scrub or
+Bush, Scrobbesbyryg, Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught the
+Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and Offa resolved to
+create a military border by planting a settlement of Englishmen between
+the Severn, which had till then served as the western boundary of the
+English race, and the huge "Offa's Dyke" which he drew from the mouth of
+Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later conquests of the West-Saxons,
+the old plan of extermination was definitely abandoned and the Welsh who
+chose to remain dwelled undisturbed among their English conquerors. From
+these conquests over the Britons Offa turned to build up again the realm
+which had been shattered at Burford. But his progress was slow. A
+reconquest of Kent in 775 woke anew the jealousy of the West-Saxons; and
+though Offa defeated their army at Bensington in 779 the victory was
+followed by several years of inaction. It was not till Wessex was again
+weakened by fresh anarchy that he was able in 794 to seize East-Anglia
+and restore his realm to its old bounds under Wulfhere. Further he could
+not go. A Kentish revolt occupied him till his death in 796, and his
+successor Cenwulf did little but preserve the realm he bequeathed him. At
+the close of the eighth century the drift of the English peoples towards
+a national unity was in fact utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria
+had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia had
+broken down before the resistance of Wessex. A threefold division seemed
+to have stamped itself upon the land; and so complete was the balance of
+power between the three realms which parted it that no subjection of one
+to the other seemed likely to fuse the English tribes into an English
+people.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN
+796-947
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Northmen]
+
+The union which each English kingdom in turn had failed to bring about
+was brought about by the pressure of the Northmen. The dwellers in the
+isles of the Baltic or on either side of the Scandinavian peninsula had
+lain hidden till now from Western Christendom, waging their battle for
+existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, and stormy seas. It was
+this hard fight for life that left its stamp on the temper of Dane,
+Swede, or Norwegian alike, that gave them their defiant energy, their
+ruthless daring, their passion for freedom and hatred of settled rule.
+Forays and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty livelihood, and
+at the close of the eighth century these raids found a wider sphere than
+the waters of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth garnered in the
+abbeys and towns of the new Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
+Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the coasts of Northern Gaul;
+and just before Offa's death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
+To men of that day it must have seemed as though the world had gone back
+three hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth their
+pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or Cerdic. There was the same
+wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck inland along the
+river-reaches or moored round the river isles, the same sights of horror,
+firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or
+shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as when the
+English themselves had attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
+slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion,
+government disappeared before these northmen as before the northmen of
+three centuries before.
+
+[Sidenote: Ecgberht]
+
+In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
+and the presence of the freebooters soon told on the political balance of
+the English realms. A great revolution was going on in the south, where
+Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death, while
+the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht.
+In Offa's days Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex
+and had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He
+remained there through the memorable year during which Charles the Great
+restored the Empire of the West, and returned in 802 to be quietly
+welcomed as King by the West-Saxon people. A march into the heart of
+Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in
+the south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia, which broke out
+in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of
+Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all England south of
+Thames to the West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of
+East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great
+overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength when Ecgberht
+crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without
+a struggle to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of
+supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream of a union of all England drew him
+to the north. Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts it stood
+at the head of the English race; and under a king like Eadberht it would
+have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood Æthelbald. But
+the ruin of Jarrow and Wearmouth had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn
+by civil strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed to
+meet the northmen, Northumbria sought union and deliverance in subjection
+to a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the
+supremacy of Wessex.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of the Northmen]
+
+With the submission of Northumbria the work which Oswiu and Æthelbald had
+failed to do was done, and the whole English race was for the first time
+knit together under a single rule. The union came not a moment too soon.
+Had the old severance of people from people, the old civil strife within
+each separate realm, gone on it is hard to see how the attacks of the
+northmen could have been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland;
+and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Charmouth in
+Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet
+them, from the field. His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a
+little rest for the land; but Æthelwulf who mounted the throne on
+Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off
+by years of hard fighting. Æthelwulf fought bravely in defence of his
+realm; in his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851
+he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success won
+peace for the land through the short and uneventful reigns of his sons
+Æthelbald and Æthelberht. But the northern storm burst in full force upon
+England when a third son, Æthelred, followed his brothers on the throne.
+The northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland and the coast of
+Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and from west and east alike they
+closed upon Britain. While one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom
+north of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on
+the coast of East-Anglia under Ivar the Boneless and marched the next
+year upon York. A victory over two claimants of its crown gave the
+pirates Northumbrian and seizing the passage of the Trent they threatened
+an attack on the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a march of King
+Æthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he made there with the northmen
+left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose
+under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, was bound to
+a tree and shot to death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen made
+Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure
+gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the
+eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his
+relics. With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his
+kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the
+pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown. Already the northmen
+had turned to the richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen.
+Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their monks fled or
+lay slain among the ruins. Mercia, though still free from actual attack,
+cowered panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment of tribute owned
+them as its overlords.
+
+[Illustration: England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3t.jpg)]
+
+[Sidenote: Wessex and the Northmen]
+
+In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and England north of
+the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a
+change could only have been made possible by the temper of the conquered
+kingdoms. To them the conquest was simply their transfer from one
+overlord to another, and it may be that in all there were men who
+preferred the overlordship of the Northman to the overlordship of the
+West-Saxon. But the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face
+with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight, not for
+supremacy, but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by terror. With
+the exception of his one march on Nottingham, King Æthelred had done
+nothing to save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the pirates no
+sooner pushed up Thames to Reading in 871 than the West-Saxons, attacked
+on their own soil, turned fiercely at bay. A desperate attack drove the
+northmen from Ashdown on the heights that overlook the Vale of White
+Horse, but their camp in the tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames
+proved impregnable. Æthelred died in the midst of the struggle, and his
+brother Ælfred, who now became king, bought the withdrawal of the pirates
+and a few years' breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the quick
+eye of Ælfred to see that the northmen had withdrawn simply with the view
+of gaining firmer footing for a new attack; three years indeed had hardly
+passed before Mercia was invaded and its under-king driven over sea to
+make place for a tributary of the invaders. From Repton half their host
+marched northwards to the Tyne, while Guthrum led the rest to Cambridge
+to prepare for their next year's attack on Wessex. In 876 his fleet
+appeared before Wareham, and in spite of a treaty bought by Ælfred, the
+northmen threw themselves into Exeter. Their presence there was likely to
+stir a rising of the Welsh, and through the winter Ælfred girded himself
+for this new peril. At break of spring his army closed round the town, a
+hired fleet cruised off the coast to guard against rescue, and the defeat
+of their fellows at Wareham in an attempt to relieve them drove the
+pirates to surrender. They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
+Gloucester. But Ælfred had hardly disbanded his troops when his enemies,
+roused by the arrival of fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at
+Chippenham, and in the opening of 878 marched ravaging over the land. The
+surprise of Wessex was complete, and for a month or two the general panic
+left no hope of resistance. Ælfred, with his small band of followers,
+could only throw himself into a fort raised hastily in the isle of
+Athelney among the marshes of the Parret, a position from which he could
+watch closely the movements of his foes. But with the first burst of
+spring he called the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still
+gathering troops as he moved marched through Wiltshire on the northmen.
+He found their host at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after
+a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender and to bind themselves
+by a solemn peace or "frith" at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the Peace of
+Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of Britain to its invaders. All
+Northumbria, all East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line which
+stretched from Thames' mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along the
+Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left
+subject to the northmen. Throughout this "Danelaw"--as it was called--the
+conquerors settled down among the conquered population as lords of the
+soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly in its central districts,
+but everywhere guarding jealously their old isolation and gathering in
+separate "heres" or armies round towns which were only linked in loose
+confederacies. The peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex
+itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England. The spell of terror was
+broken. The tide of invasion turned. From an attitude of attack the
+northmen were thrown back on an attitude of defence. The whole reign of
+Ælfred was a preparation for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back from
+the pirates the land they had won.
+
+[Sidenote: Ælfred]
+
+What really gave England heart for such a struggle was the courage and
+energy of the King himself. Alfred was the noblest as he was the most
+complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is loveable, in the
+English temper. He combined as no other man has ever combined its
+practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its profound sense of
+duty, the reserve and self-control that steadies in it a wide outlook and
+a restless daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, its
+sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and
+passionate religion. Religion indeed was the groundwork of Ælfred's
+character. His temper was instinct with piety. Everywhere throughout his
+writings that remain to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir him
+to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he was no mere saint. He felt
+none of that scorn of the world about him which drove the nobler souls of
+his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness and
+constant pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism. His rare
+geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave colour and
+charm to his life. A sunny frankness and openness of spirit breathes in
+the pleasant chat of his books, and what he was in his books he showed
+himself in his daily converse. Ælfred was in truth an artist, and both
+the lights and shadows of his life were those of the artistic
+temperament. His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings
+of travellers and scholars, betray an imaginative restlessness that longs
+to break out of the narrow world of experience which hemmed him in. At
+one time he jots down news of a voyage to the unknown seas of the north.
+At another he listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from the
+churches of Malabar. And side by side with this restless outlook of the
+artistic nature he showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid
+apprehension of unseen danger, its craving for affection, its
+sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself rather than with his reader
+that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and
+opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius. "Oh, what
+a happy man was he," he cries once, "that man that had a naked sword
+hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always did!"
+"Desirest thou power?" he asks at another time. "But thou shalt never
+obtain it without sorrows--sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener
+sorrows from thine own kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks out
+again, "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could. But I
+know that he cannot!" The loneliness which breathes in words like these
+has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the
+judgements of men. But cynicism found no echo in the large and
+sympathetic temper of Ælfred. He not only longed for the love of his
+subjects, but for the remembrance of "generations" to come. Nor did his
+inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and versatile
+activity. To the scholars he gathered round him he seemed the very type
+of a scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read or listen to
+books read to him. The singers of his court found in him a brother
+singer, gathering the old songs of his people to teach them to his
+children, breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple verse,
+solacing himself in hours of depression with the music of the Psalms. He
+passed from court and study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in
+gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their business. But
+all this versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good sense.
+Ælfred was a thorough man of business. He was careful of detail,
+laborious, methodical. He carried in his bosom a little handbook in which
+he noted things as they struck him--now a bit of family genealogy, now a
+prayer, now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the
+bridge. Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there was the same
+order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of his court.
+
+Wide however and various as was the King's temper, its range was less
+wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion,
+of the predominance of one quality over another which goes commonly with
+an intensity of moral purpose Ælfred showed not a trace. Scholar and
+soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his character kept
+that perfect balance which charms us in no other Englishman save
+Shakspere. But full and harmonious as his temper was, it was the temper
+of a king. Every power was bent to the work of rule. His practical energy
+found scope for itself in the material and administrative restoration of
+the wasted land. His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into
+education and literature. His capacity for inspiring trust and affection
+drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began the
+upbuilding of a new England. And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by
+a single aim. "So long as I have lived," said the King as life closed
+about him, "I have striven to live worthily." Little by little men came
+to know what such a life of worthiness meant. Little by little they came
+to recognize in Ælfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than the world
+had seen. Never had it seen a King who lived solely for the good of his
+people. Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal aim to
+devote himself solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was this
+grand self-mastery that gave him his power over the men about him.
+Warrior and conqueror as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the
+warrior's dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck
+the key-note of his reign. But still more is it this height and
+singleness of purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest
+faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts Ælfred out of the narrow bounds
+of Wessex. If the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the
+comparison of him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest men,
+he rises to their level in the moral grandeur of his life. And it is this
+which has hallowed his memory among his own English people. "I desire,"
+said the King in some of his latest words, "I desire to leave to the men
+that come after me a remembrance of me in good works." His aim has been
+more than fulfilled. His memory has come down to us with a living
+distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time
+gathered round it. The instinct of the people has clung to him with a
+singular affection. The love which he won a thousand years ago has
+lingered round his name from that day to this. While every other name of
+those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of
+Englishmen, that of Ælfred remains familiar to every English child.
+
+[Sidenote: English Literature]
+
+The secret of Ælfred's government lay in his own vivid energy. He could
+hardly have chosen braver or more active helpers than those whom he
+employed both in his political and in his educational efforts. The
+children whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their time.
+But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be
+done was done by the King himself. His first efforts were directed to the
+material restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw its
+towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys
+founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
+codified and amended. Still more strenuous were Ælfred's efforts for its
+moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
+pirates' sword had left few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Bæda,
+and matters were even worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most
+ignorant of the English kingdoms. "When I began to reign," said Ælfred,
+"I cannot remember one priest south of the Thames who could render his
+service-book into English." For instructors indeed he could find only a
+few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "In old
+times," the King writes sadly, "men came hither from foreign lands to
+seek for instruction, and now if we are to have it we can only get it
+from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own
+island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, and
+Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
+churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
+Peter's-pence to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his intercourse
+was closest, and it was from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in
+his work of education. Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his
+new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be
+from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that Ælfred's
+gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of
+Athelney. The real work however to be done was done, not by these
+teachers but by the King himself. Ælfred established a school for the
+young nobles at his own court, and it was to the need of books for these
+scholars in their own tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary
+effort. He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals
+of his age--the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral Book of Pope
+Gregory, the compilation of "Orosius," then the one accessible handbook
+of universal history, and the history of his own people by Bæda. He
+translated these works into English, but he was far more than a
+translator, he was an editor for his people. Here he omitted, there he
+expanded. He enriched "Orosius" by a sketch of the new geographical
+discoveries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections
+from Bæda. In one place he stops to explain his theory of government, his
+wish for a thicker population, his conception of national welfare as
+consisting in a due balance of the priest, the thegn, and the churl. The
+mention of Nero spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power. The cold
+Providence of Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgement of
+the goodness of God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off
+its royal mantle, and he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me," he
+prays with a charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, for
+every man must say what he says and do what he does according to his
+ability." But simple as was his aim, Ælfred changed the whole front of
+our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great
+poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The
+mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
+translations of Ælfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It
+seems likely that the King's rendering of Bæda's history gave the first
+impulse towards the compilation of what is known as the English or
+Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was certainly thrown into its present form
+during his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and the bishops
+of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were roughly
+expanded into a national history by insertions from Bæda: but it is when
+it reaches the reign of Ælfred that the chronicle suddenly widens into
+the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that marks the gift
+of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does from age to age
+in historic value, it remains the first vernacular history of any
+Teutonic people, and save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors
+among his Gothic people, the earliest and most venerable monument of
+Teutonic prose.
+
+But all this literary activity was only a part of that general upbuilding
+of Wessex by which Ælfred was preparing for a fresh contest with the
+stranger. He knew that the actual winning back of the Danelaw must be a
+work of the sword, and through these long years of peace he was busy with
+the creation of such a force as might match that of the northmen. A fleet
+grew out of the little squadron which Ælfred had been forced to man with
+Frisian seamen. The national fyrd or levy of all freemen at the King's
+call was reorganized. It was now divided into two halves, one of which
+served in the field while the other guarded its own burhs and townships
+and served to relieve its fellow when the men's forty days of service
+were ended. A more disciplined military force was provided by subjecting
+all owners of five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which
+recognized the change that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and
+in which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How effective these
+measures were was seen when the new resistance they met on the Continent
+drove the northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet
+steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting entered the
+Thames. Ælfred held both at bay through the year till the men of the
+Danelaw rose at their comrades' call. Wessex stood again front to front
+with the northmen. But the King's measures had made the realm strong
+enough to set aside its old policy of defence for one of vigorous attack.
+His son Eadward and his son-in-law Æthelred, whom he had set as Ealdorman
+over what remained of Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active as
+the King. The aim of the northmen was to rouse again the hostility of the
+Welsh, but while Ælfred held Exeter against their fleet, Eadward and
+Æthelred caught their army near the Severn and overthrew it with a vast
+slaughter at Buttington. The destruction of their camp on the Lea by the
+united English forces ended the war; in 897 Hasting again withdrew across
+the Channel, and the Danelaw made peace. It was with the peace he had won
+still about him that Ælfred died in 901, and warrior as his son Eadward
+had shown himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest. It was not
+till 910 that a fresh rising of the northmen forced Ælfred's children to
+gird themselves to the conquest of the Danelaw.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Elder]
+
+While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister Æthelflæd, in whose hands
+Æthelred's death left English Mercia, attacked the "Five Boroughs," a
+rude confederacy which had taken the place of the older Mercian kingdom.
+Derby represented the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln the
+Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English, Stamford the province of the
+Gyrwas, Nottingham probably that of the Southumbrians. Each of these
+"Five Boroughs" seems to have been ruled by its earl with his separate
+"host"; within each twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law, while a
+common "Thing" may have existed for the whole district. In her attack on
+this powerful league Æthelflæd abandoned the older strategy of battle and
+raid for that of siege and fortress-building. Advancing along the line of
+Trent, she fortified Tamworth and Stafford on its head-waters; when a
+rising in Gwent called her back to the Welsh border, her army stormed
+Brecknock; and its king no sooner fled for shelter to the northmen in
+whose aid he had risen than Æthelflæd at once closed on Derby. Raids from
+Middle-England failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her prey; and Derby
+was hardly her own when, turning southward, she forced the surrender of
+Leicester. Nor had the brilliancy of his sister's exploits eclipsed those
+of the King, for the son of Ælfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he
+had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the northmen from France, summoned no
+doubt by the cry of distress from their brethren in England, and had
+bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection of forts at Hertford and
+Witham. On the death of Æthelflæd in 918 he came boldly to the front.
+Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering the whole strength of the
+kingdom into his single hand, he undertook the systematic reduction of
+the Danelaw. South of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a tract watered
+by the Ouse and the Nen--originally the district of a tribe known as the
+South-English, and now, like the Five Boroughs of the north, grouped
+round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The reduction of
+these was followed by that of East-Anglia; the northmen of the Fens
+submitted with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham. Eadward's
+Mercian troops had already seized Manchester; he himself was preparing to
+complete his conquests, when in 924 the whole of the North suddenly laid
+itself at his feet. Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the Britons
+of Strathclyde "chose him to father and lord."
+
+[Sidenote: Æthelstan]
+
+The triumph was his last. Eadward died in 925, but the reign of his son
+Æthelstan, Ælfred's golden-haired grandson whom the King had girded as a
+child with a sword set in a golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt,
+proved even more glorious than his own. In spite of its submission the
+North had still to be won. Dread of the northmen had drawn Scot and
+Cumbrian to their acknowledgement of Eadward's overlordship, but
+Æthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria with his dominions than
+dread of Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot King
+Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the
+northmen. The league was broken by Æthelstan's rapid action in 926; the
+North-Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies,
+and to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a
+like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
+till then with its English inhabitants, But eight years later the same
+league called Æthelstan again to the North; and though Constantine was
+punished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet ravaged its
+coasts to Caithness the English army had no sooner withdrawn than
+Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from
+Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
+beside the northmen against the West-Saxon King; but his victory at
+Brunanburh crushed the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
+brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession in 940, and the North
+again rose in revolt. The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
+in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king
+but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again
+laid the Danelaw at his feet.
+
+[Sidenote: Dunstan]
+
+But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword. The completion of
+the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or
+warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of
+ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey and
+ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid
+personality after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born
+in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a
+man of wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester. It
+must have been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with
+scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain songs of
+heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterwards
+roused against him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might have
+derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp
+in hand on journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their
+books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine
+and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane
+letters till his brain broke down in delirium. So famous became his
+knowledge in the neighbourhood that news of it reached the court of
+Æthelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of
+ill-will among the courtiers. Again they drove him from Eadmund's train,
+threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the
+wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The
+outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But
+the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and
+his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny,
+versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring
+others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a
+ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a
+musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker alike at books
+or handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see him followed by a
+train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting,
+designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to design a robe
+which she is embroidering, and as he bends with her maidens over their
+toil his harp hung upon the wall sounds without mortal touch tones which
+the excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of the Danelaw]
+
+From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider sphere of activity
+towards the close of Eadmund's reign. But the old jealousies revived at
+his reappearance at court, and counting the game lost Dunstan prepared
+again to withdraw. The king had spent the day in the chase; the red deer
+which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only
+checked itself on the brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund in
+the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was
+at once summoned on the king's return. "Saddle your horse," said Eadmund,
+"and ride with me." The royal train swept over the marshes to his home;
+and the king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the
+abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury. Dunstan became one of Eadmund's
+councillors, and his hand was seen in the settlement of the north. It was
+the hostility of the states around it to the West-Saxon rule which had
+roused so often revolt in the Danelaw; but from the time of Brunanburh we
+hear nothing more of the hostility of Bernicia, while Cumbria was
+conquered by Eadmund and turned adroitly to account in winning over the
+Scots to his cause. The greater part of it was granted to their king
+Malcolm on terms that he should be Eadmund's "fellow-worker by sea and
+land." The league of Scot and Briton was thus finally broken up, and the
+fidelity of the Scots secured by their need of help in holding down their
+former ally. The settlement was soon troubled by the young king's death.
+As he feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom
+Eadmund had banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at
+the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him
+retire. The king sprang in wrath to his thegn's aid, and seizing Leofa by
+the hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle the robber drove
+his dagger to Eadmund's heart. His death at once stirred fresh troubles
+in the north; the Danelaw rose against his brother and successor, Eadred,
+and some years of hard fighting were needed before it was again driven to
+own the English supremacy. But with its submission in 954 the work of
+conquest was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned
+himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance
+came to an end. The Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.
+North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire might again cross
+swords with men of Hampshire; but their strife was henceforth a local
+strife between men of the same people; it was a strife of Englishmen with
+Englishmen, and not of Englishmen with Northmen.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY
+954-1071
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Absorption of the Northmen]
+
+The fierceness of the northman's onset had hidden the real character of
+his attack. To the men who first fronted the pirates it seemed as though
+the story of the world had gone back to the days when the German
+barbarians first broke in upon the civilized world. It was so above all
+in Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's own attack on the
+island was seen in the northmen's attack on it. Boats of marauders from
+the northern seas again swarmed off the British coast; church and town
+were again the special object of attack; the invaders again settled on
+the conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger than the faith of
+Christ. But the issues of the two attacks showed the mighty difference
+between them. When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman
+Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors
+stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern storm on the other hand
+left land, people, government unchanged. England remained a country of
+Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden
+yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife between Briton and
+Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the
+strife between northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose
+race was the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
+alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its
+wealth, as they were strange to the social degradation which Rome had
+brought on its province. But the northman was little more than an
+Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its
+origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
+Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters
+men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the union of
+the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the
+house of Ælfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going
+on. From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelaw the northman
+had been passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few; they were
+scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions
+there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt.
+Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation.
+Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom
+seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the northman settled in
+Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In
+England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even
+quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In a few years a
+northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another northman in
+blood was Archbishop of York.
+
+[Sidenote: The three Northern Kingdoms]
+
+The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued
+descents from the Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign the long
+attack which the northman had directed against western Christendom came,
+for a while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed its
+results had been immense. It had utterly changed the face of the west.
+The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been alike
+dashed to pieces. But break and change as it might, Christendom had held
+the northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power which had grown up on the
+western seas had disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the northman's rule
+had dwindled to the holding of a few coast towns. In France his
+settlements had shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In England
+every northman was a subject of the English King. Even the empire of the
+seas had passed from the sea-kings' hands. It was an English and not a
+Scandinavian fleet that for fifty years to come held mastery in the
+English and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory in fact the
+struggle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats still hung
+off headland and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide to
+gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet
+made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
+energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the
+political changes of Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from
+fiord and dale from dale was breaking down. The little commonwealths
+which had held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn
+together whether they would or no. In each of the three regions of the
+north great kingdoms were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made himself
+lord of the petty states about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the
+same way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway itself was the first to become a
+single monarchy. Legend told how one of its many rulers, Harald of
+Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had
+chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his
+petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald vowed never to clip or comb
+his hair till he had made all Norway his own. So every springtide came
+war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord
+settled the matter, and Harald "Ugly-Head," as men called him while the
+strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again and became Harald
+"Fair-Hair." The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude fled out
+of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some
+swarming to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out again
+and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum's host in the Rhine
+country or follow Hrolf to his fights on the Seine. But little by little
+the land settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian realms
+gathered strength for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our
+after history.
+
+[Sidenote: England and its King]
+
+But of the new danger which threatened it in this union of the north
+England knew little. The storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and
+the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of
+peace. Here as elsewhere the northman had failed in his purpose of
+conquest; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty work. In shattering
+the empire of Charles the Great he had given birth to the nations of
+modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen he had created an
+English people. The national union which had been brought about for a
+moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a union of sheer force which broke
+down at the first blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of the
+northmen were so many wedges that split up the fabric of the
+roughly-built realm. But the very agency which destroyed the new England
+was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life that
+made its union real. The peoples who had so long looked on each other as
+enemies found themselves fronted by a common foe. They were thrown
+together by a common danger and the need of a common defence. Their
+common faith grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in hand
+with England itself against the heathen of the north. They recognized a
+common king as a common struggle changed Ælfred and his sons from mere
+leaders of West-Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with
+the stranger. And when the work which Ælfred set his house to do was
+done, when the yoke of the northman was lifted from the last of his
+conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the
+battle for a common freedom and a common country, knew themselves in the
+hour of their deliverance as an English people.
+
+The new people found its centre in the King. The heightening of the royal
+power was a direct outcome of the war. The dying out of other royal
+stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship. But
+it was the war with the northmen that raised Ælfred and his sons from
+tribal leaders into national kings. The long series of triumphs which
+wrested the land from the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty;
+while the wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed the kings
+further and further from their people, lifted them higher and higher
+above the nobles, and clothed them more and more with a mysterious
+dignity. Above all the religious character of the war against the
+northmen gave a religious character to the sovereigns who waged it. The
+king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, became yet more
+sacred as "the Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he
+was pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good government;
+but his "hallowing" invested him also with a power drawn not from the
+will of man or the assent of his subjects but from the will of God, and
+treason against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign lifted the
+sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with
+him in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman
+himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere
+delegate of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every shire
+by that of the royal shire-reeves, officers charged with levying the
+royal revenues and destined ultimately to absorb judicial authority.
+Among the later nobility of the thegns personal service with such a lord
+was held not to degrade but to ennoble. "Horse-thegn," and "cup-thegn,"
+and "border," the constable, butler, and treasurer, found themselves
+officers of state; and the developement of politics, the wider extension
+of home and foreign affairs were already transforming these royal
+officers into a standing council or ministry for the transaction of the
+ordinary administrative business and the reception of judicial appeals.
+Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates nominated by the king,
+and constituting in itself a large part of the Witenagemot when that
+assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the actual control
+of affairs more and more into the hands of the sovereign himself.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Feudalism]
+
+But the king's power was still a personal power. He had to be everywhere
+and to see for himself that everything he willed was done. The royal
+claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of the Crown. There was a
+want of administrative machinery in actual connexion with the government,
+responsible to it, drawing its force directly from it, and working
+automatically in its name even in moments when the royal power was itself
+weak or wavering. The Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose
+personal action was felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose dread lay
+on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak.
+Ealdor-men, provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move
+at the royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or
+removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old
+tendency to severance and isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the
+crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we have
+reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle
+with fresh tendencies towards national disintegration which sprang like
+itself from the struggle with the northman. The tendency towards personal
+dependence and towards a social organization based on personal dependence
+received an overpowering impulse from the strife. The long insecurity of
+a century of warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to
+seek protection more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman
+"commended" himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this
+shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden
+with conditions of military service. The principle of personal allegiance
+which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to
+widen into a theory of general dependence. From Ælfred's day it was
+assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The "lordless man" became
+a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the older
+English constitution, died down more and more into the "villein," the man
+who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who
+looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his
+demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater
+nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen. The ealdormen had
+hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants of the national sovereign before
+they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which
+follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or
+Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though it were against the lord of
+the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English
+freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding power. In
+the "great meeting" of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
+rule of the realm. It represented the whole English people, as the
+wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peoples of each; and
+its powers were as supreme in the wider field as theirs in the narrower.
+It could elect or depose the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the
+imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the
+control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great
+officers of state. But such a meeting necessarily differed greatly in
+constitution from the Witan of the lesser kingdoms. The individual
+freeman, save when the host was gathered together, could hardly take part
+in its deliberations. The only relic of its popular character lay at last
+in the ring of citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at London or
+Winchester, and shouted their "aye" or "nay" at the election of a king.
+Distance and the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser
+thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and the national council
+practically shrank into a gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and
+the officers of the crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Feudalism and the Monarchy]
+
+The old English democracy had thus all but passed into an oligarchy of
+the narrowest kind. The feudal movement which in other lands was breaking
+up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at their
+head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king threatened
+to break up England itself. What hindered its triumph was the power of
+the Crown, and it is the story of this struggle between the monarchy and
+these tendencies to feudal isolation which fills the period between the
+death of Eadred and the conquest of the Norman. It was a struggle which
+England shared with the rest of the western world, but its issue here was
+a peculiar one. In other countries feudalism won an easy victory over the
+central government. In England alone the monarchy was strong enough to
+hold feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might be, the English ealdorman
+never succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent of the
+Crown. Kings as weak as Æthelred could drive ealdormen into exile and
+could replace them by fresh nominees. If the Witenagemot enabled the
+great nobles to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it
+preserved at any rate a feeling of national unity and was forced to back
+the Crown against individual revolt. The Church too never became
+feudalized. The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a
+great social and political power. As local in area as the ealdorman, for
+the province was his diocese and he sat by his side in the local
+Witenagemot, he furnished a standing check on the independence of the
+great nobles. But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy,
+it was strong enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the two forces
+could master the other, but each could weaken the other, and throughout
+the whole period of their conflict England lay a prey to disorder within
+and to insult from without.
+
+The first sign of these troubles was seen when the death of Eadred in 955
+handed over the realm to a child king, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig was
+swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu; and the quarrel between her
+and the older counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the
+coronation feast. On the young king's insolent withdrawal to her chamber
+Dunstan, at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat.
+But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence of outlawry drove the
+abbot over sea, while the triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the
+marriage of her daughter to the king and the spoliation of the
+monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig's
+kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded his marriage as
+incestuous, and it was followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958
+Archbishop Odo parted the King from his wife by solemn sentence; while
+the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's
+brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan. The death of Eadwig a
+few months later restored the unity of the realm; but his successor
+Eadgar was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his reign the
+direction of affairs must have lain in the hands of Dunstan, whose
+elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as
+of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our
+chroniclers. His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a work
+was best done by the simple enforcement of peace. During the years of
+rest in which King and Primate enforced justice and order northman and
+Englishman drew together into a single people. Their union was the result
+of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan's policy preserved
+to the conquered Danelaw its local rights and local usages. But he
+recognized the men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed northmen in
+the royal service, and promoted them to high posts in Church and State.
+For the rest he trusted to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion
+was marked by a memorable change in the name of the land. Slowly as the
+conquering tribes had learned to know themselves, by the one national
+name of Englishmen, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on
+the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's day that the name of
+Britain passed into the name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen,
+England. The same vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during
+these years of national union told on the growth of material prosperity.
+Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its extension is seen in the complaint
+that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
+the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane. The laws of Æthelred which
+provide for the protection and regulation of foreign trade only recognize
+a state of things which grew up under Eadgar. "Men of the Empire,"
+traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, "Men of Rouen," traders
+from the new Norman duchy of the Seine, were seen in the streets of
+London. It was in Eadgar's day indeed that London rose to the commercial
+greatness it has held ever since.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Martyr]
+
+Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still in the prime of
+manhood when he died in 975. His death gave a fresh opening to the great
+nobles. He had bequeathed the crown to his elder son Eadward; but the
+ealdorman of East-Anglia, Æthelwine, rose at once to set a younger child,
+Æthelred, on the throne. But the two primates of Canterbury and York who
+had joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in
+setting it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as before master
+of the realm. The boy's reign however was troubled by strife between the
+monastic party and their opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short
+by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of Æthelred, the power of
+Dunstan made way for that of ealdorman Æthelwine and the queen-mother.
+Some years of tranquillity followed this victory; but though Æthelwine
+preserved order at home he showed little sense of the danger which
+threatened from abroad. The North was girding itself for a fresh, onset
+on England. The Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into their
+kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and it was no longer in isolated
+bands but in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests in the
+South. As Æthelred drew to manhood some chance descents on the coast told
+of this fresh stir in the North, and the usual result of the northman's
+presence was seen in new risings among the Welsh.
+
+[Sidenote: Æthelred]
+
+In 991 ealdorman Brihtnoth of East-Anglia fell in battle with a Norwegian
+force at Maldon, and the withdrawal of the pirates had to be bought by
+money. Æthelwine too died at this moment, and the death of the two
+ealdormen left Æthelred free to act as King. But his aim was rather to
+save the Crown from his nobles than England from the northmen. Handsome
+and pleasant of address, the young King's pride showed itself in a string
+of imperial titles, and his restless and self-confident temper drove him
+to push the pretensions of the Crown to their furthest extent. His aim
+throughout his reign was to free himself from the dictation of the great
+nobles, and it was his indifference to their "rede" or counsel that won
+him the name of "Æthelred the Redeless." From the first he struck boldly
+at his foes, and Ælfric, the ealdorman of Central Wessex, whom the death
+of his rival Æthelwine left supreme in the realm, was driven possibly by
+fear to desert to a Danish force which he was sent in 992 to drive from
+the coast. Æthelred turned from his triumph at home to meet the forces of
+the Danish and Norwegian kings, Swein and Olaf, which anchored off London
+in 994. His policy through-out was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
+arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for intrigues which parted the
+invaders till troubles at home drew both again to the North. Æthelrod
+took quick advantage of his success at home and abroad; the place of the
+great ealdormen in the royal councils was taken by court-thegns, in whom
+we see the rudiments of a ministry, while the king's fleet attacked the
+pirates' haunts in Cumberland and the Cotentin. But in spite of all this
+activity the news of a fresh invasion found England more weak and broken
+than ever. The rise of the "new men" only widened the breach between the
+court and the great nobles, and their resentment showed itself in delays
+which foiled every attempt of Æthelred to meet the pirate-bands who still
+clung to the coast.
+
+[Sidenote: Swein]
+
+They came probably from the other side of the Channel, and it was to
+clear them away as well as secure himself against Swein's threatened
+descent that Æthelred took a step which brought England in contact with a
+land over-sea. Normandy, where the northmen had settled a hundred years
+before, was now growing into a great power, and it was to win the
+friendship of Normandy and to close its harbours against Swein that
+Æthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke's daughter, Emma, to wife. The same
+dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the northern
+mercenaries whom the king had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting
+force against their brethren; and an order of Æthelred brought about a
+general massacre of them on St. Brice's day. Wedding and murder however
+proved feeble defences against Swein. His fleet reached the coast in
+1003, and for four years he marched through the length and breadth of
+southern and eastern England, "lighting his war-beacons as he went" in
+blazing homestead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to
+prepare for a later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for
+the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from
+Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury
+was taken and sacked, Æltheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and
+there in default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set him in the midst
+of their husting, pelting him with bones and skulls of oxen, till one
+more pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe. Meanwhile the
+court was torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels between the
+court-thegns in their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels between
+these favourites and the nobles whom they superseded in the royal
+councils. The King's policy of finding aid among his new ministers broke
+down when these became themselves ealdormen. With their local position
+they took up the feudal claims of independence; and Eadric, whom Æthelred
+raised to be ealdorman of Mercia, became a power that overawed the Crown.
+In this paralysis of the central authority all organization and union was
+lost. "Shire would not help other" when Swein returned in 1013. The war
+was terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried,
+churches plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one exception of
+London, there was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung
+open their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the northmen at Bath.
+Even London was forced at last to give way, and Æthelred fled over-sea to
+a refuge in Normandy.
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut]
+
+He was soon called back again. In the opening of 1014 Swein died suddenly
+at Gainsborough; and the spell of terror was broken. The Witan recalled
+"their own born lord," and Æthelred returned to see the Danish fleet
+under Swein's son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to plan a
+more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the
+first the vigour of his temper. Setting aside his brother he made himself
+king of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh attack
+on England, whose king and nobles were again at strife, and where a
+bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and Æthelred's son
+Eadmund Ironside broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of Eadric
+to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open England to his
+arms; Wessex and Mercia submitted to him; and though the loyalty of
+London enabled Eadmund, when his father's death raised him in 1016 to the
+throne, to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a
+decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition which this
+wrested from him at Olney were soon followed by the young king's death.
+Cnut was left master of the realm. His first acts of government showed
+little but the temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
+uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. Eadric of
+Mercia, whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at
+the king's signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund
+Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
+his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this the young conqueror
+rose abruptly into a wise and temperate king. His aim during twenty years
+seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign character
+of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had begun.
+
+Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that
+the Norman was a foreigner after him. His language differed little from
+the English tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or government.
+Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. He
+dismissed his Danish host, and retaining only a trained band of household
+troops or "hus-carls" to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support
+within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. He
+fell back on "Eadgar's Law," on the old constitution of the realm, for
+his rule of government; and owned no difference between Dane and
+Englishman among his subjects. He identified himself even with the
+patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been the
+centre of the national resistance; Archbishop Ælfheah had been slain by
+Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of the Church; he translated
+Ælfheah's body with great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his father's
+ravages by gifts to the religious houses; he protected English pilgrims
+even against the robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks broke out
+in a song which he composed as he listened to their chaunt at Ely.
+"Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by" across the vast
+fen-waters that surrounded their abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and
+hear we these monks sing." A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve years
+of rule to his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character and
+the noble conception he had formed of kingship. "I have vowed to God to
+lead a right life in all things," wrote the king, "to rule justly and
+piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement to all.
+If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, through headiness
+or negligence of youth, I am ready, with God's help, to amend it
+utterly." No royal officer, either for fear of the king or for favour of
+any, is to consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor "as
+they would value my friendship and their own well-being." He especially
+denounces unfair exactions: "I have no need that money be heaped together
+for me by unjust demands." "I have sent this letter before me," Cnut
+ends, "that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for
+as you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will I spare, to spend
+myself and my toil in what is needful and good for my people."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut and Scotland]
+
+Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him began the
+long internal tranquillity which was from this time to be the keynote of
+the national history. Without, the Dane was no longer a terror; on the
+contrary it was English ships and English soldiers who now appeared in
+the North and followed Cnut in his campaigns against Wend or Norwegian.
+Within, the exhaustion which follows a long anarchy gave fresh strength
+to the Crown, and Cnut's own ruling temper was backed by the force of
+hus-carls at his disposal. The four Earls of Northumberland, Mercia,
+Wessex, and East-Anglia, whom he set in the place of the older caldormen,
+knew themselves to be the creatures of his will; the ablest indeed of
+their number, Godwine, earl of Wessex, was the minister or close
+counsellor of the King. The troubles along the Northern border were ended
+by a memorable act of policy. From Eadgar's day the Scots had pressed
+further and further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of their
+king Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham in 1018 made him master of
+Northern Northumbria. In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the quarrel
+ended in a formal cession of the district between the Forth and the
+Tweed, Lothian as it was called, to the Scot-king on his doing homage to
+Cnut. The gain told at once on the character of the Northern kingdom. The
+kings of the Scots had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and Celtic
+peoples; but from the moment that Lothian with its English farmers and
+English seamen became a part of their dominions it became the most
+important part. The kings fixed their seat at Edinburgh, and in the midst
+of an English population passed from Gaelic chieftains into the Saxon
+rulers of a mingled people.
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut's Sons]
+
+But the greatness of Cnut's rule hung solely on the greatness of his
+temper, and the Danish power was shaken by his death in 1035. The empire
+he had built up at once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed both England
+and Denmark to his son Harthacnut; but the boy's absence enabled his
+brother, Harald Harefoot, to acquire all England save Godwine's earldom
+of Wessex, and in the end even Godwine was forced to submit to him.
+Harald's death in 1040 averted a conflict between the brothers, and
+placed Harthacnut quietly on the throne. But the love which Cnut's
+justice had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness of his
+successors. The long peace sickened men of their bloodshed and violence.
+"Never was a bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes came," ran a
+popular song, when Harald's men seized Ælfred, a brother of Eadmund
+Ironside, who returned to England from Normandy where he had found a
+refuge since his father's flight to its shores. Every tenth man among his
+followers was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and Ælfred's eyes torn
+out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage than his predecessor, dug up his
+brother's body and flung it into a marsh; while a rising at Worcester
+against his hus-carls was punished by the burning of the town and the
+pillage of the shire. The young king's death was no less brutal than his
+life; in 1042 "he died as he stood at his drink in the house of Osgod
+Clapa at Lambeth." England wearied of rulers such as these: but their
+crimes helped her to free herself from the impossible dream of Cnut. The
+North, still more barbarous than herself, could give her no new element
+of progress or civilization. It was the consciousness of this and a
+hatred of rulers such as Harald and Harthacnut which co-operated with the
+old feeling of reverence for the past in calling back the line of Ælfred
+to the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Confessor]
+
+It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history that it needs
+the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, the quick perception of
+what is possible, which distinguished the adroit politician whom the
+death of Cnut left supreme in England. Originally of obscure origin,
+Godwine's ability had raised him high in the royal favour; he was allied
+to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with the earldom of Wessex, and at
+last made the Viceroy or justiciar of the King in the government of the
+realm. In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill at the
+head of a body of English troops, but his true field of action lay at
+home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine united
+vigilance, industry, and caution with a singular dexterity in the
+management of men. During the troubled years that followed the death of
+Cnut he did his best to continue his master's policy in securing the
+internal union of England under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her
+connexion with the North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut's policy
+had become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
+with the tide of popular feeling which called Eadward, the one living son
+of Æthelred, to the throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in exile at
+the court of Normandy. A halo of tenderness spread in after-time round
+this last king of the old English stock; legends told of his pious
+simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holiness that
+gained him his name of "Confessor" and enshrined him as a saint in his
+abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in manlier tones of the long
+peace and glories of his reign, how warriors and wise counsellors stood
+round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton obeyed him. His was the
+one figure that stood out bright against the darkness when England lay
+trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and so dear became his memory
+that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name.
+Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for the "good
+laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past
+that the exile really returned to the throne of Ælfred; there was
+something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his
+transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides
+over the political stage. The work of government was done by sterner
+hands.
+
+[Sidenote: Godwine]
+
+Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in the hands of its
+three Earls, Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of
+Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation
+against which Æthelred had struggled was to triumph with the death of
+Cnut. What hindered this severance was the greed of Godwine. Siward was
+isolated in the North: Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of Mercia.
+But the Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of England,
+seized district after district for his house. His son Swein secured an
+earldom in the south-west; his son Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his
+nephew Beorn was established in Central England: while the marriage of
+his daughter Eadgyth to the king himself gave Godwine a hold upon the
+throne. Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim at winning
+England itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in it. But
+his aim found a sudden check through the lawlessness of his son Swein.
+Swein seduced the abbess of Leominster, sent her home again with a yet
+more outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and on the king's refusal
+to grant it fled from the realm. Godwine's influence secured his pardon,
+but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered his cousin Beorn who had
+opposed the reconciliation and again fled to Flanders. A storm of
+national indignation followed him over-sea. The meeting of the Wise men
+branded him as "nithing," the "utterly worthless," yet in a year his
+father wrested a new pardon from the King and restored him to his
+earldom. The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in
+a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself. The king was a stranger
+in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and friends
+of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman tongue. He used in Norman
+fashion a seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites in the highest
+posts of Church and State. Foreigners such as these, though hostile to
+the minister, were powerless against Godwine's influence and ability, and
+when at a later time they ventured to stand alone against him they fell
+without a blow. But the general ill-will at Swein's inlawing enabled them
+to stir Eadward to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel brought
+the opportunity of a decisive break with him. On his return from a visit
+to the court Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of the king's
+sister, demanded quarters for his train in Dover. Strife arose, and many
+both of the burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine's better
+nature withstood Eadward when the king angrily bade him exact vengeance
+from the town for the affront to his kinsman; and he claimed a fair trial
+for the townsmen. But Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and
+the quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine at once gathered his forces
+and marched upon Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign
+favourites. But even in a just quarrel the country was cold in his
+support. The earls of Mercia and Northumberland united their forces to
+those of Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the king to a gathering
+of the Witenagemot at London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but Swein's
+outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of Wessex, declining with his usual
+prudence a useless struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Harold]
+
+But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall. Great as were
+Godwine's faults, he was the one man who now stood between England and
+the rule of the strangers who flocked to the Court; and a year had hardly
+passed when he was strong enough to return. At the appearance of his
+fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was once more forced to yield. The
+foreign prelates and bishops fled over sea, outlawed by the same meeting
+of the Wise men which restored Godwine to his home. But he returned only
+to die, and the direction of affairs passed quietly to his son Harold.
+Harold came to power unfettered by the obstacles which beset his father,
+and for twelve years he was the actual governor of the realm. The
+courage, the ability, the genius for administration, the ambition and
+subtlety of Godwine were found again in his son. In the internal
+government of England he followed out his father's policy while avoiding
+its excesses. Peace was preserved, justice administered, and the realm
+increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work and embroidery became
+famous in the markets of Flanders and France. Disturbances from without
+were crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold's military talents displayed
+themselves in a campaign against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity
+with which, arming his troops with weapons adapted for mountain conflict,
+he penetrated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country to
+complete submission. With the gift of the Northumbrian earldom on
+Siward's death to his brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
+older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of Godwine, and as the waning
+health of the king, the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who had
+returned from Hungary as his heir, and the childhood of the Ætheling
+Eadgar who stood next in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
+plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward to the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: Normandy]
+
+But his advance was watched by one even more able and ambitious than
+himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the
+Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays
+through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name
+of hamlet after hamlet has memories for English ears; a fragment of
+castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves the
+name of the Percy. The very look of the country and its people seem
+familiar to us; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
+build and features of the small English farmer; the fields about Caen,
+with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the
+very picture of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift themselves
+over the red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately
+fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of Ælfred or Dunstan, while
+the windy heights that look over orchard and meadowland are crowned with
+the square grey keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and
+the banks of Thames. It was Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader
+like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from the French king,
+Charles the Simple, in 912, at the moment when Ælfred's children were
+beginning their conquest of the English Danelaw. The treaty of
+Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of the
+coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
+was baptized, received the king's daughter in marriage, and became his
+vassal for the territory which now took the name of "the Northman's land"
+or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly on the Dane. No
+such ties of blood and speech tended to unite the northman with the
+French among whom he settled along the Seine as united him to the
+Englishmen among whom he settled along the Humber. William Longsword, the
+son of Hrolf, though wavering towards France and Christianity, remained a
+northman in heart; he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest of
+the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. Michael's Mount to
+the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the northmen of Bayeux
+where the Danish tongue and fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
+heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk of the Normans, with
+the child Duke Richard, fell away for the time from Christianity, while
+new pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. To the close of the century
+the whole people were still "Pirates" to the French around them, their
+land the "Pirates' land," their Duke the "Pirates' Duke." Yet in the end
+the same forces which merged the Dane in the Englishman told even more
+powerfully on the Dane in France. No race has ever shown a greater power
+of absorbing all the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom they
+came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them. During the
+long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a
+reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became
+French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only
+at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died
+silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and
+the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal of the fiefs of France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Duke William]
+
+From the moment of their settlement on the Frankish coast, the Normans
+had been jealously watched by the English kings; and the anxiety of
+Æthelred for their friendship set a Norman woman on the English throne.
+The marriage of Emma with Æthelred brought about a close political
+connexion between the two countries. It was in Normandy that the King
+found a refuge from Swein's invasion, and his younger boys grew up in
+exile at the Norman court. Their presence there drew the eyes of every
+Norman to the rich land which offered so tempting a prey across the
+Channel. The energy which they had shown in winning their land from the
+Franks, in absorbing the French civilization and the French religion, was
+now showing itself in adventures on far-off shores, in crusades against
+the Moslem of Spain or the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of
+adventure that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against England in
+Cnut's day under pretext of setting Æthelred's children on its throne,
+but the wreck of his fleet in a storm put an end to a project which might
+have anticipated the work of his son. It was that son, William the Great,
+as men of his own day styled him, William the Conqueror as he was to
+stamp himself by one event on English history, who was now Duke of
+Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and
+patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of the
+petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there
+never had been a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the
+greatest of men. His life from the very first was one long mastering of
+difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name
+of "the Bastard." His father Robert had seen Arlotta, a tanner's daughter
+of the town, as she washed her linen in a little brook by Falaise; and
+loving her he had made her the mother of his boy. The departure of Robert
+on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler
+among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom; treason and anarchy
+surrounded him as he grew to manhood; and disorder broke at last into
+open revolt. But in 1047 a fierce combat of horse on the slopes of
+Val-ès-dunes beside Caen left the young Duke master of his duchy and he
+soon made his mastery felt. "Normans" said a Norman poet "must be trodden
+down and kept under foot, for he only that bridles them may use them at
+his need." In the stern order he forced on the land Normandy from this
+hour felt the bridle of its Duke.
+
+[Sidenote: William and France]
+
+Secure at home, William seized the moment of Godwine's exile to visit
+England, and received from his cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards
+asserted, a promise of succession to his throne. Such a promise however,
+unconfirmed by the Witenagemot, was valueless; and the return of Godwine
+must have at once cut short the young Duke's hopes. He found in fact work
+enough to do in his own duchy, for the discontent of his baronage at the
+stern justice of his rule found support in the jealousy which his power
+raised in the states around him, and it was only after two great
+victories at Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard fighting that
+outer and inner foes were alike trodden under foot. In 1060 William stood
+first among the princes of France. Maine submitted to his rule. Britanny
+was reduced to obedience by a single march. While some of the rebel
+barons rotted in the Duke's dungeons and some were driven into exile, the
+land settled down into a peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth of
+wealth and culture. Learning and education found their centre in the
+school of Bec, which the teaching of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised
+in a few years into the most famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc's
+first contact with William, if it showed the Duke's imperious temper,
+showed too his marvellous insight into men. In a strife with the Papacy
+which William provoked by his marriage with Matilda, a daughter of the
+Count of Flanders, Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition was met
+by a sentence of banishment, and the Prior had hardly set out on a lame
+horse, the only one his house could afford, when he was overtaken by the
+Duke, impatient that he should quit Normandy. "Give me a better horse and
+I shall go the quicker," replied the imperturbable Lombard, and William's
+wrath passed into laughter and good will. From that hour Lanfranc became
+his minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in the duchy itself or
+for the more daring schemes of ambition which opened up across the
+Channel.
+
+[Sidenote: William and England]
+
+William's hopes of the English crown are said to have been revived by a
+storm which threw Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the coast of
+Ponthieu. Its count sold him to the Duke; and as the price of return to
+England William forced him to swear on the relics of saints to support
+his claim to its throne. But, true or no, the oath told little on
+Harold's course. As the childless King drew to his grave one obstacle
+after another was cleared from the earl's path. His brother Tostig had
+become his most dangerous rival; but a revolt of the Northumbrians drove
+Tostig to Flanders, and the earl was able to win over the Mercian house
+of Leofric to his cause by owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian
+Earl Eadwine, as his brother's successor. His aim was in fact attained
+without a struggle. In the opening of 1066 the nobles and bishops who
+gathered round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly from it to
+the election and coronation of Harold. But at Eouen the news was welcomed
+with a burst of furious passion, and the Duke of Normandy at once
+prepared to enforce his claim by arms. William did not claim the Crown.
+He claimed simply the right which he afterwards used when his sword had
+won it of presenting himself for election by the nation, and he believed
+himself entitled so to present himself by the direct commendation of the
+Confessor. The actual election of Harold which stood in his way, hurried
+as it was, he did not recognize as valid. But with this constitutional
+claim was inextricably mingled resentment at the private wrong which
+Harold had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he
+regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his
+enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within
+England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant
+baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to
+keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very
+trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time amidst
+all this for the common business of government, for negotiations with
+Denmark and the Empire, with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with Flanders
+and with Rome which had been estranged from England by Archbishop
+Stigand's acceptance of his pallium from one who was not owned as a
+canonical Pope.
+
+[Sidenote: Stamford Bridge]
+
+But his rival's difficulties were hardly less than his own. Harold was
+threatened with invasion not only by William but by his brother Tostig,
+who had taken refuge in Norway and secured the aid of its king, Harald
+Hardrada. The fleet and army he had gathered lay watching for months
+along the coast. His one standing force was his body of hus-carls, but
+their numbers only enabled them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the
+other hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of fighting-men was a body easy
+to raise for any single encounter but hard to keep together. To assemble
+such a force was to bring labour to a standstill. The men gathered under
+the King's standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their fields. The
+ships were the fishing-vessels of the coast. In September the task of
+holding them together became impossible, but their dispersion had hardly
+taken place when the two clouds which had so long been gathering burst at
+once upon the realm. A change of wind released the landlocked armament of
+William; but before changing, the wind which prisoned the Duke brought
+the host of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of Yorkshire. The
+King hastened with his household troops to the north and repulsed the
+Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, but ere he could
+hurry back to London the Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who
+had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off Pevensey, was ravaging
+the coast to bring his rival to an engagement. His merciless ravages
+succeeded in drawing Harold from London to the south; but the King wisely
+refused to attack with the troops he had hastily summoned to his banner.
+If he was forced to give battle, he resolved to give it on ground he had
+himself chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to check William's
+ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known afterwards as that of
+Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His position
+covered London and drove William to concentrate his forces. With a host
+subsisting by pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no alternative
+was left to the Duke but a decisive victory or ruin.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Hastings]
+
+On the fourteenth of October William led his men at dawn along the higher
+ground that leads from Hastings to the battle-field which Harold had
+chosen. From the mound of Telham the Normans saw the host of the English
+gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on the height of
+Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right; on the left, the most exposed
+part of the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold, men in full
+armour and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden Dragon of
+Wessex and the Standard of the King. The rest of the ground was covered
+by thick masses of half-armed rustics who had flocked at Harold's summons
+to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre of this
+formidable position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood, while the
+mercenary forces he had gathered in France and Britanny were ordered to
+attack its flanks. A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle;
+in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and
+catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland. He was the first
+of the host who struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The charge
+broke vainly on the stout stockade behind which the English warriors
+plied axe and javelin with fierce cries of "Out, out," and the repulse of
+the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse of the Norman horse. Again
+and again the Duke rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All the
+fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong
+valour that spurred him over the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, mingled that day
+with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible
+faculty of resource which shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton
+troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder,
+and as panic spread through the army a cry arose that the Duke was slain.
+William tore off his helmet; "I live," he shouted, "and by God's help I
+will conquer yet." Maddened by a fresh repulse, the Duke spurred right at
+the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down Gyrth, the King's
+brother; again dismounted, a blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
+unmannerly rider who would not lend him his steed. Amidst the roar and
+tumult of the battle he turned the flight he had arrested into the means
+of victory. Broken as the stockade was by his desperate onset, the
+shield-wall of the warriors behind it still held the Normans at bay till
+William by a feint of flight drew a part of the English force from their
+post of vantage. Turning on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to
+pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and made himself master of the
+central ground. Meanwhile the French and Bretons made good their ascent
+on either flank. At three the hill seemed won, at six the fight still
+raged around the Standard where Harold's hus-carls stood stubbornly at
+bay on a spot marked afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey. An
+order from the Duke at last brought his archers to the front. Their
+arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses crowded around the King and
+as the sun went down a shaft pierced Harold's right eye. He fell between
+the royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melly over his
+corpse.
+
+Night covered the flight of the English army: but William was quick to
+reap the advantage of his victory. Securing Romney and Dover, he marched
+by Canterbury upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work for
+him as he advanced; for Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on the
+field of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to contest
+the crown. Of the old royal line there remained but a single boy, Eadgar
+the Ætheling. He was chosen king; but the choice gave little strength to
+the national cause. The widow of the Confessor surrendered Winchester to
+the Duke. The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. The
+citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by their walls, gave
+Southwark to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really rested for
+support on the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and
+William, crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching into
+Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from their earldoms. The
+masterly movement forced the Earls to hurry home, and London gave way at
+once. Eadgar himself was at the head of the deputation who came to offer
+the crown to the Norman Duke. "They bowed to him," says the English
+annalist pathetically, "for need." They bowed to the Norman as they had
+bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit of Cnut.
+London indeed was secured by the erection of a fortress which afterwards
+grew into the Tower, but William desired to reign not as a Conqueror but
+as a lawful king. At Christmas he received the crown at Westminster from
+the hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of "Yea, Yea," from his new
+English subjects. Fines from the greater landowners atoned for a
+resistance which now counted as rebellion; but with this exception every
+measure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling as a successor
+of Eadward or Ælfred. As yet indeed the greater part of England remained
+quietly aloof from him, and he can hardly be said to have been recognized
+as king by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia. But to the east
+of a line which stretched from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was
+unquestioned, and over this portion he ruled as an English king. His
+soldiers were kept in strict order. No change was made in law or custom.
+The privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ which still
+remains, the most venerable of its muniments, among the city's archives.
+Peace and order were restored. William even attempted, though in vain, to
+learn the English tongue that he might personally administer justice to
+the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so tranquil that only a few
+months had passed after the battle of Senlac when leaving England in
+charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and his minister, William
+Fitz-Osbern, the King returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The peace
+he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop Odo's tyranny forced the
+Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the Welsh
+princes supported a similar rising against Norman oppression in the west.
+But as yet the bulk of the land held fairly to the new king. Dover was
+saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge in
+lands as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time
+formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians of the Eastern
+Emperors. William returned to take his place again as an English king. It
+was with an English force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with
+Exeter at its head, and it was at the head of an English army that he
+completed his work by marching to the North. His march brought Eadwine
+and Morkere again to submission; a fresh rising ended in the occupation
+of York, and England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's feet.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Norman Conquest]
+
+It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that transformed the King
+into a conqueror. The signal for this revolt came from Swein, king of
+Denmark, who had for two years past been preparing to dispute England
+with the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber all
+northern, all western and south-western England rose as one man. Eadgar
+the Ætheling with a band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland took
+the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south-west the men of Devon,
+Somerset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute;
+while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the
+West. So ably had the revolt been planned that even William was taken by
+surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a storm of York and the slaughter
+of three thousand Normans who formed its garrison. The news of this
+slaughter reached William as he was hunting in the forest of Dean; and in
+a wild outburst of wrath he swore "by the splendour of God" to avenge
+himself on the North. But wrath went hand in hand with the coolest
+statesmanship. The centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and
+pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of horsemen William bought
+at a heavy price its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward
+with the troops that gathered round him he swept the Welsh border and
+relieved Shrewsbury while William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around
+Exeter. His success set the King free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on
+the North. After a long delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he
+entered York and ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees. Town and
+village were harried and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven
+over the Scottish border. The coast was especially wasted that no hold
+might remain for future landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very
+implements of husbandry were so mercilessly destroyed that a famine which
+followed is said to have swept off more than a hundred thousand victims.
+Half a century later indeed the land still lay bare of culture and
+deserted of men for sixty miles northward of York. The work of vengeance
+once over, William led his army back from the Tees to York, and thence to
+Chester and the West. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character so
+memorably as in this terrible march. The winter was hard, the roads
+choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his
+army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses for food, broke out
+into mutiny at the order to cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire
+from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and Britanny demanded their
+release from service. William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot,
+at the head of the troops which still clung to him, he forced his way by
+paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with his own hands to
+clear the road, and as the army descended upon Chester the resistance of
+the English died away.
+
+For two years William was able to busy himself in castle-building and in
+measures for holding down the conquered land. How effective these were
+was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of
+Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to Scotland
+where Eadgar the Ætheling had again found refuge and where his sister
+Margaret had become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably some assurance
+of Malcolm's aid which roused the Mercian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to
+a fresh rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled by the
+vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skirmish, while
+Morkere found shelter for a while in the fen country where a desperate
+band of patriots gathered round an outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had
+William found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway two miles long was
+at last driven across the marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom
+died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of
+England that William marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands and the
+Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp upon the Tay to swear fealty at
+his feet.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS
+1071-1204
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II
+1071-1204
+
+
+Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from this point particularly
+valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Worcester remain the
+primary English authorities, while Simeon of Durham gives much special
+information on northern matters. For the reign of William the Red the
+chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, in his
+"Historia Noverum" and "Life of Anselm." William of Malmesbury and Henry
+of Huntingdon are both contemporary authorities during that of Henry the
+First; the latter remains a brief but accurate annalist; the former is
+the leader of a new historic school, who treat English events as part of
+the history of the world, and emulate classic models by a more
+philosophical arrangement of their materials. To these the opening of
+Stephen's reign adds the "Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail by
+one of the King's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.
+
+All this wealth of historical material however suddenly leaves us in the
+chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle dies out in the midst of Stephen's
+reign, and the close at the same time of the works we have noted leaves a
+blank in our historical literature which extends over the early years of
+Henry the Second. But this dearth is followed by a vast outburst of
+historical industry. For the Beket struggle we have the mass of the
+Archbishop's own correspondence with that of Foliot and John of
+Salisbury. From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is the Chronicle known
+as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose authorship Professor Stubbs
+has shown to be more probably due to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard
+Fitz-Neal. This is continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of
+equally official value. William of Newburgh's history, which ends in
+1198, is a work of the classical school, like William of Malmesbury's. It
+is distinguished by its fairness and good sense. To these may be added
+the Chronicle of Ralph Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall,
+that of Gervase of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh of
+Lincoln.
+
+But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second's time is shown even more
+remarkably in the mass of general literature which lies behind these
+distinctively historical sources, in the treatises of John of Salisbury,
+the voluminous works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the "Trifles" and satires of
+Walter Map, Glanvill's treatise on Law, Richard Fitz-Neal's "Dialogue on
+the Exchequer," to which we owe our knowledge of Henry's financial
+system, the romances of Gaimar and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal.
+But this intellectual fertility is far from ceasing with Henry the
+Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun when the romantic impulse
+quickens even the old English tongue in the long poem of Layamon. The
+Chronicle of Richard of Devizes and an "Itinerarium Regis" supplement
+Roger of Howden for Richard's reign. With John we enter upon the Annals
+of Barnwell and are aided by the invaluable series of the Chroniclers of
+St. Albans. Among the side topics of the time, we may find much
+information as to the Jews in Toovey's "Anglia Judaica"; the Chronicle of
+Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep into social and monastic life; the
+Cistercian revival may be traced in the records of the Cistercian abbeys
+in Dugdale's Monasticon; the Charter Rolls give some information as to
+municipal history; and constitutional developement may be traced in the
+documents collected by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE CONQUEROR
+1071-1085
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Foreign Kings]
+
+In the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest Britain
+had become England, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its
+conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a
+national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political
+order. But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse
+the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation had failed. The
+effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been foiled
+by the resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
+Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings and statesmen, had
+no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than local independence
+rose again at the call of the Northmen. The sense of a single England
+deepened with the pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of Ælfred and
+his house broadened into an English kingdom; but still tribal jealousies
+battled with national unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon,
+Northman from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the country
+roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. It came with
+foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings broke local jealousies as they
+had never been broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwine and
+the Confessor. But Cnut was more Englishman than Northman, and his system
+of government was an English system. The true foreign yoke was only felt
+when England saw its conqueror in William the Norman.
+
+For nearly a century and a half, from the hour when William turned
+triumphant from the fens of Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
+Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy
+were followed by kings from Anjou. But whether under Norman or Angevin
+Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange
+blood and of strange speech. And yet it was in these years of subjection
+that England first became really England. Provincial differences were
+finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The
+firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost
+unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness,
+and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in
+Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second
+built up the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were
+developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
+wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a
+feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
+of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed
+from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
+this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation
+of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted
+them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom. The middle
+class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a
+corresponding class in our towns. Commerce and trade were promoted by the
+justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with their advance rose the
+political importance of the trader. The boroughs of England, which at the
+opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich
+enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for
+the mightier part they were to play in the developement of our
+parliament. The shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
+begot a moral and religious revival which raised religion into a living
+thing; while the close connexion with the Continent which foreign
+conquest brought about secured for England a new communion with the
+artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.
+
+
+[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]
+
+In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe
+not merely English wealth and English freedom but England herself. And of
+these foreign masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In William
+the wild impulses of the northman's blood mingled strangely with the cool
+temper of the modern statesman. As he was the last, so he was the most
+terrible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers
+from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
+strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his
+wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his
+enemies owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-ès-dunes, horse
+and man went down before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his nature
+broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins
+with but five men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
+Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and
+the chase were one. No man could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its
+way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He
+rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired. His
+voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English
+charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of
+victory. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
+his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear a road through
+the snowdrifts. And with the northman's daring broke out the northman's
+pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their
+walls in scorn of the "tanner's" grandson, William tore out his
+prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the
+town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him
+a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a
+desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look,
+his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William
+lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "So stark
+and fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that none dared
+resist his will." His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he and no
+man dared speak to him" when the news reached him of Harold's seizure of
+the throne. It was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness
+of the woods that the King's temper unbent. "He loved the wild deer as
+though he had been their father."
+
+[Sidenote: His rule]
+
+It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere northman
+into a great general and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his
+French campaigns, the organization of his attack upon England, the
+victory at Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance which
+achieved the Conquest showed the wide range of his generalship. His
+political ability had shown itself from the first moment of his accession
+to the ducal throne. William had the instinct of government. He had
+hardly reached manhood when Normandy lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was
+crushed. Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke "could never love a
+robber," be he baron or knave. The sternness of his temper stamped itself
+throughout upon his rule. "Stark he was to men that withstood him," says
+the Chronicler of his English system of government; "so harsh and cruel
+was he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that did aught against
+his bidding he cast into bonds; bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
+abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother: first he was in
+the land, but the King cast him into bondage. If a man would live and
+hold his lands, need it were he followed the King's will." Stern as such
+a rule was, its sternness gave rest to the land. Even amidst the
+sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
+Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the enclosure of forests
+or the exactions which built up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen
+were unable to forget "the good peace he made in the land, so that a man
+might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold." Strange touches too
+of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted with this general
+temper of the Conqueror's government. One of the strongest traits in his
+character was an aversion to shed blood by process of law; he formally
+abolished the punishment of death, and only a single execution stains the
+annals of his reign. An edict yet more honourable to his humanity put an
+end to the slave-trade which had till then been carried on at the port of
+Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness and pitifulness of his
+public acts sprang indeed from a contrast within his temper itself. The
+pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a tender and faithful
+husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke
+into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. If William
+was "stark" to rebel and baron, men noted that he was "mild to those that
+loved God."
+
+[Sidenote: William and feudalism]
+
+But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and
+peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
+greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius
+on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on
+this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of
+the world. The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
+his position. He no longer held the land merely as its national and
+elected King. To his elective right he added the right of conquest. It is
+the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that
+marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of
+government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin
+of his rule. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the
+Continent nor the system of the older English royalty: more truly perhaps
+it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of England
+William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was
+necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
+already prepared for such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
+of English feudalism in the warriors, the "companions" or "thegns" who
+were personally attached to the king's war-band and received estates from
+the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times this
+feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the
+nobles followed the king's example and bound their tenants to themselves
+by a similar process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders on the other
+hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society,
+had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the
+class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and
+the social disturbance consequent upon them which forced these freemen to
+seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Even
+before the reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding the older
+freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.
+But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. The
+desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold
+by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush
+at any moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his
+throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of
+the soil, and the failure of the English risings cleared the ground for
+its establishment. The greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle
+or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole
+of their lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest. We see
+the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William
+was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two hundred manors
+in Kent with more than an equal number elsewhere rewarded the services of
+his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's counsellors
+Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares.
+But the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the spoil. The
+meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord.
+Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on condition of its
+holder's service at the King's call; a whole army was by this means
+encamped upon the soil; and William's summons could at any hour gather an
+overwhelming force around his standard.
+
+Such a force however, effective as it was against the conquered English,
+was hardly less formidable to the Crown itself. When once it was
+established, William found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal
+baronage, by the men whom he had so hardly bent to his will in Normandy,
+and who were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal power, as eager
+for an unbridled military and judicial independence within their own
+manors, here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror was shown in
+his appreciation of this danger and in the skill with which he met it.
+Large as the estates he granted were, they were scattered over the
+country in such a way as to render union between the great landowners or
+the hereditary attachment of great areas of population to any one
+separate lord equally impossible. A yet wiser measure struck at the very
+root of feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided by their owners
+into smaller sub-tenancies, the under-tenants were bound by the same
+conditions of service to their lord as he to the Crown. "Hear, my lord,"
+swore the vassal as kneeling bareheaded and without arms he placed his
+hands within those of his superior, "I become liege man of yours for life
+and limb and earthly regard; and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for
+life and death, God help me!" Then the kiss of his lord invested him with
+land as a "fief" to descend to him and his heirs for ever. In other
+countries such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes, be they
+king or no. By the usage however which William enacted in England each
+sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore fealty
+directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the King was thus established as
+the supreme and universal duty of all Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: William and England]
+
+But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so much in these inner checks
+upon feudalism as in the counterbalancing forces which he provided
+without it. He was not only the head of the great garrison that held
+England down, he was legal and elected King of the English people. If as
+Conqueror he covered the country with a new military organization, as the
+successor of Eadward he maintained the judicial and administrative
+organization of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance of
+the land between the greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
+abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire became the largest unit
+of local government, and in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs
+for its administration concentrated the whole executive power in the
+King's hands. The old legal constitution of the country gave him the
+whole judicial power, and William was jealous to retain and heighten
+this. While he preserved the local courts of the hundred and the shire he
+strengthened the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems even in
+the Confessor's day to have become more and more a court of highest
+appeal with a right to call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to
+its bar. The control over the national revenue which had rested even in
+the most troubled times in the hands of the King was turned into a great
+financial power by the Conqueror's system. Over the whole face of the
+land a large part of the manors were burthened with special dues to the
+Crown: and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording these
+that William sent into each county the commissioners whose enquiries are
+recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled in each hundred
+declared on oath the extent and nature of each estate, the names, number,
+and condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the
+Conquest, and the sums due from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
+or land-tax levied since the days of Æthelred, formed as yet the main
+financial resources of the Crown, and their exaction carried the royal
+authority in its most direct form home to every landowner. But to these
+were added a revenue drawn from the old Crown domain, now largely
+increased by the confiscations of the Conquest, the ever-growing income
+from the judicial "fines" imposed by the King's judges in the King's
+courts, and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown on the grant or
+renewal of every privilege or charter. A new source of revenue was found
+in the Jewish traders, many of whom followed William from Normandy, and
+who were glad to pay freely for the royal protection which enabled them
+to settle in their quarters or "Jewries" in all the principal towns of
+England.
+
+[Sidenote: The Church]
+
+William found a yet stronger check on his baronage in the organization of
+the Church. Its old dependence on the royal power was strictly enforced.
+Prelates were practically chosen by the King. Homage was exacted from
+bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated save by the
+King's leave. No synod could legislate without his previous assent and
+subsequent confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be
+received within the realm save by his permission. The King firmly
+repudiated the claims which were beginning to be put forward by the court
+of Rome. When Gregory VII. called on him to do fealty for his kingdom the
+King sternly refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I have never willed to
+do, nor will I do it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my
+predecessors did it to yours." William's reforms only tended to tighten
+this hold of the Crown on the clergy. Stigand was deposed; and the
+elevation of Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed by the
+removal of most of the English prelates and by the appointment of Norman
+ecclesiastics in their place. The new archbishop did much to restore
+discipline, and William's own efforts were no doubt partly directed by a
+real desire for the religious improvement of his realm. But the foreign
+origin of the new prelates cut them off from the flocks they ruled and
+bound them firmly to the foreign throne; while their independent position
+was lessened by a change which seemed intended to preserve it.
+Ecclesiastical cases had till now been decided, like civil cases, in
+shire or hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by side with ealdorman
+or sheriff. They were now withdrawn from it to the separate court of the
+bishop. The change was pregnant with future trouble to the Crown; but for
+the moment it told mainly in removing the bishop from his traditional
+contact with the popular assembly and in effacing the memory of the
+original equality of the religious with the civil power.
+
+
+[Sidenote: William's death]
+
+In any struggle with feudalism a national king, secure of the support of
+the Church, and backed by the royal hoard at Winchester, stood in
+different case from the merely feudal sovereigns of the Continent. The
+difference of power was seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over, and
+the struggle which William had anticipated opened between the baronage
+and the Crown. The wisdom of his policy in the destruction of the great
+earldoms which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at
+their restoration made in 1075 by Roger, the son of his minister William
+Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton, Ralf de Guader, whom the King had
+rewarded for his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The
+rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven
+over sea. The intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in
+William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring
+by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo collected money and men, but the
+treasure was at once seized by the royal officers and the bishop arrested
+in the midst of the court. Even at the King's bidding no officer would
+venture to seize on a prelate of the Church; and it was with his own
+hands that William was forced to effect his arrest. The Conqueror was as
+successful against foes from without as against foes from within. The
+fear of the Danes, which had so long hung like a thunder-cloud over
+England, passed away before the host which William gathered in 1085 to
+meet a great armament assembled by king Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the
+Danish fleet, and the murder of its king removed all peril from the
+north. Scotland, already humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by
+the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and after
+penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales the King commenced its
+systematic reduction by settling three of his great barons along its
+frontier. It was not till his closing years that William's unvarying
+success was troubled by a fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage under his
+son Robert and by an attack which he was forced to meet in 1087 from
+France. Its king mocked at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk and at the
+sickness which bound him to his bed at Rouen. "King William has as long a
+lying-in," laughed Philip, "as a woman behind her curtains." "When I get
+up," William swore grimly, "I will go to mass in Philip's land and bring
+a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my
+fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire
+they make." At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the
+French border fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode down the
+steep street of Mantes which he had given to the flames his horse
+stumbled among the embers, and William was flung heavily against his
+saddle. He was borne home to Rouen to die. The sound of the minster bell
+woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking the
+city--it was the hour of prime--and stretching out his hands in prayer
+the King passed quietly away. Death itself took its colour from the
+savage solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath
+left him, and the Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE NORMAN KINGS
+1085-1154
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: William the Red]
+
+With the death of the Conqueror passed the terror which had held the
+barons in awe, while the severance of his dominions roused their hopes of
+successful resistance to the stern rule beneath which they had bowed.
+William bequeathed Normandy to his eldest son Robert; but William the
+Red, his second son, hastened with his father's ring to England where the
+influence of Lanfranc secured him the crown. The baronage seized the
+opportunity to rise in arms under pretext of supporting the claims of
+Robert, whose weakness of character gave full scope for the growth of
+feudal independence; and Bishop Odo, now freed from prison, placed
+himself at the head of the revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly
+on the loyalty of his English subjects. But the national stamp which
+William had given to his kingship told at once. The English rallied to
+the royal standard; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the one surviving
+bishop of English blood, defeated the insurgents in the west; while the
+King, summoning the freemen of country and town to his host under pain of
+being branded as "nithing" or worthless, advanced with a large force
+against Rochester where the barons were concentrated. A plague which
+broke out among the garrison forced them to capitulate, and as the
+prisoners passed through the royal army cries of "gallows and cord" burst
+from the English ranks. The failure of a later conspiracy whose aim was
+to set on the throne a kinsman of the royal house, Stephen of Albemarle,
+with the capture and imprisonment of its head, Robert Mowbray, the Earl
+of Northumberland, brought home at last to the baronage their
+helplessness in a strife with the King. The genius of the Conqueror had
+saved England from the danger of feudalism. But he had left as weighty a
+danger in the power which trod feudalism under foot. The power of the
+Crown was a purely personal power, restrained under the Conqueror by his
+own high sense of duty, but capable of becoming a pure despotism in the
+hands of his son. The nobles were at his feet, and the policy of his
+minister, Ranulf Flambard, loaded their estates with feudal obligations.
+Each tenant was held as bound to appear if needful thrice a year at the
+royal court, to pay a heavy fine or rent on succession to his estate, to
+contribute aid in case of the king's capture in war or the knighthood of
+the king's eldest son or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir who
+was still a minor passed into the king's wardship, and all profit from
+his lands went during the period of wardship to the king. If the estate
+fell to an heiress, her hand was at the king's disposal, and was
+generally sold by him to the highest bidder. These rights of "marriage"
+and "wardship" as well as the exaction of aids at the royal will poured
+wealth into the treasury while they impoverished and fettered the
+baronage. A fresh source of revenue was found in the Church. The same
+principles of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as to those of
+the nobles; and during the vacancy of a see or abbey its profits, like
+those of a minor, were swept into the royal hoard. William's profligacy
+and extravagance soon tempted him to abuse this resource, and so steadily
+did he refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom death removed that
+at the close of his reign one archbishoprick, four bishopricks, and
+eleven abbeys were found to be without pastors.
+
+Vile as was this system of extortion and misrule but a single voice was
+raised in protest against it. Lanfranc had been followed in his abbey at
+Bec by the most famous of his scholars, Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like
+himself. Friends as they were, no two men could be more strangely unlike.
+Anselm had grown to manhood in the quiet solitude of his mountain-valley,
+a tenderhearted poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the Alpine snows above
+him, and an intelligence keen and clear as the mountain-air. The whole
+temper of the man was painted in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him
+as though heaven lay, a stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks,
+while the women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley became
+harvest-maidens of its king. They reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved at
+their sloth, hastily climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their
+lord. As he reached the palace the king's voice called him to his feet
+and he poured forth his tale; then at the royal bidding bread of an
+unearthly whiteness was set before him, and he ate and was refreshed. The
+dream passed with the morning; but the sense of heaven's nearness to
+earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord, the tender
+restfulness and peace in the Divine presence which it reflected lived on
+in the life of Anselm. Wandering like other Italian scholars to Normandy,
+he became a monk under Lanfranc, and on his teacher's removal to higher
+duties succeeded him in the direction of the Abbey of Bec. No teacher has
+ever thrown a greater spirit of love into his toil. "Force your scholars
+to improve!" he burst out to another teacher who relied on blows and
+compulsion. "Did you ever see a craftsman fashion a fair image out of a
+golden plate by blows alone? Does he not now gently press it and strike
+it with his tools, now with wise art yet more gently raise and shape it?
+What do your scholars turn into under this ceaseless beating?" "They turn
+only brutal," was the reply. "You have bad luck," was the keen answer,
+"in a training that only turns men into beasts." The worst natures
+softened before this tenderness and patience. Even the Conqueror, so
+harsh and terrible to others, became another man, gracious and easy of
+speech, with Anselm. But amidst his absorbing cares as a teacher, the
+Prior of Bec found time for philosophical speculations to which we owe
+the scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle Ages.
+His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to
+elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human reason. His
+passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he
+could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till he could seize
+his conception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But
+not even a fever of intense thought such as this could draw Anselm's
+heart from its passionate tenderness and love. Sick monks in the
+infirmary could relish no drink save the juice which his hand squeezed
+for them from the grape-bunch. In the later days of his archbishoprick a
+hare chased by the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his gentle
+voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman to stir in the chase while the
+creature darted off again to the woods. Even the greed of lands for the
+Church to which so many religious men yielded found its characteristic
+rebuke as the battling lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm quietly close
+his eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep.
+
+[Sidenote: William and Anselm]
+
+A sudden impulse of the Red King drew the abbot from these quiet studies
+into the storms of the world. The see of Canterbury had long been left
+without a Primate when a dangerous illness frightened the king into the
+promotion of Anselm. The Abbot, who happened at the time to be in England
+on the business of his house, was dragged to the royal couch and the
+cross forced into his hands. But William had no sooner recovered from his
+sickness than he found himself face to face with an opponent whose meek
+and loving temper rose into firmness and grandeur when it fronted the
+tyranny of the king. Much of the struggle between William and the
+Archbishop turned on questions such as the right of investiture, which
+have little bearing on our history, but the particular question at issue
+was of less importance than the fact of a contest at all. The boldness of
+Anselm's attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical
+servitude but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of
+independence. The real character of the strife appears in the Primate's
+answer when his remonstrances against the lawless exactions from the
+Church were met by a demand for a present on his own promotion, and his
+first offer of five hundred pounds was contemptuously refused. "Treat me
+as a free man," Anselm replied, "and I devote myself and all that I have
+to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you shall have neither me
+nor mine." A burst of the Red King's fury drove the Archbishop from
+court, and he finally decided to quit the country, but his example had
+not been lost, and the close of William's reign found a new spirit of
+freedom in England with which the greatest of the Conqueror's sons was
+glad to make terms. His exile however left William without a check.
+Supreme at home, he was full of ambition abroad. As a soldier the Red
+King was little inferior to his father. Normandy had been pledged to him
+by his brother Robert in exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to
+march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, and a
+rebellion at Le Mans was subdued by the fierce energy with which William
+flung himself at the news of it into the first boat he found, and crossed
+the Channel in face of a storm. "Kings never drown," he replied
+contemptuously to the remonstrances of his followers. Homage was again
+wrested from Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
+death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an army
+under Eadgar Ætheling to establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an
+English feudatory on the throne. In Wales William was less triumphant,
+and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman cavalry in the
+fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but wiser
+policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and defeat alike ended in a strange
+and tragical close. In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants in a
+glade of the New Forest, with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin
+in his breast.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry the First]
+
+Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy Land, where his
+bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown
+was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the
+baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the union of their
+estates on both sides the Channel under a single ruler. Their attitude
+threw Henry, as it had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and
+the two great measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a
+charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new relation which this
+support brought about between the people and their king. Henry's Charter
+is important, not merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of
+John, but as the first limitation on the despotism established by the
+Conqueror and carried to such a height by his son. The "evil customs" by
+which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church were explicitly
+renounced in it, the unlimited demands made by both the Conqueror and his
+son on the baronage exchanged for customary fees, while the rights of the
+people itself, though recognized more vaguely, were not forgotten. The
+barons were held to do justice to their undertenants and to renounce
+tyrannical exactions from them, the king promising to restore order and
+the "law of Eadward," the old constitution of the realm, with the changes
+which his father had introduced. His marriage gave a significance to
+these promises which the meanest English peasant could understand. Edith,
+or Matilda, was the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret,
+the sister of Eadgar Ætheling. She had been brought up in the nunnery of
+Romsey where her aunt Christina was a nun; and the veil which she had
+taken there formed an obstacle to her union with the King, which was only
+removed by the wisdom of Anselm. While Flambard, the embodiment of the
+Red King's despotism, was thrown into the Tower, the Archbishop's recall
+had been one of Henry's first acts after his accession. Matilda appeared
+before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate earnestness. She
+had been veiled in her childhood, she asserted, only to save her from the
+insults of the rude soldiery who infested the land, had flung the veil
+from her again and again, and had yielded at last to the unwomanly
+taunts, the actual blows of her aunt. "As often as I stood in her
+presence," the girl pleaded, "I wore the veil, trembling as I wore it
+with indignation and grief. But as soon as I could get out of her sight I
+used to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground, and trample it
+under foot. That was the way, and none other, in which I was veiled."
+Anselm at once declared her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of
+the English multitude when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the
+murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery of the Norman nobles, who
+nicknamed the king and his spouse Godric and Godgifu, was lost in the joy
+of the people at large. For the first time since the Conquest an English
+sovereign sat on the English throne. The blood of Cerdic and Ælfred was
+to blend itself with that of Hrolf and the Conqueror. Henceforth it was
+impossible that the two peoples should remain parted from each other; so
+quick indeed was their union that the very name of Norman had passed away
+in half a century, and at the accession of Henry's grandson it was
+impossible to distinguish between the descendants of the conquerors and
+those of the conquered at Senlac.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry and the Barons]
+
+Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm among his subjects which
+enabled Henry to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffection of
+his nobles. Early in 1101 Robert landed at Portsmouth to win the crown in
+arms. The great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof from the
+king. But the Norman Duke found himself face to face with an English army
+which gathered at Anselm's summons round Henry's standard. The temper of
+the English had rallied from the panic of Senlac. The soldiers who came
+to fight for their king "nowise feared the Normans." As Henry rode along
+their lines showing them how to keep firm their shield-wall against the
+lances of Robert's knighthood, he was met with shouts for battle. But
+king and duke alike shrank from a contest in which the victory of either
+side would have undone the Conqueror's work. The one saw his effort was
+hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his rival from the realm,
+and by a peace which the Count of Meulan negotiated Robert recognized
+Henry as King of England while Henry gave up his fief in the Cotentin to
+his brother the Duke. Robert's retreat left Henry free to deal sternly
+with the barons who had forsaken him. Robert de Lacy was stripped of his
+manors in Yorkshire; Robert Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk;
+Ivo of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to the Holy Land as a
+pilgrim. But greater even than these was Robert of Belesme, the son of
+Roger of Montgomery, who held in England the earldoms of Shrewsbury and
+Arundel, while in Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and Alençon. Robert
+stood at the head of the baronage in wealth and power: and his summons to
+the King's Court to answer for his refusal of aid to the king was
+answered by a haughty defiance. But again the Norman baronage had to feel
+the strength which English loyalty gave to the Crown. Sixty thousand
+Englishmen followed Henry to the attack of Robert's strongholds along the
+Welsh border. It was in vain that the nobles about the king, conscious
+that Robert's fall left them helpless in Henry's hands, strove to bring
+about a peace. The English soldiers shouted "Heed not these traitors, our
+lord King Henry," and with the people at his back the king stood firm.
+Only an early surrender saved Robert's life. He was suffered to retire to
+his estates in Normandy, but his English lands were confiscated to the
+Crown. "Rejoice, King Henry," shouted the English soldiers, "for you
+began to be a free king on that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme
+and drove him from the land." Master of his own realm and enriched by the
+confiscated lands of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy, where
+the misgovernment of the Duke had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk,
+and where the outrages of nobles like Robert of Belesme forced the more
+peaceful classes to call the king to their aid. In 1106 his forces met
+those of his brother on the field of Tenchebray, and a decisive English
+victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered duchy
+became a dependency of the English crown, and Henry's energies were
+frittered away through a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts,
+the hostility of the French, and the efforts of his nephew William, the
+son of Robert, to regain the crown which his father had lost.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's rule]
+
+With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was free to enter on that work of
+administration which was to make his reign memorable in our history.
+Successful as his wars had been he was in heart no warrior but a
+statesman, and his greatness showed itself less in the field than in the
+council chamber. His outer bearing like his inner temper stood in marked
+contrast to that of his father. Well read, accomplished, easy and fluent
+of speech, the lord of a harem of mistresses, the centre of a gay
+court where poet and jongleur found a home, Henry remained cool,
+self-possessed, clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless himself, and
+neither seeking nor desiring his people's love, but wringing from them
+their gratitude and regard by sheer dint of good government. His work of
+order was necessarily a costly work; and the steady pressure of his
+taxation, a pressure made the harder by local famines and plagues during
+his reign, has left traces of the grumbling it roused in the pages of the
+English Chronicle. But even the Chronicler is forced to own amidst his
+grumblings that Henry "was a good man, and great was the awe of him." He
+had little of his father's creative genius, of that far-reaching
+originality by which the Conqueror stamped himself and his will on the
+very fabric of our history. But he had the passion for order, the love of
+justice, the faculty of organization, the power of steady and unwavering
+rule, which was needed to complete the Conqueror's work. His aim was
+peace, and the title of the Peace-loving King which was given him at his
+death showed with what a steadiness and constancy he carried out his aim.
+In Normandy indeed his work was ever and anon undone by outbreaks of its
+baronage, outbreaks sternly repressed only that the work might be
+patiently and calmly taken up again where it had been broken off. But in
+England his will was carried out with a perfect success. For more than a
+quarter of a century the land had rest. Without, the Scots were held in
+friendship, the Welsh were bridled by a steady and well-planned scheme of
+gradual conquest. Within, the licence of the baronage was held sternly
+down, and justice secured for all. "He governed with a strong hand," says
+Orderic, but the strong hand was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant.
+"Great was the awe of him," writes the annalist of Peterborough. "No man
+durst ill-do to another in his days. Peace he made for man and beast."
+Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they
+were blows which his English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.
+"While he mastered by policy the foremost counts and lords and the
+boldest tyrants, he ever cherished and protected peaceful men and men of
+religion and men of the middle class." What impressed observers most was
+the unswerving, changeless temper of his rule. The stern justice, the
+terrible punishments he inflicted on all who broke his laws, were parts
+of a fixed system which differed widely from the capricious severity of a
+mere despot. Hardly less impressive was his unvarying success. Heavy as
+were the blows which destiny levelled at him, Henry bore and rose
+unconquered from all. To the end of his life the proudest barons lay
+bound and blinded in his prison. His hoard grew greater and greater.
+Normandy, toss as she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last. In
+England it was only after his death that men dared mutter what evil
+things they had thought of Henry the Peace-lover, or censure the
+pitilessness, the greed, and the lust which had blurred the wisdom and
+splendour of his rule.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's Administration]
+
+His vigorous administration carried out into detail the system of
+government which the Conqueror had sketched. The vast estates which had
+fallen to the crown through revolt and forfeiture were granted out to new
+men dependent on royal favour. On the ruins of the great feudatories whom
+he had crushed Henry built up a class of lesser nobles, whom the older
+barons of the Conquest looked down on in scorn, but who were strong
+enough to form a counterpoise to their influence, while they furnished
+the Crown with a class of useful administrators whom Henry employed as
+his sheriffs and judges. A new organization of justice and finance bound
+the kingdom more tightly together in Henry's grasp. The Clerks of the
+Royal Chapel were formed into a body of secretaries or royal ministers,
+whose head bore the title of Chancellor. Above them stood the Justiciar,
+or Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the
+king acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected from the
+barons connected with the royal household, were formed into a Supreme
+Court of the realm. The King's Court, as this was called, permanently
+represented the whole court of royal vassals which had hitherto been
+summoned thrice in the year. As the royal council, it revised and
+registered laws, and its "counsel and consent," though merely formal,
+preserved the principle of the older popular legislation. As a court of
+justice, it formed the highest court of appeal: it could call up any suit
+from a lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the union of
+several sheriffdoms under some of its members connected it closely with
+the local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the
+assessment and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the
+name of the Court of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like a
+chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In
+their financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer."
+Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons
+and rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld
+or land tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids from the
+baronial estates, which formed the chief part of the royal revenue. Local
+disputes respecting these payments or the assessment of the town-rents
+were settled by a detachment of barons from the court who made the
+circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the judicial
+visitations, the "judges' circuits," which still form so marked a feature
+in our legal system.
+
+[Sidenote: The Angevin Marriage]
+
+Measures such as these changed the whole temper of the Norman rule. It
+remained a despotism, but from this moment it was a despotism regulated
+and held in check by the forms of administrative routine. Heavy as was
+the taxation under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering
+throughout his reign from famine and plague, the peace and order which
+his government secured through thirty years won a rest for the land in
+which conqueror and conquered blended into a single people and in which
+this people slowly moved forward to a new freedom. But while England thus
+rested in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her king. In 1120
+his son, William the "Ætheling," with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry
+on his return from Normandy; but the White Ship in which he embarked
+lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet till the guards of the king's
+treasure pressed its departure. It had hardly cleared the harbour when
+the ship's side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank beneath the
+waves. One terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the night, was
+heard by the royal fleet; but it was not till the morning that the fatal
+news reached the king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the
+ground, and rose never to smile again. He had no other son, and the
+circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that
+William, the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his natural heir.
+Henry hated William while he loved his own daughter Maud, who had been
+married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored by his
+death to her father's court. The succession of a woman was new in English
+history; it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when all hope of issue
+from a second wife whom he wedded was over Henry forced priests and
+nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress, and
+affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the son of the one foe whom he
+dreaded, Count Fulk of Anjou.
+
+[Sidenote: Anjou]
+
+The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the wonderful history by which
+the descendants of a Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but
+of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and
+Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Normandy had
+won. The legend of the father of their race carries us back to the times
+of our own Ælfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they
+ravaged along Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the
+debateable land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester,
+half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free
+outlaw-fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his
+rough forest school "how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground,
+to bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear
+nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle
+with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire, and his son
+Ingelger, who had swept the northmen from Touraine and the land to the
+west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became the
+first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is a mere
+creation of some twelfth century jongleur. The earliest Count whom
+history recognizes is Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of
+France who were now drawing nearer to the throne, and between 909 and 929
+he received from them in guerdon the county of Anjou. The story of his
+son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of
+his house. Alone of his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight was
+to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called "Canon." One Martinmas eve
+Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the French king, Lewis
+d'Outremer, entered the church. "He sings like a priest," laughed the
+king as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon.
+But Fulk was ready with his reply. "Know, my lord," wrote the Count of
+Anjou, "that a king unlearned is a crowned ass." Fulk was in fact no
+priest, but a busy ruler, governing, enforcing peace, and carrying
+justice to every corner of the wasted land. To him alone of his race men
+gave the title of "the Good."
+
+[Sidenote: Fulk the Black]
+
+Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a bold, dashing
+soldier, Fulk's son, Geoffry Greygown, sank almost into a vassal of his
+powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and Champagne. But this
+vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, Fulk the
+Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we can trace
+that marked type of character which their house was to preserve through
+two hundred years. He was without natural affection. In his youth he
+burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom
+decked out in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his bitterest
+war against his son, and exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation
+which men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. "You are conquered,
+you are conquered!" shouted the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffry,
+bridled and saddled like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his
+father's feet. In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which
+startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he
+was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the
+fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot
+and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the
+Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem,
+and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of penitence. He
+rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from
+utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his
+lands. He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by
+despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who
+had troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and
+blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the
+wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst
+forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the
+curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.
+
+At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important of the greater
+provinces of France. At his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at
+least in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted,
+quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk's career was one long series of
+victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and he had
+the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his greatest
+descendants. There was a moment in the first of his battles when the day
+seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of the Bretons drew the Angevin
+horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung
+heavily to the ground. Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he
+swept down almost singly on the foe "as a storm-wind" (so rang the pæan
+of the Angevins) "sweeps down on the thick corn-rows," and the field was
+won. But to these qualities of the warrior he added a power of political
+organization, a capacity for far-reaching combinations, a faculty of
+statesmanship, which became the heritage of his race, and lifted them as
+high above the intellectual level of the rulers of their time as their
+shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man. His overthrow
+of Britanny on the field of Conquereux was followed by the gradual
+absorption of Southern Touraine; a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival
+house of Blois; the seizure of Saumur completed his conquests in the
+south, while Northern Touraine was won bit by bit till only Tours
+resisted the Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its Count, Herbert
+Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Henry]
+
+His work of conquest was completed by his son. Geoffry Martel wrested
+Tours from the Count of Blois, and by the seizure of Le Mans brought his
+border to the Norman frontier. Here however his advance was checked by
+the genius of William the Conqueror, and with his death the greatness of
+Anjou came for a while to an end. Stripped of Maine by the Normans and
+broken by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule of Fulk Rechin
+left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to fresh energy with the
+accession of his son, Fulk of Jerusalem. Now urging the turbulent Norman
+nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert's son, William, in his strife
+with his uncle, offering himself throughout as the loyal supporter of the
+French kingdom which was now hemmed in on almost every side by the forces
+of the English king and of his allies the Counts of Blois and Champagne,
+Fulk was the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared. It was to
+disarm his restless hostility that the king gave the hand of Matilda to
+Geoffry the Handsome. But the hatred between Norman and Angevin had been
+too bitter to make such a marriage popular, and the secrecy with which it
+was brought about was held by the barons to free them from the oath they
+had previously sworn. As no baron if he was sonless could give a husband
+to his daughter save with his lord's consent, the nobles held by a
+strained analogy that their own assent was needful to the marriage of
+Maud. Henry found a more pressing danger in the greed of her husband
+Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the common broom of Anjou, the planta
+genista, in his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet. His claims
+ended at last in intrigues with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to
+the border to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his
+presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 the old king
+withdrew to the Forest of Lions to die.
+
+[Sidenote: Stephen]
+
+"God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry's death-bed,
+"the peace he loved." With him indeed closed the long peace of the Norman
+rule. An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his departure, and
+in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew, appeared at the
+gates of London. Stephen was a son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela,
+who had married a Count of Blois; he had been brought up at the English
+court, had been made Count of Mortain by Henry, had become Count of
+Boulogne by his marriage, and as head of the Norman baronage had been the
+first to pledge himself to support Matilda's succession. But his own
+claim as nearest male heir of the Conqueror's blood (for his cousin, the
+son of Robert, had fallen some years before in Flanders) was supported by
+his personal popularity; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humour, his
+generosity, his very prodigality made Stephen a favourite with all. No
+noble however had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town opened its
+gates when London poured out to meet him with uproarious welcome. Neither
+baron nor prelate was present to constitute a National Council, but the
+great city did not hesitate to take their place. The voice of her
+citizens had long been accepted as representative of the popular assent
+in the election of a king; but it marks the progress of English
+independence under Henry that London now claimed of itself the right of
+election. Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the
+crown its "Aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk-moot, and
+these providing at their own will for the good of the realm unanimously
+resolved to choose a king." The solemn deliberation ended in the choice
+of Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king with money and blood,
+Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacification and good
+government of the realm. It was in fact the new union of conquered and
+conquerors into a single England that did Stephen's work. The succession
+of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of Anjou, and to Norman as to
+Englishman the rule of the Angevin was a foreign rule. The welcome
+Stephen won at London and Winchester, his seizure of the royal treasure,
+the adhesion of the Justiciar Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant
+consent of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from Anjou where
+Geoffry was at this moment pressed by revolt, the need above all of some
+king to meet the outbreak of anarchy which followed Henry's death,
+secured Stephen the voice of the baronage. He was crowned at
+Christmas-tide; and soon joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester, a bastard
+son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; while the issue of a charter
+from Oxford in 1136, a charter which renewed the dead king's pledge of
+good government, promised another Henry to the realm. The charter
+surrendered all forests made in the last reign as a sop to the nobles,
+and conciliated the Church by granting freedom of election and renouncing
+all right to the profits of vacant churches; while the king won the
+people by a promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of the Standard]
+
+The king's first two years were years of success and prosperity. Two
+risings of barons in the east and west were easily put down, and in 1137
+Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the Duchy against an attack from
+Anjou. But already the elements of trouble were gathering round him.
+Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly qualities save that of a
+soldier's bravery; and the realm soon began to slip from his grasp. He
+turned against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to which he owed
+his accession by surrounding himself with hired knights from Flanders; he
+drained the treasury by creating new earls endowed with pensions from it,
+and recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness of the
+gathering storm only drove Stephen to bind his friends to him by
+suffering them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal tyranny which
+Henry had struck down. But the long reign of the dead king had left the
+Crown so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own. A plot which
+Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from the outset of his reign came
+indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl's revolt stripped Stephen of Caen
+and half Normandy. But when his partizans in England rose in the south
+and the west and the King of Scots, whose friendship Stephen had bought
+in the opening of his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the
+northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king. Stephen himself
+marched on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds save
+Bristol. His people fought for him in the north. The pillage and
+cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the
+spirit of the Yorkshiremen. Baron and freeman gathered at York round
+Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the field of Northallerton to await
+the foe. The sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York,
+St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in
+a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre of the host. The first onset
+of David's host was a terrible one. "I who wear no armour," shouted the
+chief of the Galwegians, "will go as far this day as any one with
+breastplate of mail"; his men charged with wild shouts of "Albin, Albin,"
+and were followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands. But their
+repulse was complete; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the close
+English ranks around the Standard, and the whole army fled in confusion
+to Carlisle.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Bishops]
+
+Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative organization of Henry
+still did its work. Roger remained justiciar, his son was chancellor, his
+nephew Nigel, the Bishop of Ely, was treasurer. Finance and justice were
+thus concentrated in the hands of a single family which preserved amidst
+the deepening misrule something of the old order and rule, and which
+stood at the head of the "new men," whom Henry had raised into importance
+and made the instruments of his will. These new men were still weak by
+the side of the older nobles; and conscious of the jealousy and ill-will
+with which they were regarded they followed in self-defence the example
+which the barons were setting in building and fortifying castles on their
+domains. Roger and his house, the objects from their official position of
+a deeper grudge than any, were carried away by the panic. The justiciar
+and his son fortified their castles, and it was only with a strong force
+at their back that the prelates appeared at court. Their attitude was one
+to rouse Stephen's jealousy, and the news of Matilda's purpose of
+invasion lent strength to the doubts which the nobles cast on their
+fidelity. All the weak violence of the king's temper suddenly broke out.
+He seized Roger the Chancellor and the Bishop of Lincoln when they
+appeared at Oxford in June 1139, and forced them to surrender their
+strongholds. Shame broke the justiciar's heart; he died at the close of
+the year, and his nephew Nigel of Ely was driven from the realm. But the
+fall of this house shattered the whole system of government. The King's
+Court and the Exchequer ceased to work at a moment when the landing of
+Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda set Stephen face to face with a
+danger greater than he had yet encountered, while the clergy, alienated
+by the arrest of the Bishops and the disregard of their protests, stood
+angrily aloof.
+
+[Sidenote: Civil War]
+
+The three bases of Henry's system of government, the subjection of the
+baronage to the law, the good-will of the Church, and the organization of
+justice and finance, were now utterly ruined; and for the fourteen years
+which passed from this hour to the Treaty of Wallingford England was
+given up to the miseries of civil war. The country was divided between
+the adherents of the two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London and
+the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in 1141 left the latter a captive
+in the hands of his enemies, while Matilda was received throughout the
+land as its "Lady." But the disdain with which she repulsed the claim of
+London to the enjoyment of its older privileges called its burghers to
+arms; her resolve to hold Stephen a prisoner roused his party again to
+life, and she was driven to Oxford to be besieged there in 1142 by
+Stephen himself, who had obtained his release in exchange for Earl Robert
+after the capture of the Earl in a battle at Winchester. She escaped from
+the castle, but with the death of Robert her struggle became a hopeless
+one, and in 1148 she withdrew to Normandy. The war was now a mere chaos
+of pillage and bloodshed. The royal power came to an end. The royal
+courts were suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come at the king's
+call. The bishops met in council to protest, but their protests and
+excommunications fell on deafened ears. For the first and last time in
+her history England was in the hands of the baronage, and their outrages
+showed from what horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had saved
+her. Castles sprang up everywhere. "They filled the land with castles,"
+say the terrible annals of the time. "They greatly oppressed the wretched
+people by making them work at these castles, and when they were finished
+they filled them with devils and armed men." In each of these
+robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a king. The strife for the Crown
+had broken into a medley of feuds between baron and baron, for none could
+brook an equal or a superior in his fellow. "They fought among themselves
+with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and rapine;
+in what had been the most fertile of counties they destroyed almost all
+the provision of bread." For fight as they might with one another, all
+were at one in the plunder of the land. Towns were put to ransom.
+Villages were sacked and burned. All who were deemed to have goods,
+whether men or women, were carried off and flung into dungeons and
+tortured till they yielded up their wealth. No ghastlier picture of a
+nation's misery has ever been painted than that which closes the English
+Chronicle whose last accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.
+"They hanged up men by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke. Some
+were hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and burning things
+were hung on to their feet. They put knotted strings about men's heads,
+and writhed them till they went to the brain. They put men into prisons
+where adders and snakes and toads were crawling, and so they tormented
+them. Some they put into a chest short and narrow and not deep and that
+had sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all
+their limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and grim things called
+rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to carry. It was
+thus made: it was fastened to a beam and had a sharp iron to go about a
+man's neck and throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but
+he bore all the iron. Many thousands they starved with hunger."
+
+[Sidenote: Religious Revival]
+
+It was only after years of this feudal anarchy that England was rescued
+from it by the efforts of the Church. The political influence of the
+Church had been greatly lessened by the Conquest: for pious, learned, and
+energetic as the bulk of the Conqueror's bishops were, they were not
+Englishmen. Till the reign of Henry the First no Englishman occupied an
+English see. This severance of the higher clergy from the lower
+priesthood and from the people went far to paralyze the constitutional
+influence of the Church. Anselm stood alone against Rufus, and when
+Anselm was gone no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the silence of
+the reign of Henry the First. But at the close of Henry's reign and
+throughout the reign of Stephen England was stirred by the first of those
+great religious movements which it was to experience afterwards in the
+preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the
+Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys. Everywhere in
+town and country men banded themselves together for prayer: hermits
+flocked to the woods: noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a
+reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order, as they spread over the moors
+and forests of the North. A new spirit of devotion woke the slumbers of
+the religious houses, and penetrated alike to the home of the noble and
+the trader. London took its full share in the revival. The city was proud
+of its religion, its thirteen conventual and more than a hundred
+parochial churches. The new impulse changed its very aspect. In the midst
+of the city Bishop Richard busied himself with the vast cathedral church
+of St. Paul which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges came up the river with
+stone from Caen for the great arches that moved the popular wonder, while
+street and lane were being levelled to make room for its famous
+churchyard. Rahere, a minstrel at Henry's court, raised the Priory of St.
+Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built St. Giles's at Cripplegate.
+The old English Cnichtenagild surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site
+for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house paints
+admirably the temper of the citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior
+Norman, built church and cloister and bought books and vestments in so
+liberal a fashion that no money remained to buy bread. The canons were at
+their last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the refectory as they
+passed round the cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the
+tables laid but not a single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set out," said
+the citizens; "but where is the bread to come from?" The women who were
+present vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday, and there was soon bread
+enough and to spare for the priory and its priests.
+
+[Sidenote: Thomas of London]
+
+We see the strength of the new movement in the new class of ecclesiastics
+whom it forced on to the stage. Men like Archbishop Theobald drew
+whatever influence they wielded from a belief in their holiness of life
+and unselfishness of aim. The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new
+impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at the moment we have
+reached its power was found strong enough to wrest England out of the
+chaos of feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen's reign his brother
+Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been appointed in 1139 Papal
+Legate for the realm, had striven to supply the absence of any royal or
+national authority by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the
+moral right of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne.
+The compact between king and people which became a part of constitutional
+law in the Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the Charter of
+Stephen, but its legitimate consequence in the responsibility of the
+crown for the execution of the compact was first drawn out by these
+ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions of Stephen and
+Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward and Richard, and the
+solemn act by which the succession was changed in the case of James.
+Extravagant and unauthorized as their expression of it may appear, they
+expressed the right of a nation to good government. Henry of Winchester
+however, "half monk, half soldier," as he was called, possessed too
+little religious influence to wield a really spiritual power, and it was
+only at the close of Stephen's reign that the nation really found a moral
+leader in Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald's ablest agent
+and adviser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert Beket, a leading citizen and,
+it is said, Portreeve of London, the site of whose house is still marked
+by the Mercers' chapel in Cheapside. His mother Rohese was a type of the
+devout woman of her day; she weighed her boy every year on his birthday
+against money, clothes, and provisions which she gave to the poor. Thomas
+grew up amidst the Norman barons and clerks who frequented his father's
+house with a genial freedom of character tempered by the Norman
+refinement; he passed from the school of Merton to the University of
+Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of the young nobles of
+the time. Tall, handsome, bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his
+firmness of temper showed itself in his very sports; to rescue his hawk
+which had fallen into the water he once plunged into a millrace and was
+all but crushed by the wheel. The loss of his father's wealth drove him
+to the court of Archbishop Theobald, and he soon became the Primate's
+confidant in his plans for the rescue of England.
+
+[Illustration: The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Treaty of Wallingford]
+
+The natural influence which the Primate would have exerted was long held
+in suspense by the superior position of Bishop Henry of Winchester as
+Papal Legate; but this office ceased with the Pope who granted it, and
+when in 1150 it was transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald soon
+made his weight felt. The long disorder of the realm was producing its
+natural reaction in exhaustion and disgust, as well as in a general
+craving for return to the line of hereditary succession whose breaking
+seemed the cause of the nation's woes. But the growth of their son Henry
+to manhood set naturally aside the pretensions both of Count Geoffry and
+Matilda. Young as he was Henry already showed the cool long-sighted
+temper which was to be his characteristic on the throne. Foiled in an
+early attempt to grasp the crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder
+which was doing his work till the death of his father at the close of
+1151 left him master of Normandy and Anjou. In the spring of the
+following year his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, added
+Aquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw the gathering storm, and strove
+to meet it. He called on the bishops and baronage to secure the
+succession of his son Eustace by consenting to his association with him
+in the kingdom. But the moment was now come for Theobald to play his
+part. He was already negotiating through Thomas of London with Henry and
+the Pope; he met Stephen's plans by a refusal to swear fealty to his son,
+and the bishops, in spite of Stephen's threats, went with their head. The
+blow was soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as Theobald's agent,
+invited Henry to appear in England, and though the Duke disappointed his
+supporters' hopes by the scanty number of men he brought with him in
+1153, his weakness proved in the end a source of strength. It was not to
+foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success but to the arms of
+Englishmen. An English army gathered round him, and as the hosts of
+Stephen and the Duke drew together a battle seemed near which would
+decide the fate of the realm. But Theobald who was now firmly supported
+by the greater barons again interfered and forced the rivals to an
+agreement. To the excited partizans of the house of Anjou it seemed as if
+the nobles were simply playing their own game in the proposed settlement
+and striving to preserve their power by a balance of masters. The
+suspicion was probably groundless, but all fear vanished with the death
+of Eustace, who rode off from his father's camp, maddened with the ruin
+of his hopes, to die in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand of
+God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground was now clear, and in November
+the Treaty of Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy. The
+castles were to be razed, the crown lands resumed, the foreign
+mercenaries banished from the country, and sheriffs appointed to restore
+order. Stephen was recognized as king, and in turn recognized Henry as
+his heir. The duke received at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and
+passed into Normandy in the spring of 1154. The work of reformation had
+already begun. Stephen resented indeed the pressure which Henry put on
+him to enforce the destruction of the castles built during the anarchy;
+but Stephen's resistance was but the pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He
+was in fact fast drawing to the grave; and on his death in October 1154
+Henry returned to take the crown without a blow.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+HENRY THE SECOND
+1154-1189
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry Fitz-Empress]
+
+Young as he was, and he had reached but his twenty-first year when he
+returned to England as its king, Henry mounted the throne with a purpose
+of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical,
+serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
+something in his build and look, in the square stout form, the fiery
+face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the
+coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring,
+coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who
+observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning till night."
+Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing in diet, never
+resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a
+singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or
+hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough,
+passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the
+character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation
+when neighbourhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
+Normans into a single people. A national feeling was thus springing up
+before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away.
+Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his
+day: he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which
+enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's
+impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older
+constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance
+to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and
+traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
+co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable
+and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to
+gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such
+anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of
+a kingly rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class,
+administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the
+nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in
+the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized
+this idea. But of the currents of thought and feeling which were tending
+in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and
+social impulses which were telling on men about him was simply to let
+them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under
+the eyes of a king who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at
+picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild
+frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of
+the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold
+together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably
+destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's
+position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of
+the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion
+alien to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept away in
+the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and
+activity blinded him. But whether by the anti-national temper of his
+general system or by the administrative reforms of his English rule his
+policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for
+the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Scutage]
+
+He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. His
+first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till his
+accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First; and it was
+with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were
+driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite of the
+opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and Exchequer restored. Age
+and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post of
+minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of
+Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser and was now
+made Chancellor. Thomas won the personal favour of the king. The two
+young men had, in Theobald's words, "but one heart and mind"; Henry
+jested in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in
+rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. He loaded his
+favourite with riches and honours, but there is no ground for thinking
+that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's policy
+seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own. His work of
+reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad. Welsh
+outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an army over the border; and a
+crushing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general than as a
+statesman. The next year saw him drawn across the Channel, where he was
+already master of a third of the present France. Anjou, Maine, and
+Touraine he had inherited from his father, Normandy from his mother, he
+governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven provinces of the
+South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche, Périgord, the Limousin, the
+Angoumois, and Gascony, belonged to his wife. As Duchess of Aquitaine
+Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared in 1159 to
+enforce by arms. But the campaign was turned to the profit of his
+reforms. He had already begun the work of bringing the baronage within
+the grasp of the law by sending judges from the Exchequer year after year
+to exact the royal dues and administer the king's justice even in castle
+and manor. He now attacked its military influence. Each man who held
+lands of a certain value was bound to furnish a knight for his lord's
+service; and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at their
+disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to serve in the war of
+Toulouse, he allowed the lower tenants to commute their service for
+sums payable to the royal treasury under the name of "scutage," or
+shield-money. The "Great Scutage" did much to disarm the baronage, while
+it enabled the king to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.
+Again however he was luckless in war. King Lewis of France threw himself
+into Toulouse. Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide
+dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain; he
+withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance
+and the betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of Lewis.
+
+[Sidenote: Archbishop Thomas]
+
+Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the relations of the
+State with the Church. These rested in the main on the system established
+by the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had no wish to meddle. But
+he was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal before the
+law; and he had no more mercy for clerical than for feudal immunities.
+The immunities of the clergy indeed were becoming a hindrance to public
+justice. The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended far beyond the
+priesthood; it included in Henry's day the whole of the professional and
+educated classes. It was subject to the jurisdiction of the Church courts
+alone; but bodily punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the
+lay courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and laity become
+that the bishops no longer sought civil aid but restricted themselves to
+the purely spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation of orders.
+Such penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while preserving
+the Church courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted offenders
+to secular punishment. For the carrying out of these designs he sought an
+agent in Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister for
+eight years, and had fought bravely in the war against Toulouse at the
+head of the seven hundred knights who formed his household. But the king
+had other work for him than war. On Theobald's death he forced on the
+monks of Canterbury his election as Archbishop. But from the moment of
+his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its
+whole energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first
+intimation of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to his gay court
+attire: "You are choosing a fine dress," he said, "to figure at the head
+of your Canterbury monks"; once monk and Archbishop he passed with a
+fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism; and a visit to the Council
+of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority
+were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third, strengthened his purpose of
+struggling for the privileges of the Church. His change of attitude
+encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty lawsuits, but no
+breach had come with the king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts
+should be punished by the civil power. Thomas refused; he would only
+consent that a clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer
+like a layman. Both parties appealed to the "customs" of the realm; and
+it was to state these "customs" that a court was held in 1164 at
+Clarendon near Salisbury.
+
+[Sidenote: Legal Reforms]
+
+The report presented by bishops and barons formed the Constitutions of
+Clarendon, a code which in the bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted
+the system of the Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to
+take place before royal officers, in the king's chapel, and with the
+king's assent. The prelate-elect was bound to do homage to the king for
+his lands before consecration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the
+king, subject to all feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in the
+King's Court. No bishop might leave the realm without the royal
+permission. No tenant in chief or royal servant might be excommunicated,
+or their land placed under interdict, but by the king's assent. What was
+new was the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
+King's Court was to decide whether a suit between clerk and layman, whose
+nature was disputed, belonged to the Church courts or the King's. A royal
+officer was to be present at all ecclesiastical proceedings in order to
+confine the Bishop's court within its own due limits, and a clerk
+convicted there passed at once under the civil jurisdiction. An appeal
+was left from the Archbishop's court to the King's Court for defect of
+justice, but none might appeal to the Papal court save with the king's
+leave. The privilege of sanctuary in churches and churchyards was
+repealed, so far as property and not persons was concerned. After a
+passionate refusal the Primate was at last brought to give his assent to
+these Constitutions, but the assent was soon retracted, and Henry's
+savage resentment threw the moral advantage of the position into his
+opponent's hands. Vexatious charges were brought against Thomas, and he
+was summoned to answer at a Council held in the autumn at Northampton.
+All urged him to submit; his very life was said to be in peril from the
+king's wrath. But in the presence of danger the courage of the man rose
+to its full height. Grasping his archiepiscopal cross he entered the
+royal court, forbade the nobles to condemn him, and appealed in the teeth
+of the Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of "Traitor!" followed him
+as he withdrew. The Primate turned fiercely at the word: "Were I a
+knight," he shouted back, "my sword should answer that foul taunt!" Once
+alone however, dread pressed more heavily; he fled in disguise at
+nightfall and reached France through Flanders.
+
+Great as were the dangers it was to bring with it, the flight of Thomas
+left Henry free to carry on the reforms he had planned. In spite of
+denunciations from Primate and Pope, the Constitutions regulated from
+this time the relations of the Church with the State. Henry now turned to
+the actual organization of the realm. His reign, it has been truly said,
+"initiated the rule of law" as distinct from the despotism, whether
+personal or tempered by routine, of the Norman sovereigns. It was by
+successive "assizes" or codes issued with the sanction of the great
+councils of barons and prelates which he summoned year by year, that he
+perfected in a system of gradual reforms the administrative measures
+which Henry the First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legislation
+commences in 1166 with the Assize of Clarendon, the first object of which
+was to provide for the order of the realm by reviving the old English
+system of mutual security or frankpledge. No stranger might abide in any
+place save a borough and only there for a single night unless sureties
+were given for his good behaviour; and the list of such strangers was to
+be submitted to the itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize
+for the repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so often
+attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred, with four
+from each township, were sworn to present those who were known or reputed
+as criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The jurors were
+thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also in determining
+the value of the charge, and it is this double character of Henry's
+jurors that has descended to our "grand jury," who still remain charged
+with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after examination of the
+witnesses against them. Two later steps brought the jury to its modern
+condition. Under Edward the First witnesses acquainted with the
+particular fact in question were added in each case to the general jury,
+and by the separation of these two classes of jurors at a later time the
+last became simply "witnesses" without any judicial power, while the
+first ceased to be witnesses at all and became our modern jurors, who are
+only judges of the testimony given. With this assize too a practice which
+had prevailed from the earliest English times, the practice of
+"compurgation," passed away. Under this system the accused could be
+acquitted of the charge by the voluntary oath of his neighbours and
+kinsmen; but this was abolished by the Assize of Clarendon, and for the
+fifty years which followed it his trial, after the investigation of the
+grand jury, was found solely in the ordeal or "judgement of God," where
+innocence was proved by the power of holding hot iron in the hand or by
+sinking when flung into the water, for swimming was a proof of guilt. It
+was the abolition of the whole system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran
+in 1216 which led the way to the establishment of what is called a "petty
+jury" for the final trial of prisoners.
+
+[Sidenote: Murder of Thomas]
+
+But Henry's work of reorganization had hardly begun when it was broken by
+the pressure of the strife with the Primate. For six years the contest
+raged bitterly; at Rome, at Paris, the agents of the two powers intrigued
+against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest persecution in
+driving the Primate's kinsmen from England, and in confiscating the lands
+of their order till the monks of Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home;
+while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his friends by his violence
+and excommunications, as well as by the stubbornness with which he clung
+to the offensive clause "Saving the honour of my order," the addition of
+which to his consent would have practically neutralised the king's
+reforms. The Pope counselled mildness, the French king for a time
+withdrew his support, his own clerks gave way at last. "Come up," said
+one of them bitterly when his horse stumbled on the road, "saving the
+honour of the Church and my order." But neither warning nor desertion
+moved the resolution of the Primate. Henry, in dread of Papal
+excommunication, resolved in 1170 on the coronation of his son: and this
+office, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he transferred to the
+Archbishop of York. But the Pope's hands were now freed by his successes
+in Italy, and the threat of an interdict forced the king to a show of
+submission. The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconciliation
+with the king at Fréteval, and the Kentishmen flocked around him with
+uproarious welcome as he entered Canterbury. "This is England," said his
+clerks, as they saw the white headlands of the coast. "You will wish
+yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said Thomas sadly, and
+his foreboding showed his appreciation of Henry's character. He was now
+in the royal power, and orders had already been issued in the younger
+Henry's name for his arrest when four knights from the King's Court,
+spurred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their master's wrath,
+crossed the sea, and on the 29th of December forced their way into the
+Archbishop's palace. After a stormy parley with him in his chamber they
+withdrew to arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the cathedral, but
+as he reached the steps leading from the transept to the choir his
+pursuers burst in from the cloisters. "Where," cried Reginald Fitzurse in
+the dusk of the dimly-lighted minster, "where is the traitor, Thomas
+Beket?" The Primate turned resolutely back: "Here am I, no traitor, but a
+priest of God," he replied, and again descending the steps he placed
+himself with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All the
+bravery and violence of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas
+as he tossed back the threats and demands of his assailants. "You are our
+prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to drag him
+from the church. "Do not touch me, Reginald," cried the Primate, "pander
+that you are, you owe me fealty"; and availing himself of his personal
+strength he shook him roughly off. "Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse,
+and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Ranulf de
+Broc with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains on the
+ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly, "this traitor will never
+rise again."
+
+[Sidenote: The Church and Literature]
+
+The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout
+Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was
+canonized, and became the most popular of English saints. The stately
+"martyrdom" which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the
+triumph which his blood had won. But the contest had in fact revealed a
+new current of educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church
+than the reforms of the king. Throughout it Henry had been aided by a
+silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from
+the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have seen
+literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself
+against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical
+privileges. Almost all our writers from Bæda to the days of the Angevins
+are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed the Conquest
+was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee
+had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman
+abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and
+writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature,
+patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints
+compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this
+time a part of every religious house of any importance. But the
+literature which found this religious shelter was not so much
+ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional impulse
+given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics. The
+literary revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old
+historical form. At Durham Turgot and Simeon threw into Latin shape the
+national annals to the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to
+northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen's reign were noted
+down by two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between England and
+the Scots.
+
+These however were the colourless jottings of mere annalists; it was in
+the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern's lives of the English saints or
+in Eadmer's record of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his
+successor, that we see the first indications of a distinctively English
+feeling telling on the new literature. The national impulse is yet more
+conspicuous in the two historians that followed. The war-songs of the
+English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, an Archdeacon of
+Huntingdon, who wove them into annals compiled from Bæda, and the
+Chronicle; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously
+collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular traditions of
+the English kings. It is in William above all others that we see the new
+tendency of English literature. In himself, as in his work, he marks the
+fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for he was of both English
+and Norman parentage and his sympathies were as divided as his blood. The
+form and style of his writings show the influence of those classical
+studies which were now reviving throughout Christendom. Monk as he is,
+William discards the older ecclesiastical models and the annalistic form.
+Events are grouped together with no strict reference to time, while the
+lively narrative flows rapidly and loosely along with constant breaks of
+digression over the general history of Europe and the Church. It is in
+this change of historic spirit that William takes his place as first of
+the more statesmanlike and philosophic school of historians who began to
+arise in direct connexion with the Court, and among whom the author of
+the chronicle which commonly bears the name of "Benedict of Peterborough"
+with his continuator Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous. Both held
+judicial offices under Henry the Second, and it is to their position at
+Court that they owe the fulness and accuracy of their information as to
+affairs at home and abroad, as well as their copious supply of official
+documents. What is noteworthy in these writers is the purely political
+temper with which they regard the conflict of Church and State in their
+time. But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly
+secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of
+Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the
+royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on
+English government.
+
+[Sidenote: Gerald of Wales]
+
+Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work of a priest who
+claimed to be a bishop, are the writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is
+the father of our popular literature as he is the originator of the
+political and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of
+Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his veins, and
+something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and
+his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the
+wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald
+became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his
+hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of
+the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw
+pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be
+understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style:
+"new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the
+old and dry method of some authors and aimed at adopting the fashion of
+speech which is actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest of
+Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two
+journeys undertaken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin,
+illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and
+his good sense. They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we
+find in the correspondence of a modern journal. There is the same modern
+tone in his political pamphlets; his profusion of jests, his fund of
+anecdote, the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness and
+critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a
+fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant even to
+such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in which Gerald poured
+out his resentment against the Angevins are the cause of half the scandal
+about Henry and his sons which has found its way into history. His life
+was wasted in an ineffectual attempt to secure the see of St. David's,
+but his pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation to its later
+struggle with the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Romance]
+
+A tone of distinct hostility to the Church developed itself almost from
+the first among the singers of romance. Romance had long before taken
+root in the court of Henry the First, where under the patronage of Queen
+Maud the dreams of Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Britanny,
+and which had travelled to Wales in the train of the exile Rhys ap
+Tewdor, took shape in the History of the Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth.
+Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes
+of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades and of the
+world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, were mingled together by this
+daring fabulist in a work whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred
+of Beverley transferred Geoffry's inventions into the region of sober
+history, while two Norman _trouveurs_, Gaimar and Wace, translated them
+into French verse. So complete was the credence they obtained that
+Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second, while the
+child of his son Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny received the name
+of the Celtic hero. Out of Geoffry's creation grew little by little the
+poem of the Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled with the story of
+Arthur the older and more mysterious legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent
+that of Lancelot to the wandering minstrels of the day, who moulded it as
+they wandered from hall to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood
+wrested from its loyalty by the love of woman. The stories of Tristram
+and Gawayne, at first as independent as that of Lancelot, were drawn with
+it into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance; and when the Church, jealous
+of the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a counteracting
+influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the San Graal which held the blood
+of the Cross invisible to all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the
+genius of a Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends together,
+sent Arthur and his knights wandering over sea and land in quest of the
+San Graal, and crowned the work by the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of
+ideal knighthood, without fear and without reproach.
+
+[Sidenote: Walter de Map]
+
+Walter stands before us as the representative of a sudden outburst of
+literary, social, and religious criticism which followed this growth of
+romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the
+two Henries. Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite
+with the king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, his genius
+was as various as it was prolific. He is as much at his ease in sweeping
+together the chitchat of the time in his "Courtly Trifles" as in creating
+the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest strength
+when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform and
+embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his
+"Bishop Goliath." The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their
+struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and
+confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the
+veil from the corruption of the mediæval Church, its indolence, its
+thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy from
+Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what
+escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the
+archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor
+officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd
+of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars,
+abbots "purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering together
+like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of
+purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the
+Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
+this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.
+
+[Illustration: Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Invasion of Ireland]
+
+It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such invectives as
+sober history, or to judge the Church of the twelfth century by the
+taunts of Walter de Map. What writings such as his bring home to us is
+the upgrowth of a new literary class, not only standing apart from the
+Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, and breaking
+down the unquestioning reverence with which men had till now regarded it
+by their sarcasm and abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which
+begins with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer
+and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. But even in these early
+days we can hardly doubt that it gave Henry strength in his contest with
+the Church. So little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop
+Thomas that the years which follow it form the grandest portion of his
+reign. While Rome was threatening excommunication he added a new realm to
+his dominions. Ireland had long since fallen from the civilization and
+learning which its missionaries brought in the seventh century to the
+shores of Northumbria. Every element of improvement or progress which had
+been introduced into the island disappeared in the long and desperate
+struggle with the Danes. The coast-towns which the invaders founded, such
+as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish, in blood and manners and at feud
+with the Celtic tribes around them, though sometimes forced by the
+fortunes of war to pay tribute and to accept the overlordship of the
+Irish kings. It was through these towns however that the intercourse with
+England which had ceased since the eighth century was to some extent
+renewed in the eleventh. Cut off from the Church of the island by
+national antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the See of
+Canterbury for the ordination of their bishops, and acknowledged a right
+of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The relations thus
+formed were drawn closer by a slave-trade between the two countries which
+the Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time in suppressing at
+Bristol but which appears to have quickly revived. In the twelfth century
+Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into
+slavery in spite of royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the
+English Church. The slave-trade afforded a legitimate pretext for war,
+had a pretext been needed by the ambition of Henry the Second; and within
+a few months of that king's coronation John of Salisbury was despatched
+to obtain the Papal sanction for an invasion of the island. The
+enterprise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the colour of a
+crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the general body of Christendom,
+the absence of learning and civilization, the scandalous vices of its
+people, were alleged as the grounds of Henry's action. It was the general
+belief of the time that all islands fell under the jurisdiction of the
+Papal See, and it was as a possession of the Roman Church that Henry
+sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland. His aim was "to enlarge the
+bounds of the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the
+manners of its people and to plant virtue among them, and to increase the
+Christian religion." He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to
+extirpate vicious customs, to respect the rights of the native Churches,
+and to enforce the payment of Peter's pence" as a recognition of the
+overlordship of the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved the
+enterprise, as one prompted by "the ardour of faith and love of
+religion," and declared his will that the people of Ireland should
+receive Henry with all honour, and revere him as their lord.
+
+The Papal bull was produced in a great council of the English baronage,
+but the opposition was strong enough to force on Henry a temporary
+abandonment of his designs, and twelve years passed before the scheme was
+brought to life again by the flight of Dermod, King of Leinster, to
+Henry's court. Dermod had been driven from his dominions in one of the
+endless civil wars which devastated the island; he now did homage for his
+kingdom to Henry, and returned to Ireland with promises of aid from the
+English knighthood. He was followed in 1168 by Robert FitzStephen, a son
+of the Constable of Cardigan, with a little band of a hundred and forty
+knights, sixty men-at-arms, and three or four hundred Welsh archers.
+Small as was the number of the adventurers, their horses and arms proved
+irresistible by the Irish kernes; a sally of the men of Wexford was
+avenged by the storm of their town; the Ossory clans were defeated with a
+terrible slaughter, and Dermod, seizing a head from the heap of trophies
+which his men piled at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and
+lips with his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of
+Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, a ruined baron later
+known by the nickname of Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's
+prohibition landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen hundred men as
+Dermod's mercenary. The city was at once stormed, and the united forces
+of the earl and king marched to the siege of Dublin. In spite of a relief
+attempted by the King of Connaught, who was recognized as overking of the
+island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken by surprise; and the
+marriage of Richard with Eva, Dermod's daughter, left the Earl on the
+death of his father-in-law, which followed quickly on these successes,
+master of his kingdom of Leinster. The new lord had soon however to hurry
+back to England and appease the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of
+Dublin to the Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English lordship,
+and by accompanying the king in 1171 on a voyage to the new dominion
+which the adventurers had won.
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of the younger Henry]
+
+Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his purpose, the conquest of Ireland
+would now have been accomplished. The King of Connaught indeed and the
+chiefs of Ulster refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes
+owned his suzerainty; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized him as
+their lord; and he was preparing to penetrate to the north and west, and
+to secure his conquest by a systematic erection of castles throughout the
+country, when the need of making terms with Rome, whose interdict
+threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop Thomas, recalled him in the
+spring of 1172 to Normandy. Henry averted the threatened sentence by a
+show of submission. The judicial provisions in the Constitutions of
+Clarendon were in form annulled, and liberty of election was restored in
+the case of bishopricks and abbacies. In reality however the victory
+rested with the king. Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments
+remained practically in his hands, and the King's Court asserted its
+power over the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops. But the strife with
+Thomas had roused into active life every element of danger which
+surrounded Henry, the envious dread of his neighbours, the disaffection
+of his own house, the disgust of the barons at the repeated blows which
+he levelled at their military and judicial power. The king's withdrawal
+of the office of sheriff from the great nobles of the shire to entrust it
+to the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff of the royal
+judges quickened the resentment of the baronage into revolt. His wife
+Eleanor, now parted from Henry by a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son,
+whose coronation had given him the title of king, to demand possession of
+the English realm. On his father's refusal the boy sought refuge with
+Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal for a vast rising. France,
+Flanders, and Scotland joined in league against Henry; his younger sons,
+Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine, while the Earl of
+Leicester sailed from Flanders with an army of mercenaries to stir up
+England to revolt. The Earl's descent ended in a crushing defeat near St.
+Edmundsbury at the hands of the king's justiciars; but no sooner had the
+French king entered Normandy and invested Rouen than the revolt of the
+baronage burst into flame. The Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray
+rose in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the midland shires, Hugh
+Bigod in the eastern counties, while a Flemish fleet prepared to support
+the insurrection by a descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop
+Thomas still hung round Henry's neck, and his first act in hurrying to
+England to meet these perils in 1174 was to prostrate himself before the
+shrine of the new martyr and to submit to a public scourging in expiation
+of his sin. But the penance was hardly wrought when all danger was
+dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of Scotland, William the
+Lion, surprised by the English under cover of a mist, fell into the hands
+of Henry's minister, Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots
+the English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With the army of
+mercenaries which he had brought over sea Henry was able to return to
+Normandy, to raise the siege of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to
+submission.
+
+[Sidenote: Later reforms]
+
+Through the next ten years Henry's power was at its height. The French
+king was cowed. The Scotch king bought his release in 1175 by owning
+Henry's suzerainty. The Scotch barons did homage, and English garrisons
+manned the strongest of the Scotch castles. In England itself church and
+baronage were alike at the king's mercy. Eleanor was imprisoned; and the
+younger Henry, though always troublesome, remained powerless to do harm.
+The king availed himself of this rest from outer foes to push forward his
+judicial and administrative organization. At the outset of his reign he
+had restored the King's Court and the occasional circuits of its
+justices; but the revolt was hardly over when in 1176 the Assize of
+Northampton rendered this institution permanent and regular by dividing
+the kingdom into six districts, to each of which three itinerant judges
+were assigned. The circuits thus marked out correspond roughly with those
+that still exist. The primary object of these circuits was financial; but
+the rendering of the king's justice went on side by side with the
+exaction of the king's dues, and this carrying of justice to every corner
+of the realm was made still more effective by the abolition of all feudal
+exemptions from the royal jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new
+system lay in the opportunities it afforded to judicial corruption; and
+so great were its abuses, that in 1178 Henry was forced to restrict for a
+while the number of justices to five, and to reserve appeals from their
+court to himself in council. The Court of Appeal which was thus created,
+that of the King in Council, gave birth as time went on to tribunal after
+tribunal. It is from it that the judicial powers now exercised by the
+Privy Council are derived, as well as the equitable jurisdiction of the
+Chancellor. In the next century it became the Great Council of the realm,
+and it is from this Great Council, in its two distinct capacities, that
+the Privy Council drew its legislative, and the House of Lords its
+judicial character. The Court of Star Chamber and the Judicial Committee
+of the Privy Council are later offshoots of Henry's Court of Appeal. From
+the judicial organization of the realm, he turned to its military
+organization, and in 1181 an Assize of Arms restored the national fyrd or
+militia to the place which it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution
+of scutage for military service had freed the crown from its dependence
+on the baronage and its feudal retainers; the Assize of Arms replaced
+this feudal organization by the older obligation of every freeman to
+serve in defence of the realm. Every knight was now bound to appear in
+coat of mail and with shield and lance, every freeholder with lance and
+hauberk, every burgess and poorer freeman with lance and helmet, at the
+king's call. The levy of an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the
+disposal of the Crown for purposes of defence.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's death]
+
+A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his brother Geoffry in 1183
+hardly broke the current of Henry's success. The revolt ended with the
+young king's death, and in 1186 this was followed by the death of
+Geoffry. Richard, now his father's heir, remained busy in Aquitaine; and
+Henry was himself occupied with plans for the recovery of Jerusalem,
+which had been taken by Saladin in 1187. The "Saladin tithe," a tax
+levied on all goods and chattels, and memorable as the first English
+instance of taxation on personal property, was granted to the king at the
+opening of 1188 to support his intended Crusade. But the Crusade was
+hindered by strife which broke out between Richard and the new French
+king, Philip; and while Henry strove in vain to bring about peace, a
+suspicion that he purposed to make his youngest son, John, his heir drove
+Richard to Philip's side. His father, broken in health and spirits,
+negotiated fruitlessly through the winter, but with the spring of 1189
+Richard and the French king suddenly appeared before Le Mans. Henry was
+driven in headlong flight from the town. Tradition tells how from a
+height where he halted to look back on the burning city, so dear to him
+as his birthplace, the king hurled his curse against God: "Since Thou
+hast taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born and bred, and
+where my father lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too--I will
+rob Thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." If the words were
+uttered, they were the frenzied words of a dying man. Death drew Henry to
+the home of his race, but Tours fell as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted
+king was driven to beg mercy from his foes. They gave him the list of the
+conspirators against him: at its head was the name of one, his love for
+whom had brought with it the ruin that was crushing him, his youngest
+son, John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, "let things
+go as they will--I care no more for myself or for the world." The end was
+come at last. Henry was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne,
+and muttering, "Shame, shame on a conquered king," passed sullenly away.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE ANGEVIN KINGS
+1189-1204
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: John and Longchamp]
+
+The fall of Henry the Second only showed the strength of the system he
+had built up on this side the sea. In the hands of the Justiciar, Ranulf
+de Glanvill, England remained peaceful through the last stormy months of
+his reign, and his successor Richard found it undisturbed when he came
+for his crowning in the autumn of 1189. Though born at Oxford, Richard
+had been bred in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his realm, and
+his visit was simply for the purpose of gathering money for a Crusade.
+Sheriffdoms, bishopricks, were sold; even the supremacy over Scotland was
+bought back again by William the Lion; and it was with the wealth which
+these measures won that Richard made his way in 1190 to Marseilles and
+sailed thence to Messina. Here he found his army and a host under King
+Philip of France; and the winter was spent in quarrels between the two
+kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred of Sicily. In the spring
+of 1191 his mother Eleanor arrived with ill news from England. Richard
+had left the realm under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of
+Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but before quitting France he had
+entrusted it wholly to the latter, who stood at the head of Church and
+State as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the
+king, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred
+among the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John. While richly
+gifting his brother with earldoms and lands, Richard had taken oath from
+him that he would quit England for three years. But tidings that the
+Justiciar was striving to secure the succession of Arthur, the child of
+his elder brother Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny, to the English
+crown at once recalled John to the realm, and peace between him and
+Longchamp was only preserved by the influence of the queen-mother
+Eleanor. Richard met this news by sending Walter of Coutances, the
+Archbishop of Rouen, with full but secret powers to England. On his
+landing in the summer of 1191 Walter found the country already in arms.
+No battle had been fought, but John had seized many of the royal castles,
+and the indignation stirred by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop Geoffry
+of York, a bastard son of Henry the Second, called the whole baronage to
+the field. The nobles swore fealty to John as Richard's successor, and
+Walter of Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission as
+Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's exile from the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Richard]
+
+The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the Holy Land. He had
+landed at Acre in the summer and joined with the French king in its
+siege. But on the surrender of the town Philip at once sailed home, while
+Richard, marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem. The
+city however was saved by false news of its strength, and through the
+following winter and the spring of 1192 the king limited his activity to
+securing the fortresses of southern Palestine. In June he again advanced
+on Jerusalem, but the revolt of his army forced him a second time to fall
+back, and news of Philip's intrigues with John drove him to abandon
+further efforts. There was need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's sake
+in a merchant vessel, he was driven by a storm on the Adriatic coast, and
+while journeying in disguise overland arrested in December at Vienna by
+his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. Through the whole year John,
+in disgust at his displacement by Walter of Coutances, had been plotting
+fruitlessly with Philip. But the news of this capture at once roused both
+to activity. John secured his castles and seized Windsor, giving out that
+the king would never return; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor,
+Henry the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria had given Richard up, to
+retain his captive. But a new influence now appeared on the scene. The
+see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his prison bestowed it on
+Hubert Walter, the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill,
+and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp. Hubert's ability was
+seen in the skill with which he held John at bay and raised the enormous
+ransom which Henry demanded, the whole people, clergy as well as lay,
+paying a fourth of their moveable goods. To gain his release however
+Richard was forced besides this payment of ransom to do homage to the
+Emperor, not only for the kingdom of Arles with which Henry invested him
+but for England itself, whose crown he resigned into the Emperor's hands
+and received back as a fief. But John's open revolt made even these terms
+welcome, and Richard hurried to England in the spring of 1194. He found
+the rising already quelled by the decision with which the Primate led an
+army against John's castles, and his landing was followed by his
+brother's complete submission.
+
+[Sidenote: Richard and Philip]
+
+The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in England, but oversea
+Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too
+clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his father's administrative
+genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard
+was far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in sheer
+physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly
+with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he
+was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans
+as he was bold in their conception. "The devil is loose; take care of
+yourself," Philip had written to John at the news of Richard's release.
+In the French king's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by
+insults which he had borne during the Crusade. He had availed himself of
+Richard's imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine
+rose in open revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of
+the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary
+soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their
+financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm
+government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces
+on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou,
+the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But
+in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in
+check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Fréteval while
+he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
+vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against
+his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice
+and firmness of the Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to
+procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the
+education of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes were
+assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the
+grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the
+hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the
+sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
+elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary
+representation; in Hubert's mind they were doubtless intended to do
+little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation. His work
+poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
+truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to
+unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in
+a revolt against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the election
+of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German
+throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would
+bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.
+
+[Sidenote: Château Gaillard]
+
+But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider
+plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the
+loyalty of the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through
+Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a
+stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his
+Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving
+along the border at the head of Brabançon mercenaries, in whose camp the
+old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provençal
+ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site that Richard
+selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his
+realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of
+arms. As a monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle," Château
+Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages. Richard
+fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great
+semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the
+line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown
+the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat
+meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with
+the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to
+Rouen. The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard
+designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked
+by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid
+stream, and by a fortified town which the king built in the valley of the
+Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and
+the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land
+connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three hundred
+feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
+the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most
+part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the
+fortifications themselves--the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with
+casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel,
+the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les
+Andelys. Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst
+of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky: "How pretty a
+child is mine, this child of but one year old!"
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's death]
+
+The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Château Gaillard at a later
+time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled
+in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honour. "I
+would take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
+saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its walls of butter," was
+the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land and the Archbishop of
+Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but the king met the
+interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was
+withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a "rain of blood," whose fall scared
+his courtiers. "Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says
+a cool observer, "he would have answered with a curse." The twelve
+months' hard work, in fact, by securing the Norman frontier set Richard
+free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting; for
+England had at last struck against the continued exactions. In 1198 Hugh,
+Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and bishops to refuse a new demand for
+the maintenance of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in
+despair. A new justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted
+some money by a harsh assize of the forests; but the exchequer was soon
+drained, and Richard listened with more than the greed of his race to
+rumours that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin.
+Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was
+said, of the Lord of Châlus. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and in
+the spring of 1199 Richard prowled around the walls. But the castle held
+stubbornly out till the king's greed passed into savage menace. He would
+hang all, he swore--man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the
+midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as
+he had lived, owning the wild passion which for seven years past had kept
+him from confession lest he should be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving
+with kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.
+
+[Sidenote: Loss of Normandy]
+
+The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. John was acknowledged
+as king in England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured for him by its
+duchess, his mother Eleanor; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
+Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Britanny.
+The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against
+Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the
+French king practically annexed the country, and in May 1200 a treaty
+between the two kings left John master of the whole dominion of his
+house. But fresh troubles broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John's refusal
+to answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, declared in
+1202 his fiefs forfeited; and Arthur, now a boy of fifteen, strove to
+seize Eleanor in the castle of Mirebeau. Surprised at its siege by a
+rapid march of the king, the boy was taken prisoner to Rouen, and
+murdered there in the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his uncle's
+hand. This brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces in revolt,
+while Philip sentenced John to forfeiture as a murderer, and marched
+straight on Normandy. The ease with which the conquest of the Duchy was
+effected can only be explained by the utter absence of any popular
+resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century before
+the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant to
+arms from Avranches to Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
+mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly over before Normandy
+settled down into the most loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this
+was due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of the
+towns to independence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering
+force and military ability with which the conquest was effected. But the
+utter absence of opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his
+transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign master
+to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the
+two. Between France and Normandy there had been as many years of
+friendship as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of
+bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in
+fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip entered
+Rouen as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission to the house of
+Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to
+an equal. In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as startling a success.
+Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into his hands,
+and the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of
+Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the Garonne; and
+from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne to the
+Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of England.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+THE CHARTER
+1204-1307
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III
+1204-1307
+
+
+A Chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell near Cambridge, and
+which has been embodied in the "Memoriale" of Walter of Coventry, gives
+us a contemporary account of the period from 1201 to 1225. We possess
+another contemporary annalist for the same period in Roger of Wendover,
+the first of the published chroniclers of St. Albans, whose work extends
+to 1235. Though full of detail Roger is inaccurate, and he has strong
+royal and ecclesiastical sympathies; but his chronicle was subsequently
+revised in a more patriotic sense by another monk of the same abbey,
+Matthew Paris, and continued in the "Greater Chronicle" of the latter.
+
+Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of the time in his
+"Historia Anglorum" (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of the
+great chroniclers of his house; for the chronicles of Rishanger, his
+successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked on at
+that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and lifeless
+jottings of events which become more and more local as time goes on. The
+annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have been
+published in the "Annales Monastici" of the Rolls series, add important
+details for the reigns of John and Henry III. Those of Melrose, Osney,
+and Lanercost help us in the close of the latter reign, where help is
+especially welcome. For the Barons' war we have besides these the
+royalist chronicle of Wykes, Rishanger's fragment published by the Camden
+Society, and a chronicle of Bartholomew de Cotton, which is contemporary
+from 1264 to 1298. Where the chronicles fail however the public documents
+of the realm become of high importance. The "Royal Letters" (1216-1272)
+which have been printed from the Patent Rolls by Professor Shirley (Rolls
+Series) throw great light on Henry's politics.
+
+Our municipal history during this period is fully represented by that of
+London. For the general history of the capital the Rolls series has given
+us its "Liber Albus" and "Liber Custumarum," while a vivid account of its
+communal revolution is to be found in the "Liber de Antiquis Legibus"
+published by the Camden Society. A store of documents will be found in
+the Charter Rolls published by the Record Commission, in Brady's work on
+"English Boroughs," and in the "Ordinances of English Gilds," published
+with a remarkable preface from the pen of Dr. Brentano by the Early
+English Text Society. For our religious and intellectual history
+materials now become abundant. Grosseteste's Letters throw light on the
+state of the Church and its relations with Rome; those of Adam Marsh give
+us interesting details of Earl Simon's relation to the religious movement
+of his day; and Eceleston's tract on the arrival of the Friars is
+embodied in the "Monumenta Franciscana." For the Universities we have the
+collection of materials edited by Mr. Anstey under the name of "Munimenta
+Academica."
+
+With the close of Henry's reign our directly historic materials become
+scantier and scantier. The monastic annals we have before mentioned are
+supplemented by the jejune entries of Trivet and Murimuth, by the
+"Annales Anglic et Scotias," by Rishanger's Chronicle, his "Gesta Edwardi
+Primi," and three fragments of his annals (all published in the Rolls
+Series). The portion of the so-called "Walsingham's History" which
+relates to this period is now attributed by Mr. Riley to Rishanger's
+hand. For the wars in the north and in the west we have no records from
+the side of the conquered. The social and physical state of Wales indeed
+is illustrated by the "Itinerarium" which Gerald de Barri drew up in the
+twelfth century, but Scotland has no contemporary chronicles for this
+period; the jingling rimes of Blind Harry are two hundred years later
+than his hero, Wallace. We possess however a copious collection of State
+papers in the "Rotuli Scotiæ," the "Documents and Records illustrative of
+the History of Scotland" which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well as
+in Rymer's Foedera. For the history of our Parliament the most noteworthy
+materials have been collected by Professor Stubbs in his Select Charters,
+and he has added to them a short treatise called "Modus Tenendi
+Parliamentum," which may be taken as a fair account of its actual state
+and powers in the fourteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+JOHN
+1204-1216
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Conquest]
+
+The loss of Normandy did more than drive John from the foreign dominions
+of his race; it set him face to face with England itself. England was no
+longer a distant treasure-house from which gold could be drawn for wars
+along the Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in order
+by wise ministers and by flying visits from its foreign king. Henceforth
+it was his home. It was to be ruled by his personal and continuous rule.
+People and sovereign were to know each other, to be brought into contact
+with each other as they had never been brought since the conquest of the
+Norman. The change in the attitude of the king was the more momentous
+that it took place at a time when the attitude of the country itself was
+rapidly changing. The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect to the land.
+A foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers. Foreign nobles were
+quartered in every manor. A military organization of the country changed
+while it simplified the holding of every estate. Huge castles of white
+stone bridled town and country; huge stone minsters told how the Norman
+had bridled even the Church. But the change was in great measure an
+external one. The real life of the nation was little affected by the
+shock of the Conquest. English institutions, the local, judicial, and
+administrative forms of the country were the same as of old. Like the
+English tongue they remained practically unaltered. For a century after
+the Conquest only a few new words crept in from the language of the
+conquerors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the nation at large
+remain unchanged that William himself tried to learn it that he might
+administer justice to his subjects. Even English literature, banished as
+it was from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable
+rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious works, in
+poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in the great monument of
+our prose, the English Chronicle. It was not till the miserable reign of
+Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey of Peterborough. But the
+"Sayings of Ælfred" show a native literature going on through the reign
+of Henry the Second, and the appearance of a great work of English verse
+coincides in point of time with the return of John to his island realm.
+"There was a priest in the land whose name was Layamon; he was the son of
+Leovenath; may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble
+church on the bank of Severn (good it seemed to him!) near Radstone,
+where he read books. It came to mind to him and in his chiefest thought
+that he would tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were named
+and whence they came who first had English land." Journeying far and wide
+over the country, the priest of Earnley found Bæda and Wace, the books
+too of St. Albin and St. Austin. "Layamon laid down these books and
+turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to
+him! Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true words
+set together, and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's church
+is now that of Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in
+fact an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Bæda.
+Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is
+beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty
+Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the
+same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly
+affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes
+of Cædmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough, simple joy.
+
+[Sidenote: English Patriotism]
+
+Instead of crushing England, indeed, the Conquest did more than any event
+that had gone before to build up an English people. All local
+distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian, of both from
+Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The
+Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling,
+of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence
+strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the
+defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. Ælfred, the great name of the English
+past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of Ælfred"
+embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn from
+this deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action which
+began as soon as the Conquest had given place to strife among the
+conquerors. A common hostility to the conquering baronage gave the nation
+leaders in its foreign sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed
+at Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged it. It was under William
+the Red that English soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons who
+surrendered at Rochester. It was under Henry the First that an English
+army faced Duke Robert and his foreign knighthood when they landed for a
+fresh invasion, "not fearing the Normans." It was under the same great
+king that Englishmen conquered Normandy in turn on the field of
+Tenchebray. This overthrow of the conquering baronage, this union of the
+conquered with the king, brought about the fusion of the conquerors in
+the general body of the English people. As early as the days of Henry the
+Second the descendants of Norman and Englishman had become
+indistinguishable. Both found a bond in a common English feeling and
+English patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin
+"foreigners" who streamed into England in the wake of Henry and his sons.
+Both had profited by the stern discipline of the Norman rule. The
+wretched reign of Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace without
+parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched from the settlement of the
+Conquest to the return of John. Of her kings' forays along Norman or
+Aquitanian borders England heard little; she cared less. Even Eichard's
+crusade woke little interest in his island realm. What England saw in her
+kings was "the good peace they made in the land." And with peace came a
+stern but equitable rule, judicial and administrative reforms that
+carried order and justice to every corner of the land, a wealth that grew
+steadily in spite of heavy taxation, an immense outburst of material and
+intellectual activity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Universities]
+
+It was with a new English people therefore that John found himself face
+to face. The nation which he fronted was a nation quickened with a new
+life and throbbing with a new energy. Not least among the signs of this
+energy was the upgrowth of our Universities. The establishment of the
+great schools which bore this name was everywhere throughout Europe a
+special mark of the impulse which Christendom gained from the crusades. A
+new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more
+cultured East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first
+rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of
+Cordova or Bagdad. In the twelfth century a classical revival restored
+Cæsar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on
+the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like
+William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic philosophy
+sprang up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the
+imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal
+Europe broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers such
+as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to spread the new power of
+knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience
+with the older traditions of mankind either local or intellectual that
+drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with
+thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers
+were gathered together. A new power sprang up in the midst of a world
+which had till now recognized no power but that of sheer brute force.
+Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars
+who lectured in every cloister were hailed as "masters" by the crowds at
+their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats of councils, of the
+thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was of note
+enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king.
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford]
+
+Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald where
+Thomas of London and John of Salisbury were already busy with the study
+of the Civil Law. But when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was at
+once silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at war with the Church
+and jealous of the power which the wreck of the royal authority was
+throwing into Theobald's hands. At this time Oxford stood in the first
+rank among English towns. Its town church of St. Martin rose from the
+midst of a huddled group of houses, girded in with massive walls, that
+lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of
+Cherwell and the Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, eastward
+and westward, to these rivers; while on the south a sharper descent led
+down across swampy meadows to the ford from which the town drew its name
+and to the bridge that succeeded it. Around lay a wild forest country,
+moors such as Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, great
+woods of which Shotover and Bagley are the relics closing the horizon to
+the south and east. Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle
+marked the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river valley
+along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed, its walls
+formed the least element in the town's military strength, for on every
+side but the north it was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell or
+by an intricate network of streams into which the Thames breaks among the
+meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of
+Austin Canons, which with the older priory of St. Frideswide gave Oxford
+some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of the
+D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a
+palace without its walls, the presence again and again of important
+Parliaments, marked its political weight within the realm. The settlement
+of one of the wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of
+the town indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No
+place better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of
+its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden
+expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the
+Conquest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English
+castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of
+Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his
+palace of Beaumont. In the southern quarter of the city the canons of St.
+Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan
+cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all
+its parish churches and founded within their new castle walls the church
+of the Canons of St. George.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford Scholars]
+
+We know nothing of the causes which drew students and teachers within the
+walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher
+quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney
+and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst into a larger
+life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet however the fortunes of the
+University were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars
+gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or
+Abelard. The English took their place as one of the "nations" of the
+French University. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian
+teachers. Thomas of London wandered to Paris from his school at Merton.
+But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford quietly grew in
+numbers and repute, and forty years after the visit of Vacarius its
+educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his
+amusing Topography of Ireland to its students the most learned and famous
+of the English clergy were to be found within its walls. At the opening
+of the thirteenth century Oxford stood without a rival in its own
+country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest
+schools of the Western world. But to realize this Oxford of the past we
+must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the
+present. In the outer look of the new University there was nothing of the
+pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the "High" or looks
+down from the gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of
+venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history
+plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a mediæval town. Thousands
+of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as
+poor as themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking,
+quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the
+place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and
+Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething
+mass of turbulent life. The retainers who followed their young lords to
+the University fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets.
+Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter struggle
+of North and South. At nightfall roysterer and reveller roamed with
+torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down
+burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry and
+wiped off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two.
+Now a tavern squabble between scholar and townsman widened into a general
+broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary's vied with the town bell of
+St. Martin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical
+controversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in
+this turbulent, surging mob. When England growled at the exactions of the
+Papacy in the years that were to follow the students besieged a legate in
+the abbot's house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row preceded the
+opening of the Barons' war. "When Oxford draws knife," ran an old rime,
+"England's soon at strife."
+
+[Sidenote: Edmund Rich]
+
+But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of life. A keen
+thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands
+round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich--
+Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days--came about the time we
+have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years old, from a little lane at
+Abingdon that still bears his name. He found his school in an inn that
+belonged to the abbey of Eynsham where his father had taken refuge from
+the world. His mother was a pious woman of the day, too poor to give her
+boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every
+Wednesday; but Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He plunged at
+once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for knowledge, its
+mystical piety. "Secretly," perhaps at eventide when the shadows were
+gathering in the church of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and
+students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the
+Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary for his
+bride. Years of study, broken by a fever that raged among the crowded,
+noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris;
+and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way as
+poor scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christendom. Here
+a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that
+Edmund consented at last to an assignation; but when he appeared it was
+in company of grave academical officials who, as the maiden declared in
+the hour of penitence which followed, "straightway whipped the offending
+Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return
+from Paris became the most popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that
+Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him
+in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his
+grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep
+in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a
+grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training and a
+chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would.
+"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of
+scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as
+he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish student
+would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its troubles;
+the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long formed his
+sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which
+Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the
+form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood
+among his mathematical diagrams. "What are these?" she seemed to say; and
+seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles
+interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian
+Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as the figure faded away, "thy diagrams
+henceforth, my son."
+
+[Sidenote: The University and Feudalism]
+
+The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training,
+and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the
+spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old
+mediæval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so
+strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local
+isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from
+barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of
+material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of
+place and social position. The University on the other hand was a protest
+against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European
+and not local. Not merely every province of France, but every people of
+Christendom had its place among the "nations" of Paris or Padua. A common
+language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the
+warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took
+the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or
+realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both
+failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast
+commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt
+himself as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter round Mont St.
+Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars
+carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the
+work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere,
+but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and
+Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at
+any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been
+brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of
+national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of
+the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of
+Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with
+Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the
+fray with the legate. At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found
+hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within this
+strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely
+democratic basis. Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on
+precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical
+strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on
+which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room. The
+University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were
+admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the "master."
+To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or
+"ruler" in the schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy all were
+equal. When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles
+of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in
+the final decision. Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.
+It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned
+every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an
+officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Universities and the Church]
+
+If the democratic spirit of the Universities' threatened feudalism, their
+spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer
+seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension which
+mediæval usage gave to the word "orders" gathered the whole educated
+world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be their age or
+proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay
+responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to
+the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This
+ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.
+The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the
+University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it
+had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the
+Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then
+situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only
+rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them. The
+sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of
+those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto
+absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of
+classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a
+greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
+society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of
+denial into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for
+reason a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a smile
+the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these,
+Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new
+culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the "World's
+Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an
+infidel. A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by
+the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact
+with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer an
+accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere
+Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and against what
+obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.
+"Slowly," he tells us, "has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle
+come into use among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his
+Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and others, were
+translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace
+1237 because of their assertion of the eternity of the world and of time
+and because of the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third
+book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many passages erroneously
+translated. Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For St.
+Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read
+the Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the
+book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his writing. So there were
+but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, who were of any account
+in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up
+to this year of grace 1292."
+
+[Sidenote: The Town]
+
+If we pass from the English University to the English Town we see a
+progress as important and hardly less interesting. In their origin our
+boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the western world. The
+cities of Italy and Provence had preserved the municipal institutions of
+their Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler
+with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around
+them; the communes of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt
+against feudal outrage within their walls. But in England the tradition
+of Rome passed utterly away, while feudal oppression was held fairly in
+check by the Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning
+simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed precisely
+in the same manner as the townships around it. Its existence witnessed
+indeed to the need which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help
+and protection. The burh or borough was probably a more defensible place
+than the common village; it may have had a ditch or mound about it
+instead of the quickset-hedge or "tun" from which the township took its
+name. But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where
+men clustered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.
+The towns were different in the circumstances and date of their rise.
+Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders. Some dated
+from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns. Some
+clustered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of
+church and monastery. Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.
+There was the same variety in the mode in which the various town
+communities were formed. While the bulk of them grew by simple increase
+of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with
+its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show
+how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and
+claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the
+town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the
+town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the
+constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of
+the people at large. Whether we regard it as a township, or rather from
+its size as a hundred or collection of townships, the obligations of the
+dwellers within its bounds were those of the townships round, to keep
+fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd, and a
+reeve and four men to the hundred court and shire court. As in other
+townships, land was a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless
+man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life; for
+purposes of government or property the town consisted simply of the
+landed proprietors within its bounds. The common lands which are still
+attached to many of our boroughs take us back to a time when each
+township lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as
+boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common
+pasture; Oxford has still its own "Port-meadow."
+
+[Sidenote: Towns and their lords]
+
+The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the
+hands of its own freemen, gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote."
+But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal
+requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it
+affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great
+thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.
+A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution.
+It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered
+justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's dues or annual rent of
+the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To modern
+eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When
+Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into
+those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's
+corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his
+pound. The great forest around was the Earl's, and it was only out of his
+grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or
+pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and government of a town
+lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the
+fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their
+markets and fairs. But in fact when once these dues were paid and these
+services rendered the English townsman was practically free. His rights
+were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and
+person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a
+fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his
+master's reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of
+his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town tower
+gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exercise
+rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs. Their
+merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums
+due from the town among the different burgesses, looked to the due
+repairs of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same part as
+a town-council of to-day.
+
+[Sidenote: The Merchant Gild]
+
+The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to closer association
+which found support in those principles of mutual aid and mutual
+restraint that lay at the base of our old institutions. Gilds or clubs
+for religious, charitable, or social purposes were common throughout the
+country, and especially common in boroughs, where men clustered more
+thickly together. Each formed a sort of artificial family. An oath of
+mutual fidelity among its members was substituted for the tie of blood,
+while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the
+gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth. But within this new
+family the aim of the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as
+close as that of the old. "Let all share the same lot," ran its law; "if
+any misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for aid from his
+gild-brothers in atoning for guilt incurred by mishap. He could call on
+them for assistance in case of violence or wrong. If falsely accused they
+appeared in court as his compurgators, if poor they supported, and when
+dead they buried him. On the other hand he was responsible to them, as
+they were to the State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of
+brother against brother was also a wrong against the general body of the
+gild and was punished by fine or in the last resort by an expulsion which
+left the offender a "lawless" man and an outcast. The one difference
+between these gilds in country and town was this, that in the latter case
+from their close local neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.
+Under Æthelstan the London gilds united into one for the purpose of
+carrying out more effectually their common aims, and at a later time we
+find the gilds of Berwick enacting "that where many bodies are found side
+by side in one place they may become one, and have one will, and in the
+dealings of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The process
+was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods naturally
+differed much in social rank, and even after the union was effected we
+see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent of some one or
+more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In London for instance
+the Cnighten-gild which seems to have stood at the head of its fellows
+retained for a long time its separate property, while its Alderman--as
+the chief officer of each gild was called--became the Alderman of the
+united gild of the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar gild of
+Thanes from which the chief officers of the town seem commonly to have
+been selected. Imperfect however as the union might be, when once it was
+effected the town passed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a
+powerful community, far more effectually organized than in the loose
+organization of the township, and whose character was inevitably
+determined by the circumstances of its origin. In their beginnings our
+boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings of persons engaged in
+agricultural pursuits; the first Dooms of London provide especially for
+the recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing
+security of the country invited the farmer or the landowner to settle
+apart in his own fields, and the growth of estate and trade told on the
+towns themselves, the difference between town and country became more
+sharply defined. London of course took the lead in this new developement
+of civic life. Even in Æthelstan's day every London merchant who had made
+three long voyages on his own account ranked as a Thegn. Its "lithsmen,"
+or shipmen's-gild, were of sufficient importance under Harthacnut to
+figure in the election of a king, and its principal street still tells of
+the rapid growth of trade in its name of "Cheap-side" or the bargaining
+place. But at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had become
+universal. The name given to the united brotherhood in a borough is in
+almost every case no longer that of the "town-gild," but of the
+"merchant-gild."
+
+[Sidenote: Emancipation of Towns]
+
+This social change in the character of the townsmen produced important
+results in the character of their municipal institutions. In becoming a
+merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the "town" enlarged their
+powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their
+internal trade. It became their special business to obtain from the crown
+or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage,
+grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself
+they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control
+of markets, and the recovery of debts. It was only by slow and difficult
+advances that each step in this securing of privilege was won. Still it
+went steadily on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an
+English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services
+disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities
+are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were
+king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture
+of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new
+minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who
+were ready to fill again their master's treasury at the price of the
+strip of parchment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of
+government. In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the
+boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble
+they preserved or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.
+The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting,
+the right to equal justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought
+safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of
+the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and
+market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that
+swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and
+church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing
+more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their
+home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their
+steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.
+
+[Sidenote: London]
+
+London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its
+citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even
+at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all
+its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited
+by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One
+immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England
+from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed
+quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he
+quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered
+his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French
+domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on
+the site of his great victory "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver,
+Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed
+with the English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play so
+notable a part as in London. The Normans had had mercantile
+establishments in London as early as the reign of Æthelred, if not of
+Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a
+trading colony like the colony of the "Emperor's Men," or Easterlings.
+But with the Conquest their number greatly increased. "Many of the
+citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers
+in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better
+stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." The
+status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They could no longer
+be looked upon as strangers in cities which had passed under the Norman
+rule. In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in
+a separate French town, side by side with the English borough. But in
+London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing class.
+Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later
+days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of
+its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within
+the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the
+annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a
+little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet
+Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the
+Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a
+burgher family from Caen.
+
+[Sidenote: Freedom of London]
+
+It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the
+long internal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that London
+owed the wealth and importance to which it attained during the reign of
+Henry the First. The charter which Henry granted it became a model for
+lesser boroughs. The king yielded its citizens the right of justice; each
+townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court
+or hustings whose sessions took place every week. They were subject only
+to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle
+which the Normans introduced. Their trade was protected from toll or
+exaction over the length and breadth of the land. The king however still
+nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve, or magistrate of the
+town, nor were the citizens as yet united together in a commune or
+corporation. But an imperfect civic organization existed in the "wards"
+or quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman, and in the
+"gilds" or voluntary associations of merchants or traders which ensured
+order and mutual protection for their members. Loose too as these bonds
+may seem, they were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions
+of freedom which the towns preserved. The London burgesses gathered in
+their town-mote when the bell swung out from the bell-tower of St. Paul's
+to deliberate freely on their own affairs under the presidency of their
+alderman. Here, too, they mustered in arms if danger threatened the city,
+and delivered the town-banner to their captain, the Norman baron
+Fitz-Walter, to lead them against the enemy.
+
+[Sidenote: Early Oxford]
+
+Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as this, but the instance
+of Oxford shows how the freedom of London told on the general advance of
+English towns. In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town
+had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the withdrawal of
+the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. Though the monastery of St.
+Frideswide rose in the turmoil of the eighth century on the slope which
+led down to a ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a glimpse
+of the borough that must have grown up under its walls. The first
+definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
+Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of
+this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the
+last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of
+Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the
+Thames to give it military and political importance. Of the life of its
+burgesses however we still know little or nothing. The names of its
+parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early
+church after church gathered round the earlier town-church of St. Martin.
+But the men of the little town remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the
+"Portmannimote" as it was called, which was held in the churchyard of St.
+Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older self as the Freeman's Common
+Hall--their town-mead is still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later
+charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
+judging and law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating
+trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or money or
+marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats paying
+toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they
+floated down the Thames towards London.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford and the Normans]
+
+The number of houses marked waste in the survey marks the terrible
+suffering of Oxford in the Norman Conquest: but the ruin was soon
+repaired, and the erection of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches,
+the planting of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what various
+ways the energy of its new masters was giving an impulse to its life. It
+is a proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian
+houses about them that each of the later town-halls of the borough had,
+before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the larger
+dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently converted into academic
+halls bore traces of the same origin in names such as Moysey's Hall,
+Lombard's Hall, or Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for
+besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a lesser Jewry
+scattered over its southern quarter, and we can hardly doubt that this
+abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the
+causes which drew teachers and scholars within its walls. The Jewry, a
+town within a town, lay here as elsewhere isolated and exempt from the
+common justice, the common life and self-government of the borough. On
+all but its eastern side too the town was hemmed in by jurisdictions
+independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide
+"bailey" of the Castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north,
+stretching away beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of
+the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor
+and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet-court in the hamlet
+of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within the walls
+subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry had a rule and
+law of its own. Scores of householders, dotted over street and lane, were
+tenants of castle or abbey and paid no suit or service at the borough
+court.
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford and London]
+
+But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the
+spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so
+closely cabined and confined. Nowhere indeed was the impulse which London
+was giving likely to tell with greater force. The "bargemen" of Oxford
+were connected even before the Conquest with the "boatmen," or shippers,
+of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing
+these names represented what is known as the merchant-gild of the town.
+Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant-gild of Oxford from
+the time of Henry the First. Even then lands, islands, pastures belonged
+to it, and amongst them the same Port-meadow which is familiar to Oxford
+men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow. The connexion between
+the two gilds was primarily one of trade. "In the time of King Eadward
+and Abbot Ordric" the channel of the Thames beneath the walls of the
+Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up that boats could scarce pass as
+far as Oxford, and it was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
+and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
+south of his church. But by the time of Henry the Second closer bonds
+than this linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
+about judgements in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were
+empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatsoever
+the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed
+right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were
+assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatsoever matter the men of Oxford
+be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and
+custom of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the
+citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
+
+[Sidenote: Life of the Town]
+
+A legal connexion such as this could hardly fail to bring with it an
+identity of municipal rights. Oxford had already passed through the
+earlier steps of her advance towards municipal freedom before the
+conquest of the Norman. Her burghers assembled in their own
+Portmannimote, and their dues to the crown were assessed at a fixed sum
+of honey or coin. But the formal definition of their rights dates, as in
+the case of London, from the time of Henry the First. The customs and
+exemptions of its townsmen were confirmed by Henry the Second "as ever
+they enjoyed them in the time of Henry my grandfather, and in like manner
+as my citizens of London hold them." By this date the town had attained
+entire judicial and commercial freedom, and liberty of external commerce
+was secured by the exemption of its citizens from toll on the king's
+lands. Complete independence was reached when a charter of John
+substituted a mayor of the town's own choosing for the reeve or bailiff
+of the crown. But dry details such as these tell little of the quick
+pulse of popular life that beat in the thirteenth century through such a
+community as that of Oxford. The church of St. Martin in the very heart
+of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four streets met, was the
+centre of the city life. The town-mote was held in its churchyard.
+Justice was administered ere yet a townhall housed the infant magistracy
+by mayor or bailiff sitting beneath a low pent-house, the "penniless
+bench" of later days, outside its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the
+burghers to council or arms. Around the church the trade-gilds were
+ranged as in some vast encampment. To the south of it lay Spicery and
+Vintnery, the quarter of the richer burgesses. Fish-street fell noisily
+down to the bridge and the ford. The Corn-market occupied then as now the
+street which led to Northgate. The stalls of the butchers stretched along
+the "Butcher-row," which formed the road to the bailey and the castle.
+Close beneath the church lay a nest of huddled lanes, broken by a stately
+synagogue, and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the
+Jew. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets;
+the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; processions of
+pilgrims wound through gates and lane to the shrine of St. Frideswide.
+Frays were common enough; now the sack of a Jew's house; now burgher
+drawing knife on burgher; now an outbreak of the young student lads who
+were growing every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town was
+well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his
+door; the call of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand
+and banners flying to enforce the king's peace.
+
+[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury]
+
+The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal domain but
+around abbey or castle was slower and more difficult. The story of St.
+Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an
+imperfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land here in the Confessor's
+time was covered with houses by the time of Henry the Second. The
+building of the great abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to
+mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot's domain. The troubles
+of the time helped here as elsewhere the progress of the town; serfs,
+fugitives from justice or their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally
+sought shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were
+wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not a settler but was bound to pay his pence
+to the Abbot's treasury, to plough a rood of his land, to reap in his
+harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the
+annual catch of eels from the Abbey waters. Within the four crosses that
+bounded the Abbot's domain land and water were his; the cattle of the
+townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the
+loan of their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream and
+seize their cloths wherever he found them. No toll might be levied from
+tenants of the Abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and
+stall till the buyers of the Abbot had had the pick of the market. There
+was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk-mote it
+was before the Abbot's officers that its meeting was held; if they
+appealed to the alderman he was the Abbot's nominee and received the
+horn, the symbol of his office, at the Abbot's hands. Like all the
+greater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was a
+silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem to have
+slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishing, were commuted for
+an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of
+flax, simply disappeared. By usage, by omission, by downright
+forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to a needy
+abbot, the town won freedom.
+
+[Sidenote: The Towns and Justice]
+
+But progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in the history
+of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance of
+law, but yet more as marking the part which a new moral sense of man's
+right to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
+Rude as the borough was, it possessed the right of meeting in full
+assembly of the townsmen for government and law. Justice was administered
+in presence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted or condemned by
+the oath of his neighbours. Without the borough bounds however the system
+of Norman judicature prevailed; and the rural tenants who did suit and
+service at the Cellarer's court were subjected to the trial by battle.
+The execution of a farmer named Ketel who came under this feudal
+jurisdiction brought the two systems into vivid contrast. Ketel seems to
+have been guiltless of the crime laid to his charge; but the duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
+townsmen woke his fellow farmers to a sense of wrong. "Had Ketel been a
+dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
+acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is"; and even
+the monks were moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal
+freedom and justice with the townsmen. The franchise of the town was
+extended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers
+"came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll, and paid
+the town-penny." A chance story preserved in a charter of later date
+shows the same struggle for justice going on in a greater town. At
+Leicester the trial by compurgation, the rough predecessor of trial by
+jury, had been abolished by the Earls in favour of trial by battle. The
+aim of the burgesses was to regain their old justice, and in this a
+touching incident at last made them successful. "It chanced that two
+kinsmen, Nicholas the son of Acon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged
+a duel about a certain piece of land concerning which a dispute had
+arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour,
+each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he
+came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and was
+about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him 'Take care of the pit,
+turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so much clamour and
+noise was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around that
+the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he enquired
+of some how it was there was such a clamour, and answer was made to him
+that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that
+one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood
+over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him. Then the
+townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they
+should give him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street
+that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the
+twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from
+that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among
+themselves."
+
+[Sidenote: Division of Labour]
+
+At the time we have reached this struggle for emancipation was nearly
+over. The larger towns had secured the privilege of self-government, the
+administration of justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns
+of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal history at which towns
+began to acquire the right of electing their own chief magistrate, the
+Portreeve or Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown. But
+with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle between
+the various classes of the townsmen themselves. The growth of wealth and
+industry was bringing with it a vast increase of population. The mass of
+the new settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders
+without landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot in
+the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no part in
+the actual life of the town. The right of trade and of the regulation of
+trade in common with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the
+hands of the landed burghers whom we have described. By a natural process
+too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the
+"burghers" of the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised mass around them.
+The same change which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or
+trades from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three
+occupations of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth, to a
+position of superiority even within the privileged circle of the seven,
+told though with less force on the English boroughs. The burghers of the
+merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves on the greater operations
+of commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, while the meaner
+employments of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neighbours.
+This advance in the division of labour is marked by such severances as we
+note in the thirteenth century of the cloth merchant from the tailor or
+the leather merchant from the butcher.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Trade-Gilds]
+
+But the result of this severance was all-important in its influence on
+the constitution of our towns. The members of the trades thus abandoned
+by the wealthier burghers formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon
+rose into dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant-gild of the town.
+A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full
+membership of these trade-gilds. Their regulations were of the minutest
+character; the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, the
+hours of toil fixed "from day-break to curfew," and strict provision made
+against competition in labour. At each meeting of these gilds their
+members gathered round the Craft-box which contained the rules of their
+Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a
+quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of
+the gild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful
+tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by
+fines or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of a
+right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions among the
+members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the gild but
+sufficed to found chantries and masses and set up painted windows in the
+church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of a
+craft-gild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with
+those of prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow degrees that they
+rose to such a height as this. The first steps in their existence were
+the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects
+with any success it was first necessary that the whole body of craftsmen
+belonging to the trade should be compelled to join the gild, and secondly
+that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured to it. A
+royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of
+these charters took place the first struggle with the merchant-gilds
+which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the
+boroughs. The weavers, who were the first trade-gild to secure royal
+sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in a contest
+for existence as late as the reign of John when the citizens of London
+bought for a time the suppression of their gild. Even under the House of
+Lancaster Exeter was engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailors'
+gild. From the eleventh century however the spread of these societies
+went steadily on, and the control of trade passed more and more from the
+merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.
+
+[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Folk]
+
+It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time, of the
+"greater folk" against the "lesser folk," or of the "commune," the
+general mass of the inhabitants, against the "prudhommes," or "wiser"
+few, which brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade to
+the general government of the town, the great civic revolution of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Continent, and especially
+along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older
+burghers had been complete. In Köln the craftsmen had been reduced to all
+but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears
+of "the man without heart or honour who lives by his toil." Such social
+tyranny of class over class brought a century of bloodshed to the cities
+of Germany; but in England the tyranny of class over class was restrained
+by the general tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the most
+part a milder form. The longest and bitterest strife of all was naturally
+at London. Nowhere had the territorial constitution struck root so
+deeply, and nowhere had the landed oligarchy risen to such a height of
+wealth and influence. The city was divided into wards, each of which was
+governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class. In some indeed the
+office seems to have become hereditary. The "magnates," or "barons," of
+the merchant-gild advised alone on all matters of civic government or
+trade regulation, and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues
+or burthens of the town. Such a position afforded an opening for
+corruption and oppression of the most galling kind; and it seems to have
+been a general impression of the unfair assessment of the dues levied on
+the poor and the undue burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised
+classes which provoked the first serious discontent. In the reign of
+Richard the First William of the Long Beard, though one of the governing
+body, placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in the
+panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered fifty thousand of the
+craftsmen. His eloquence, his bold defiance of the aldermen in the
+town-mote, gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who
+surrounded him hailed him as "the saviour of the poor." One of his
+addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer of the time. In mediæval
+fashion he began with a text from the Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with
+joy from the fountain of the Saviour." "I," he began, "am the saviour of
+the poor. Ye poor men who have felt the weight of rich men's hands, draw
+from my fountain waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for
+the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from
+the waters. It is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the
+lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faithless folk; I will part
+the chosen from the reprobate as light from darkness." But it was in vain
+that he strove to win royal favour for the popular cause. The support of
+the moneyed classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars with
+Philip of France; and the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert, after a moment of
+hesitation issued orders for William Longbeard's arrest. William felled
+with an axe the first soldier who advanced to seize him, and taking
+refuge with a few adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow summoned his
+adherents to rise. Hubert however, who had already flooded the city with
+troops, with bold contempt of the right of sanctuary set fire to the
+tower. William was forced to surrender, and a burgher's son, whose father
+he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth. With his death the quarrel
+slumbered for more than fifty years. But the movement towards equality
+went steadily on. Under pretext of preserving the peace the
+unenfranchised townsmen united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and
+mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the
+wealthier burgesses. Nor did London stand alone in this movement. In all
+the larger towns the same discontent prevailed, the same social growth
+called for new institutions, and in their silent revolt against the
+oppression of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training themselves
+to stand forward as champions of a wider liberty in the Barons' War.
+
+[Sidenote: The Villein]
+
+Without the towns progress was far slower and more fitful. It would seem
+indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural
+population than on any other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings
+of the house of Ælfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of
+freemen had alike diminished. The pure slave class had never been
+numerous, and it had been reduced by the efforts of the Church, perhaps
+by the general convulsion of the Danish wars. But these wars had often
+driven the ceorl or freeman of the township to "commend" himself to a
+thegn who pledged him his protection in consideration of payment in a
+rendering of labour. It is probable that these dependent ceorls are the
+"villeins" of the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the Domesday
+Survey, men sunk indeed from pure freedom and bound both to soil and
+lord, but as yet preserving much of their older rights, retaining their
+land, free as against all men but their lord, and still sending
+representatives to hundred-moot and shire-moot. They stood therefore far
+above the "landless man," the man who had never possessed even under the
+old constitution political rights, whom the legislation of the English
+kings had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who
+served as household servant or as hired labourer or at the best as
+rent-paying tenant of land which was not his own. The Norman knight or
+lawyer however saw little distinction between these classes; and the
+tendency of legislation under the Angevins was to blend all in a single
+class of serfs. While the pure "theow" or absolute slave disappeared
+therefore the ceorl or villein sank lower in the social scale. But though
+the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more together and fused into
+a more homogeneous class, its actual position corresponded very
+imperfectly with the view of the lawyers. All indeed were dependents on a
+lord. The manor-house became the centre of every English village. The
+manor-court was held in its hall; it was here that the lord or his
+steward received homage, recovered fines, held the view of frank-pledge,
+or enrolled the villagers in their tithing. Here too, if the lord
+possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without
+its doors stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord's demesne or
+home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the "villeins"
+of the manor. It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves,
+the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.
+These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and
+it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class
+of the population from another. The "villein," in the strict sense of the
+word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the
+ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The cottar, the bordar, and the
+labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the
+year.
+
+But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited
+by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of
+the originally meaner "landless man." The possession of his little
+homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his
+cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere
+indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord's caprice into
+rights that could be pleaded at law. The number of teams, the fines, the
+reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of
+oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy
+of which became the title-deed of the villein. It was to this that he
+owed the name of "copy-holder" which at a later time superseded his older
+title. Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on oral
+evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was
+eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise generally
+secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord. It was the
+duty of the lord's bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins,
+but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was
+chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of their
+interests and rights. A fresh step towards freedom was made by the
+growing tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments. The
+population was slowly increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was
+applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure divided the
+inheritance of the tenantry equally among their sons, the holding of each
+tenant and the services due from it became divided in a corresponding
+degree. A labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the
+increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of
+independence made it more burthensome to those who rendered it. It was
+probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears of labour
+for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every estate, gradually
+developed into a general commutation of services. We have already
+witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change in the
+case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon became universal, and
+"malt-silver," "wood-silver," and "larder-silver" gradually took the
+place of the older personal services on the court-rolls. The process of
+commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords themselves. The
+luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost
+of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of
+freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an
+easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took
+part. At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to
+royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the
+king's serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were
+enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the
+exhausted exchequer.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England]
+
+Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a
+national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.
+But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl. The
+loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was
+the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a
+half a national temper to the baronage. Not only the "new men," the
+ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound
+to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as
+Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a
+love of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as the natural
+leaders of a people bound together by the stern government which had
+crushed all local division, which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of
+a peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was almost
+unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had trained them to something
+of their old free government again by the very machinery of election it
+used to facilitate its heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of
+Normandy brought home the king. The growth which had been going on had
+easily escaped the eyes of rulers who were commonly absent from the realm
+and busy with the affairs of countries beyond the sea. Henry the Second
+had been absent for years from England: Richard had only visited it twice
+for a few months: John had as yet been almost wholly occupied with his
+foreign dominions. To him as to his brother England had as yet been
+nothing but a land whose gold paid the mercenaries that followed him, and
+whose people bowed obediently to his will. It was easy to see that
+between such a ruler and such a nation once brought together strife must
+come: but that the strife came as it did and ended as it did was due
+above all to the character of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: John]
+
+"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John."
+The terrible verdict of his contemporaries has passed into the sober
+judgement of history. Externally John possessed all the quickness, the
+vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which
+distinguished his house. His worst enemies owned that he toiled steadily
+and closely at the work of administration. He was fond of learned men
+like Gerald of Wales. He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of
+winning the love of women. But in his inner soul John was the worst
+outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their
+insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and
+tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical
+indifference to honour or truth. In mere boyhood he tore with brutal
+levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their
+lord. His ingratitude and perfidy brought his father with sorrow to the
+grave. To his brother he was the worst of traitors. All Christendom
+believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur of Britanny. He
+abandoned one wife and was faithless to another. His punishments were
+refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men
+under copes of lead. His court was a brothel where no woman was safe from
+the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his
+victims' shame. He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in
+his impiety. Though he scoffed at priests and turned his back on the mass
+even amidst the solemnities of his coronation, he never stirred on a
+journey without hanging relics round his neck. But with the wickedness of
+his race he inherited its profound ability. His plan for the relief of
+Château Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur's hopes at
+Mirebeau, showed an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of
+his political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time.
+Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern the difficulties of his
+position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which he met them. The
+overthrow of his continental power only spurred him to the formation of a
+league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt
+of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The
+closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and
+incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The
+awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost
+Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of
+despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but
+the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.
+
+[Sidenote: Innocent the Third]
+
+From the moment of his return to England in 1204 John's whole energies
+were bent to the recovery of his dominions on the Continent. He
+impatiently collected money and men for the support of those adherents of
+the House of Anjou who were still struggling against the arms of France
+in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of 1205 he gathered an army at
+Portsmouth and prepared to cross the Channel. But his project was
+suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert
+Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal. So completely had both
+the baronage and the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude
+of their representatives revealed to the king a new spirit of national
+freedom which was rising around him, and John at once braced himself to a
+struggle with it. The death of Hubert Walter in July, only a few weeks
+after his protest, removed his most formidable opponent, and the king
+resolved to neutralize the opposition of the Church by placing a creature
+of his own at its head. John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by
+the monks of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as Primate. But in
+a previous though informal gathering the convent had already chosen its
+sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop. The rival claimants hastened to
+appeal to Rome, and their appeal reached the Papal Court before
+Christmas. The result of the contest was a startling one both for
+themselves and for the king. After a year's careful examination Innocent
+the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, quashed at the close of
+1206 both the contested elections. The decision was probably a just one,
+but Innocent was far from stopping there. The monks who appeared before
+him brought powers from the convent to choose a new Primate should their
+earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly assured of their
+choice of Grey, had promised to confirm their election. But the bribes
+which the king lavished at Rome failed to win the Pope over to this plan;
+and whether from mere love of power, for he was pushing the Papal claims
+of supremacy over Christendom further than any of his predecessors, or as
+may fairly be supposed in despair of a free election within English
+bounds, Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his presence Stephen
+Langton to the archiepiscopal see.
+
+[Sidenote: The Interdict]
+
+Personally a better choice could not have been made, for Stephen was a
+man who by sheer weight of learning and holiness of life had risen to the
+dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed him in the front rank
+of English patriots. But in itself the step was an usurpation of the
+rights both of the Church and of the Crown. The king at once met it with
+resistance. When Innocent consecrated the new Primate in June 1207, and
+threatened the realm with interdict if Langton were any longer excluded
+from his see, John replied by a counter-threat that the interdict should
+be followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every
+Italian he could seize in the realm. How little he feared the priesthood
+he showed when the clergy refused his demand of a thirteenth of movables
+from the whole country and Archbishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax
+before the Council. John banished the Archbishop and extorted the money.
+Innocent however was not a man to draw back from his purpose, and in
+March 1208 the interdict he had threatened fell upon the land. All
+worship save that of a few privileged orders, all administration of
+Sacraments save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and
+breadth of the country: the church-bells were silent, the dead lay
+unburied on the ground. Many of the bishops fled from the country. The
+Church in fact, so long the main support of the royal power against the
+baronage, was now driven into opposition. Its change of attitude was to
+be of vast moment in the struggle which was impending; but John recked
+little of the future; he replied to the interdict by confiscating the
+lands of the clergy who observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their
+privileges to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them
+unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a Welshman was brought before
+him for the murder of a priest, "he has killed my enemy." In 1209 the
+Pope proceeded to the further sentence of excommunication, and the king
+was formally cut off from the pale of the Church. But the new sentence
+was met with the same defiance as the old. Five of the bishops fled over
+sea, and secret disaffection was spreading widely, but there was no
+public avoidance of the excommunicated king. An Archdeacon of Norwich who
+withdrew from his service was crushed to death under a cope of lead, and
+the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or noble from following
+his example.
+
+[Sidenote: The Deposition]
+
+The attitude of John showed the power which the administrative reforms of
+his father had given to the Crown. He stood alone, with nobles estranged
+from him and the Church against him, but his strength seemed utterly
+unbroken. From the first moment of his rule John had defied the baronage.
+The promise to satisfy their demand for redress of wrongs in the past
+reign, a promise made at his election, remained unfulfilled; when the
+demand was repeated he answered it by seizing their castles and taking
+their children as hostages for their loyalty. The cost of his fruitless
+threats of war had been met by heavy and repeated taxation, by increased
+land tax and increased scutage. The quarrel with the Church and fear of
+their revolt only deepened his oppression of the nobles. He drove De
+Braose, one of the most powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile,
+while his wife and grandchildren were believed to have been starved to
+death in the royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic-stricken
+to the court of the excommunicate king John heaped outrages worse than
+death. Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, the preference
+shown to foreigners, were small provocations compared with his attacks on
+the honour of their wives and daughters. But the baronage still
+submitted. The financial exactions indeed became light as John filled his
+treasury with the goods of the Church; the king's vigour was seen in the
+rapidity with which he crushed a rising of the nobles in Ireland, and
+foiled an outbreak of the Welsh; while the triumphs of his father had
+taught the baronage its weakness in any single-handed struggle against
+the Crown. Hated therefore as he was the land remained still. Only one
+weapon was now left in Innocent's hands. Men held then that a king, once
+excommunicate, ceased to be a Christian or to have any claims on the
+obedience of Christian subjects. As spiritual heads of Christendom, the
+Popes had ere now asserted their right to remove such a ruler from his
+throne and to give it to a worthier than he; and it was this right which
+Innocent at last felt himself driven to exercise. After useless threats
+he issued in 1212 a bull of deposition against John, absolved his
+subjects from their allegiance, proclaimed a crusade against him as an
+enemy to Christianity and the Church, and committed the execution of the
+sentence to the king of the French. John met the announcement of this
+step with the same scorn as before. His insolent disdain suffered the
+Roman legate, Cardinal Pandulf, to proclaim his deposition to his face at
+Northampton. When Philip collected an army for an attack on England an
+enormous host gathered at the king's call on Barham Down; and the English
+fleet dispelled all danger of invasion by crossing the Channel, by
+capturing a number of French ships, and by burning Dieppe.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John's Submission]
+
+But it was not in England only that the king showed his strength and
+activity. Vile as he was, John possessed in a high degree the political
+ability of his race, and in the diplomatic efforts with which he met the
+danger from France he showed himself his father's equal. The barons of
+Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the south. John bought the aid
+of the Count of Flanders on his northern border. The German king, Otto,
+pledged himself to bring the knighthood of Germany to support an invasion
+of France. But at the moment of his success in diplomacy John suddenly
+gave way. It was in fact the revelation of a danger at home which shook
+him from his attitude of contemptuous defiance. The bull of deposition
+gave fresh energy to every enemy. The Scotch king was in correspondence
+with Innocent. The Welsh princes who had just been forced to submission
+broke out again in war. John hanged their hostages, and called his host
+to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales, but the army met only to become
+a fresh source of danger. Powerless to oppose the king openly, the
+baronage had plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies. The
+hostility of Philip had dispelled their dread of isolated action; many
+indeed had even promised aid to the French king on his landing. John
+found himself in the midst of hidden enemies; and nothing could have
+saved him but the haste--whether of panic or quick decision--with which
+he disbanded his army and took refuge in Nottingham Castle. The arrest of
+some of the barons showed how true were his fears, for the heads of the
+French conspiracy, Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, at once fled
+over sea to Philip. His daring self-confidence, the skill of his
+diplomacy, could no longer hide from John the utter loneliness of his
+position. At war with Rome, with France, with Scotland, Ireland, and
+Wales, at war with the Church, he saw himself disarmed by this sudden
+revelation of treason in the one force left at his disposal. With
+characteristic suddenness he gave way. He endeavoured by remission of
+fines to win back his people. He negotiated eagerly with the Pope,
+consented to receive the Archbishop, and promised to repay the money he
+had extorted from the Church.
+
+[Sidenote: John becomes vassal of Rome]
+
+But the shameless ingenuity of the king's temper was seen in his resolve
+to find in his very humiliation a new source of strength. If he yielded
+to the Church he had no mind to yield to the rest of his foes; it was
+indeed in the Pope who had defeated him that he saw the means of baffling
+their efforts. It was Rome that formed the link between the varied
+elements of hostility which combined against him. It was Rome that gave
+its sanction to Philip's ambition and roused the hopes of Scotch and
+Welsh, Rome that called the clergy to independence, and nerved the barons
+to resistance. To detach Innocent by submission from the league which
+hemmed him in on every side was the least part of John's purpose. He
+resolved to make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thunders on his
+foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy it had formed, in crushing
+the baronage, in oppressing the clergy, in paralyzing--as Rome only could
+paralyze--the energy of the Primate. That greater issues even than these
+were involved in John's rapid change of policy time was to show; but
+there is no need to credit the king with the foresight that would have
+discerned them. His quick versatile temper saw no doubt little save the
+momentary gain. But that gain was immense. Nor was the price as hard to
+pay as it seems to modern eyes. The Pope stood too high above earthly
+monarchs, his claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed them,
+were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate business and interests
+of the day, to make the owning of his suzerainty any very practical
+burthen. John could recall a time when his father was willing to own the
+same subjection as that which he was about to take on himself. He could
+recall the parallel allegiance which his brother had pledged to the
+Emperor. Shame indeed there must be in any loss of independence, but in
+this less than any, and with Rome the shame of submission had already
+been incurred. But whatever were the king's thoughts his act was
+decisive. On the 15th of May 1213 he knelt before the legate Pandulf,
+surrendered his kingdom to the Roman See, took it back again as a
+tributary vassal, swore fealty and did liege homage to the Pope.
+
+[Sidenote: Its Results]
+
+In after times men believed that England thrilled at the news with a
+sense of national shame such as she had never felt before. "He has become
+the Pope's man" the whole country was said to have murmured; "he has
+forfeited the very name of king; from a free man he has degraded himself
+into a serf." But this was the belief of a time still to come when the
+rapid growth of national feeling which this step and its issues did more
+than anything to foster made men look back on the scene between John and
+Pandulf as a national dishonour. We see little trace of such a feeling in
+the contemporary accounts of the time. All seem rather to have regarded
+it as a complete settlement of the difficulties in which king and kingdom
+were involved. As a political measure its success was immediate and
+complete. The French army at once broke up in impotent rage, and when
+Philip turned on the enemy John had raised up for him in Flanders, five
+hundred English ships under the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the fleet
+which accompanied the French army along the coast and utterly destroyed
+it. The league which John had so long matured at once disclosed itself.
+Otto, reinforcing his German army by the knighthood of Flanders and
+Boulogne as well as by a body of mercenaries in the pay of the English
+king, invaded France from the north. John called on his baronage to
+follow him over sea for an attack on Philip from the south.
+
+[Sidenote: Geoffry Fitz-Peter]
+
+Their plea that he remained excommunicate was set aside by the arrival of
+Langton and his formal absolution of the king on a renewal of his
+coronation oath and a pledge to put away all evil customs. But the barons
+still stood aloof. They would serve at home, they said, but they refused
+to cross the sea. Those of the north took a more decided attitude of
+opposition. From this point indeed the northern barons begin to play
+their part in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies, Percies,
+Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those of de Ros or de Vaux, all had
+sprung to greatness on the ruins of the Mowbrays and the great houses of
+the Conquest, and had done service to the Crown in its strife with the
+older feudatories. But loyal as was their tradition they were English to
+the core; they had neither lands nor interest over sea, and they now
+declared themselves bound by no tenure to follow the king in foreign
+wars. Furious at this check to his plans John marched in arms northwards
+to bring these barons to submission. But he had now to reckon with a new
+antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter. Geoffry had hitherto
+bent to the king's will; but the political sagacity which he drew from
+the school of Henry the Second in which he had been trained showed him
+the need of concession, and his wealth, his wide kinship, and his
+experience of affairs gave his interposition a decisive weight. He seized
+on the political opportunity which was offered by the gathering of a
+Council at St. Albans at the opening of August with the purpose of
+assessing the damages done to the Church. Besides the bishops and barons,
+a reeve and his four men were summoned to this Council from each royal
+demesne, no doubt simply as witnesses of the sums due to the plundered
+clergy. Their presence however was of great import. It is the first
+instance which our history presents of the summons of such
+representatives to a national Council, and the instance took fresh weight
+from the great matters which came to be discussed. In the king's name the
+Justiciar promised good government for the time to come, and forbade all
+royal officers to practise extortion as they prized life and limb. The
+king's peace was pledged to those who had opposed him in the past; and
+observance of the laws of Henry the First was enjoined upon all within
+the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Stephen Langton]
+
+But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that English freedom was to find its
+champion and the baronage their leader. From the moment of his landing in
+England Stephen Langton had taken up the constitutional position of the
+Primate in upholding the old customs and rights of the realm against the
+personal despotism of the kings. As Anselm had withstood William the Red,
+as Theobald had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand and
+rescue his country from the tyranny of John. He had already forced him to
+swear to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor, in other words the
+traditional liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to sail for
+Poitou he compelled the king to deal with them not by arms but by process
+of law. But the work which he now undertook was far greater and weightier
+than this. The pledges of Henry the First had long been forgotten when
+the Justiciar brought them to light, but Langton saw the vast importance
+of such a precedent. At the close of the month he produced Henry's
+charter in a fresh gathering of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at once
+welcomed as a base for the needed reforms. From London Langton hastened
+to the king, whom he reached at Northampton on his way to attack the
+nobles of the north, and wrested from him a promise to bring his strife
+with them to legal judgement before assailing them in arms. With his
+allies gathering abroad John had doubtless no wish to be entangled in a
+long quarrel at home, and the Archbishop's mediation allowed him to
+withdraw with seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at Durham
+John marched hastily south again, and reached London in October. His
+Justiciar at once laid before him the claims of the Councils of St.
+Alban's and St. Paul's; but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed
+him from the pressure which his minister was putting upon him. "Now, by
+God's feet," cried John, "I am for the first time King and Lord of
+England," and he entrusted the vacant justiciarship to a Poitevin, Peter
+des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony with
+his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the Archbishop to the
+front, and Langton at once demanded the king's assent to the charter of
+Henry the First. In seizing on this charter as a basis for national
+action Langton showed a political ability of the highest order. The
+enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed showed the sagacity with
+which the Archbishop had chosen his ground. From that moment the baronage
+was no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a sense of common
+wrong or a vague longing for common deliverance: they were openly united
+in a definite claim of national freedom and national law.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Bouvines]
+
+John could as yet only meet the claim by delay. His policy had still to
+wait for its fruits at Rome, his diplomacy to reap its harvest in
+Flanders, ere he could deal with England. From the hour of his submission
+to the Papacy his one thought had been that of vengeance on the barons
+who, as he held, had betrayed him; but vengeance was impossible till he
+should return a conqueror from the fields of France. It was a sense of
+this danger which nerved the baronage to their obstinate refusal to
+follow him over sea: but furious as he was at their resistance, the
+Archbishop's interposition condemned John still to wait for the hour of
+his revenge. In the spring of 1214 he crossed with what forces he could
+gather to Poitou, rallied its nobles round him, passed the Loire in
+triumph, and won back again Angers, the home of his race. At the same
+time Otto and the Count of Flanders, their German and Flemish knighthood
+strengthened by reinforcements from Boulogne as well as by a body of
+English troops under the Earl of Salisbury, threatened France from the
+north. For the moment Philip seemed lost: and yet on the fortunes of
+Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in this crisis of her
+fate, France was true to herself and her king. From every borough of
+Northern France the townsmen marched to his rescue, and the village
+priests led their flocks to battle with the Church-banners flying at
+their head. The two armies met at the close of July near the bridge of
+Bouvines, between Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day went
+against the allies. The Flemish knights were the first to fly; then the
+Germans in the centre of the host were crushed by the overwhelming
+numbers of the French; last of all the English on the right of it were
+broken by a fierce onset of the Bishop of Beauvais who charged mace in
+hand and struck the Earl of Salisbury to the ground. The news of this
+complete overthrow reached John in the midst of his triumphs in the
+South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at once deserted by
+the Poitevin nobles; and a hasty retreat alone enabled him to return in
+October, baffled and humiliated, to his island kingdom.
+
+[Sidenote: Rising of the Baronage]
+
+His return forced on the crisis to which events had so long been
+drifting. The victory at Bouvines gave strength to his opponents. The
+open resistance of the northern barons nerved the rest of their order to
+action. The great houses who had cast away their older feudal traditions
+for a more national policy were drawn by the crisis into close union with
+the families which had sprung from the ministers and councillors of the
+two Henries. To the first group belonged such men as Saher de Quinci, the
+Earl of Winchester, Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the Earl of
+Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin, William Mallet, the houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant.
+Among the second group were Henry Bohun and Roger Bigod, the Earls of
+Hereford and Norfolk, the younger William Marshal, and Robert de Vere.
+Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the command of their united force,
+represented both parties equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house
+of Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard de Lucy, had
+been his grandfather. Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these
+nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John's
+delays. If he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make war
+on him till he confirmed them by Charter under the king's seal, and they
+parted to raise forces with the purpose of presenting their demands at
+Christmas. John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy
+of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election, while he
+embittered still more the strife with his nobles by demanding scutage
+from the northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou. But the
+barons were now ready to act, and early in January in the memorable year
+1215 they appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands
+before the king.
+
+[Sidenote: John deserted]
+
+John was taken by surprise. He asked for a truce till Easter-tide, and
+spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the blow. Again he offered
+freedom to the Church, and took vows as a Crusader against whom war was a
+sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance and fealty
+from the whole body of his subjects. But month after month only showed
+the king the uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was with
+him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of aid from
+Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his cause at the
+shire-courts brought back news that no man would help him against the
+charter that the barons claimed: and his efforts to detach the clergy
+from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The nation was against
+the king. He was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers
+still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival,
+Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the
+administrative school of his father and who, dissent as they might from
+John's mere oppression, still looked on the power of the Crown as the one
+barrier against feudal anarchy: and beside them stood some of the great
+nobles of royal blood, his father's bastard Earl William of Salisbury,
+his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a
+grandson of Henry the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of
+Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the
+elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the rising of the
+younger Henry against Henry the Second, and stood by him as he died; he
+had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the outlawry of
+John. He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course,
+to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking
+from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and
+looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to
+bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.
+
+[Sidenote: John yields]
+
+But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him rather as
+mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with the demands of the
+barons when the delay which had been granted was over and the nobles
+again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their
+claims before the King. Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely
+despotic idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the
+passionate surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask
+for my kingdom?" he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will
+make me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's
+court had done their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry,
+they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. Richard and John
+both held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law of the
+land; and to fetter that will by the customs and franchises which were
+embodied in the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of
+his rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of his
+people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the close of May
+London threw open her gates to the forces of the barons, now arrayed
+under Robert Fitz-Walter as "Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church."
+Exeter and Lincoln followed the example of the capital; promises of aid
+came from Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
+Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the nobles who
+had as yet clung to the king, but whose hopes of conciliation were
+blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the summons of the "Army of
+God." Pandulf indeed and Archbishop Langton still remained with John, but
+they counselled, as Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counselled, his
+acceptance of the Charter. None in fact counselled its rejection save his
+new Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners who
+knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But even the number
+of these was small; there was a moment when John found himself with but
+seven knights at his back and before him a nation in arms. Quick as he
+was, he had been taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the
+short respite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
+mercenaries to his aid and appealed to his new suzerain, the Pope.
+Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart, John
+bowed to necessity and called the barons to a conference on an island in
+the Thames, between Windsor and Staines, near a marshy meadow by the
+river side, the meadow of Runnymede. The king encamped on one bank of the
+river, the barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their
+delegates met on the 15th of June in the island between them, but the
+negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of unconditional
+submission. The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to in a single
+day.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Charter]
+
+Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathedrals and
+churches, and one copy may still be seen in the British Museum, injured
+by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown,
+shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the
+earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes
+and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age
+men have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in itself
+the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new
+constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the First formed the
+basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal
+recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by
+Henry the Second. What was new in it was its origin. In form, like the
+Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In
+actual fact it was a treaty between the whole English people and its
+king. In it England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
+nation bound together by common national interests, by a common national
+sympathy. In words which almost close the Charter, the "community of the
+whole land" is recognized as the great body from which the restraining
+power of the baronage takes its validity. There is no distinction of
+blood or class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble. All are
+recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.
+Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not of
+baron and churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, of
+townsman and villein. The provisions against wrong and extortion which
+the barons drew up as against the king for themselves they drew up as
+against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on
+Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone
+before. The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for
+precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the
+older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold
+the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of
+written and defined law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks
+the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the
+nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of
+written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.
+
+Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had shown its power of
+self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which
+recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form. But all
+vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of
+Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and
+property, to good government. "No freeman," ran a memorable article that
+lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be seized or
+imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin:
+we will not go against any man nor send against him, save by legal
+judgement of his peers or by the law of the land." "To no man will we
+sell," runs another, "or deny, or delay, right or justice." The great
+reforms of the past reigns were now formally recognized; judges of assize
+were to hold their circuits four times in the year, and the King's Court
+was no longer to follow the king in his wanderings over the realm but to
+sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was a small
+danger compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and his
+predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of the scutage which Henry
+the Second had introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom.
+He had restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often abolished, under the
+new name of "carucage," had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the
+plate of the churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
+raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his
+pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met this
+abuse by a provision on which our constitutional system rests. "No
+scutage or aid [other than the three customary feudal aids] shall be
+imposed in our realm save by the common council of the realm"; and to
+this Great Council it was provided that prelates and the greater barons
+should be summoned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the
+sheriffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
+what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the definition
+turned it into a national right, a right so momentous that on it rests
+our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baronage seem to have been
+startled when they realized the extent of their claim; and the provision
+was dropped from the later issue of the Charter at the outset of the next
+reign. But the clause brought home to the nation at large their
+possession of a right which became dearer as years went by. More and more
+clearly the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
+of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England fought
+for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hampden. It was the
+establishment of this right which established English freedom.
+
+The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they claimed for the
+nation at large. The boon of free and unbought justice was a boon for
+all, but a special provision protected the poor. The forfeiture of the
+freeman on conviction of felony was never to include his tenement, or
+that of the merchant his wares, or that of the countryman, as Henry the
+Second had long since ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood
+were to be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, the
+exaction of forced labour, by royal officers was forbidden; and the
+abuses of the forest system were checked by a clause which disafforested
+all forests made in John's reign. The under-tenants were protected
+against all lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms
+as these were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown. The
+towns were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their
+freedom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common
+deliberation, of regulation of trade. "Let the city of London have all
+its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water.
+Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and
+towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." The
+influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments by which
+freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign merchants, and an
+uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced throughout
+the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Innocent annuls the Charter]
+
+There remained only one question, and that the most difficult of all; the
+question how to secure this order which the Charter established in the
+actual government of the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate
+abuses; the hostages were restored to their homes, the foreigners
+banished by a clause in the Charter from the country. But it was less
+easy to provide means for the control of a king whom no man could trust.
+By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-five barons
+were to be chosen from the general body of their order to enforce on John
+the observance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the
+king should its provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the
+Charter should not only be published throughout the whole country but
+sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by order from the king.
+"They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a burst of
+fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his
+impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of which
+he was a master. After a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for
+months along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid he had
+solicited from Rome and from the Continent. It was not without definite
+purpose that he had become the vassal of the Papacy. While Innocent was
+dreaming of a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its head to enforce
+justice and religion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal
+protection would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would. The
+thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the
+armies of England are at hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a
+Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. His envoys were already at Rome,
+pleading for a condemnation of the Charter. The after action of the
+Papacy shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English freedom.
+But he was indignant that a matter which might have been brought before
+his court of appeal as overlord should have been dealt with by armed
+revolt, and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal
+tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the king who submitted to
+his justice. He annulled the Great Charter by a bull in August, and at
+the close of the year excommunicated the barons.
+
+[Sidenote: Landing of Lewis]
+
+His suspension of Stephen Langton from the exercise of his office as
+Primate was a more fatal blow. Langton hurried to Rome, and his absence
+left the barons without a head at a moment when the very success of their
+efforts was dividing them. Their forces were already disorganized when
+autumn brought a host of foreign soldiers from over sea to the king's
+standard. After starving Rochester into submission John found himself
+strong enough to march ravaging through the Midland and Northern
+counties, while his mercenaries spread like locusts over the whole face
+of the land. From Berwick the king turned back triumphant to coop up his
+enemies in London while fresh Papal excommunications fell on the barons
+and the city. But the burghers set Innocent at defiance. "The ordering of
+secular matters appertaineth not to the Pope," they said, in words that
+seem like mutterings of the coming Lollardism; and at the advice of Simon
+Langton, the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out and mass was
+celebrated as before. Success however was impossible for the
+undisciplined militia of the country and the towns against the trained
+forces of the king, and despair drove the barons to listen to Fitz-Walter
+and the French party in their ranks, and to seek aid from over sea.
+Philip had long been waiting the opportunity for his revenge upon John.
+In the April of 1216 his son Lewis accepted the crown in spite of
+Innocent's excommunications, and landed soon after in Kent with a
+considerable force. As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries
+who constituted John's host refused to fight against the French sovereign
+and the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. Deserted by the
+bulk of his troops, the king was forced to fall rapidly back on the Welsh
+Marches, while his rival entered London and received the submission of
+the larger part of England. Only Dover held out obstinately against
+Lewis. By a series of rapid marches John succeeded in distracting the
+plans of the barons and in relieving Lincoln; then after a short stay at
+Lynn he crossed the Wash in a fresh movement to the north. In crossing
+however his army was surprised by the tide, and his baggage with the
+royal treasures washed away. Fever seized the baffled tyrant as he
+reached the Abbey of Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed by a
+gluttonous debauch, and on the 19th of October John breathed his last at
+Newark.
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME I (OF 8)***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of the English People, Volume I (of 8), by John Richard Green</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume I (of
+8), by John Richard Green</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p class="noindent">Title: History of the English People, Volume I (of 8)</p>
+<p class="noindent">       Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216</p>
+<p class="noindent">Author: John Richard Green</p>
+<p class="noindent">Release Date: November 9, 2005  [eBook #17037]<br>
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008</p>
+<p class="noindent">Language: English</p>
+<p class="noindent">Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p class="noindent">***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME I (OF 8)***</p>
+<br><br>
+<h4>E-text prepared by Paul Murray<br>
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br>
+    (https://www.pgdp.net/)</h4>
+<br><br>
+<table border=0 bgcolor="ddddee" cellpadding=10>
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+		The index for the entire 8 volume
+		set of <i>History of the English People</i> was located
+		at the end of Volume VIII. For ease in
+		accessibility, it has been removed and produced as a
+		separate volume
+		(<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533">https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533</a>).	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<br><br>
+<hr class="pg" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="TOP"></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<span class="main">HISTORY<br>OF<br>THE ENGLISH PEOPLE</span>
+<span class="sub">VOLUME I</span>
+    <div class="byline">BY <span class="docauthor">JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.<br>HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD</span>
+</div>
+<ul>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522746"></a>EARLY ENGLAND, 449-1071</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522752"></a>FOREIGN KINGS, 1071-1204</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522758"></a>THE CHARTER, 1204-1216</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522778"></a><i>First Edition, Demy 8vo, November</i> 1877;<br>
+</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522794"></a><i>Reprinted December</i> 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.<br>
+</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4522810"></a><i>Eversley Edition,</i> 1895.<br>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co.
+and New York
+1895
+</div>
+
+<div class="center">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="front.1_div.1"></a>
+</div>
+<p>
+I Dedicate this Book
+</p>
+
+<p>
+TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS<br>
+MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
+</p>
+
+<p>
+EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN<br>
+AND<br>
+WILLIAM STUBBS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="toc"><div class="chapters">
+<hr>
+<div class="header">CONTENTS</div>
+<table summary="Table of contents">
+<tr class="volume"><td><a href="#Vol1">VOLUME I</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="book">
+<td><a href="#Bk1">BOOK I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1">EARLY ENGLAND</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1">449-1071</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Auth"> </a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Auth">AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Auth">449-1071</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch1">CHAPTER I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch1">THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch1">449-577</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch2">CHAPTER II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch2">THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch2">577-796</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch3">CHAPTER III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch3">WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch3">796-947</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch4">FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk1-Ch4">954-1071</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="book">
+<td><a href="#Bk2">BOOK II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2">ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2">1071-1204</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Auth"> </a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Auth">AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Auth">1071-1204</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch1">CHAPTER I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch1">THE CONQUEROR</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch1">1071-1085</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch2">CHAPTER II</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch2">THE NORMAN KINGS</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch2">1085-1154</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch3">CHAPTER III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch3">HENRY THE SECOND</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch3">1154-1189</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch4">THE ANGEVIN KINGS</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk2-Ch4">1189-1204</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="book">
+<td><a href="#Bk3">BOOK III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3">THE CHARTER</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3">1204-1307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Auth"> </a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Auth">AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Auth">1204-1307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch1">CHAPTER I</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch1">JOHN</a></td>
+<td><a href="#Bk3-Ch1">1204-1216</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="toc"><div class="maps">
+<hr>
+<div class="header">LIST OF MAPS</div>
+<table summary="List of maps">
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v1-map-1.png">Britain and the English Conquest</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v1-map-2.jpg">The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v1-map-3.jpg">England and the Danelaw</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v1-map-4.jpg">The Dominions of the Angevins</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td><a href="images/v1-map-5.jpg">Ireland just before the English Invasion</a></td></tr>
+<tr class="figure"><td></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<div class="volume">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Vol1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4518064"></a>VOLUME I</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4518111"></a>BOOK I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518117"></a>EARLY ENGLAND</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4518123"></a>449-1071</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-003"></a>1-003]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1-Auth"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4517893"></a> </li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4517898"></a>AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4517904"></a>449-1071</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities
+are scant and imperfect. The only extant British account
+is the "Epistola" of Gildas, a work written probably about
+A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and inflated, but
+his book is of great value in the light it throws on the state
+of the island at that time, and above all as the one record
+of the conquest which we have from the side of the conquered.
+The English conquerors, on the other hand, have
+left jottings of their conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex
+in the curious annals which form the opening of the
+compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon
+Chronicle," annals which are undoubtedly historic, though
+with a slight mythical intermixture. For the history of
+the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast
+we possess no written materials from either side; and a
+fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the
+later compilation ("Historia Britonum") which bears the
+name of Nennius alone throws light on the conquest of the
+North.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has
+succeeded by a wonderful combination of historical and
+archæological knowledge in constructing a narrative of the
+conquest of Southern and South-Western Britain which
+must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-004"></a>1-004]</span>
+
+<p>
+This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of
+the account given in my text; and I can only trust that it may
+soon be embodied in some more accessible form than that of
+a series of papers in the Transactions of the Archæological
+Institute. In a like way, though Kemble's "Saxons in
+England" and Sir F. Palgrave's "History of the English
+Commonwealth" (if read with caution) contain much that
+is worth notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution
+of the English people and the changes introduced into it
+since their settlement in Britain must be mainly drawn from
+the "Constitutional History" of Professor Stubbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bæda's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum," a work
+of which I have spoken in my text, is the primary authority
+for the history of the Northumbrian overlordship which
+followed the Conquest. It is by copious insertions from
+Bæda that the meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the
+West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which
+they at present appear in the part of the English Chronicle
+which concerns this period. The life of Wilfrid by Eddi,
+with those of Cuthbert by an anonymous contemporary and
+by Bæda himself, throws great light on the religious and
+intellectual condition of the North at the time of its
+supremacy. But with the fall of Northumbria we pass into
+a period of historical dearth. A few incidents of Mercian
+history are preserved among the meagre annals of Wessex in
+the English Chronicle: but for the most part we are thrown
+upon later writers, especially Henry of Huntingdon and
+William of Malmesbury, who, though authors of the twelfth
+century, had access to older materials which are now lost.
+A little may be gleaned from biographies such as that of
+Guthlac of Crowland; but the letters of Boniface and
+Alcwine, which have been edited by Jaffé in his series of
+"Monumenta Germanica," form the most valuable contemporary
+materials for this period.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the
+English Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we
+have said, is a compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of
+the Conquest of South Britain, and (2) Short Notices of the
+Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded by copious insertions
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-005"></a>1-005]</span>
+
+from Bæda, and after the end of his work by brief additions
+from some northern sources. These materials may have
+been thrown together into their present form in Ælfred's
+time as a preface to the far fuller annals which begin with
+the reign of Æthelwulf, and which widen into a great
+contemporary history when they reach that of Ælfred himself.
+After Ælfred's day the Chronicle varies much in value.
+Through the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a
+Mercian Chronicle is imbedded in it: it then dies down into
+a series of scant and jejune entries, broken however with
+grand battle-songs, till the reign of Æthelred when its
+fulness returns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable
+mass of historical material for the age of Ælfred and his
+successors. The life of Ælfred which bears the name of
+Asser, puzzling as it is in some ways, is probably really
+Asser's work, and certainly of contemporary authority. The
+Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears the
+name of Æthelweard adds a little to our acquaintance with
+this time. The Laws, which form the base of our constitutional
+knowledge of this period, fall, as has been well
+pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
+Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the
+earlier laws of Æthelberht and Ine, "mainly of the nature
+of amendments of custom." Those of Ælfred, Æthelred,
+Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the
+Confessor, "aspire to the character of Codes." They are
+printed in Mr. Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes
+of England," but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs
+in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly bears
+on our constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters
+and other documents belonging to this period has been
+collected by Kemble in his "Codex Diplomaticus Ævi
+Saxonici," and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in his
+"Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum." Dunstan's biographies have
+been collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series
+published by the Master of the Rolls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the period which follows the accession of Æthelred
+we are still aided by these collections of royal Laws and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-006"></a>1-006]</span>
+
+Charters, and the English Chronicle becomes of great
+importance. Its various copies indeed differ so much in tone
+and information from one another that they may to some
+extent be looked upon as distinct works, and "Florence of
+Worcester" is probably the translation of a valuable copy
+of the "Chronicle" which has disappeared. The translation
+however was made in the twelfth century, and it is coloured
+by the revival of national feeling which was characteristic
+of the time. Of Eadward the Confessor himself we have
+a contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard for the
+Master of the Rolls) which throws great light on the personal
+history of the King and on his relations to the house
+of Godwine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of
+St. Quentin, a verbose and confused writer, whose work
+was abridged and continued by William of Jumièges, a
+contemporary of the Conqueror. William's work in turn
+served as the basis of the "Roman de Rou" composed by
+Wace in the time of Henry the Second. The primary
+authority for the Conqueror himself is the "Gesta Willelmi"
+of his chaplain and violent partizan, William of Poitiers.
+For the period of the invasion, in which the English authorities
+are meagre, we have besides these the contemporary
+"Carmen de Bello Hastingensi," by Guy, Bishop of Amiens,
+and the pictures in the Bayeux Tapestry. Orderic, a writer
+of the twelfth century, gossipy and confused but honest
+and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement
+in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in
+his account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among
+secondary authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of
+Durham is useful for northern matters, and William of
+Malmesbury worthy of note for his remarkable combination
+of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of
+course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief
+documents for the early history of Anjou have been collected
+in the "Chroniques d'Anjou" published by the Historical
+Society of France. Those which are authentic are little
+more than a few scant annals of religious houses; but light
+is thrown on them by the contemporary French chronicles.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-007"></a>1-007]</span>
+
+The "Gesta Consulum" is nothing but a compilation of the
+twelfth century, in which a mass of Angevin romance as
+to the early story of the Counts is dressed into historical
+shape by copious quotations from these French historians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our
+earlier history when historical criticism has done more than
+has yet been done for the materials given us by Ireland and
+Wales. For Welsh history the "Brut y Tywysogion" and
+the "Annales Cambriæ" are now accessible in the series
+published by the Master of the Rolls; the "Chronicle of
+Caradoc of Lancarvan" is translated by Powel; the Mabinogion,
+or Romantic Tales, have been published by Lady
+Charlotte Guest; and the Welsh Laws collected by the
+Record Commission. The importance of these, as embodying
+a customary code of very early date, will probably be
+better appreciated when we possess the whole of the Brehon
+Laws, the customary laws of Ireland, which are now being
+issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to which attention
+has justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine ("Early History
+of Institutions") as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest
+antiquity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The enormous mass of materials which exists for the
+early history of Ireland, various as they are in critical
+value, may be seen in Mr. O'Curry's "Lectures on the
+Materials of Ancient Irish History"; and they may be
+conveniently studied by the general reader in the "Annals
+of the Four Masters," edited by Dr. O'Donovan. But this
+is a mere compilation (though generally a faithful one)
+made about the middle of the seventeenth century from
+earlier sources, two of which have been published in the
+Rolls series. One, the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the
+Gaill," is an account of the Danish wars which may have
+been written in the eleventh century; the other, the
+"Annals of Loch Cé," is a chronicle of Irish affairs from
+the end of the Danish wars to 1590. The "Chronicon
+Scotorum" (in the same series) extends to the year 1150,
+and though composed in the seventeenth century is valuable
+from the learning of its author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The
+works of Colgan are to Irish church affairs what the "Annals
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-008"></a>1-008]</span>
+
+of the Four Masters" are to Irish civil history. They
+contain a vast collection of translations and transcriptions
+of early saints' lives, from those of Patrick downwards.
+Adamnan's "Life of Columba" (admirably edited by Dr.
+Beeves) supplies some details to the story of the
+Northumbrian kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we
+find the "Book of Rights," a summary of the dues and
+rights of the several over-kings and under-kings, of much
+earlier date probably than the Norman invasion; and
+Cormac's "Glossary," attributed to the tenth century and
+certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned
+of legal and social details, and something of the pagan
+religion of Ireland.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-009"></a>1-009]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1-Ch1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4532005"></a>CHAPTER I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4532010"></a>THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4532017"></a>449-577</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Old England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the fatherland of the English race we must
+look far away from England itself. In the fifth
+century after the birth of Christ the one country
+which we know to have borne the name of Angeln
+or the Engleland lay within the district which is
+now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the
+peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern
+seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered
+homesteads, its prim little townships looking down
+on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
+waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast
+with a sunless woodland broken here and there by
+meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
+sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem
+to have been merely an outlying fragment of what
+was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk of
+whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-010"></a>1-010]</span>
+
+and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons
+of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to
+the Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons
+stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the
+fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay
+another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is
+still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle,
+Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
+branch of the Teutonic family; and at
+the moment when history discovers them they
+were being drawn together by the ties of a common
+blood, common speech, common social and political
+institutions. There is little ground indeed for
+believing that the three tribes looked on themselves
+as one people, or that we can as yet apply
+to them, save by anticipation, the common name
+of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to
+share in the conquest of the land in which we
+live; and it is from the union of all of them when
+its conquest was complete that the English people
+has sprung.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The English Village</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the temper and life of the folk in this older
+England we know little. But from the glimpses
+that we catch of it when conquest had brought
+them to the shores of Britain their political and
+social organization must have been that of the
+German race to which they belonged. In their
+villages lay ready formed the social and political
+life which is round us in the England of to-day.
+A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-011"></a>1-011]</span>
+
+fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark
+the "township," as the village was then called
+from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
+served as its simple fortification, formed a complete
+and independent body, though linked by ties
+which were strengthening every day to the townships
+about it and the tribe of which it formed a
+part. Its social centre was the homestead where
+the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the first
+English settlers in the waste, still handed down
+the blood and traditions of his fathers. Around
+this homestead or æthel, each in its little croft,
+stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls,
+men sprung, it may be, from descendants of the
+earliest settler who had in various ways forfeited
+their claim to a share in the original homestead,
+or more probably from incomers into the village
+who had since settled round it and been admitted
+to a share in the land and freedom of the
+community. The eorl was distinguished from his
+fellow villagers by his wealth and his nobler
+blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
+reverence; and it was from him and his fellow
+æthelings that host-leaders, whether of the village
+or the tribe, were chosen in times of war. But
+this claim to precedence rested simply on the free
+recognition of his fellow villagers. Within the
+township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It
+was the freeman who was the base of village
+society. He was the "free-necked man" whose
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-012"></a>1-012]</span>
+
+long hair floated over a neck which had never
+bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man"
+who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone
+preserved that right of self-redress or private war
+which in such a state of society formed the main
+check upon lawless outrage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Justice</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the English, as among all the races of
+mankind, justice had originally sprung from each
+man's personal action. There had been a time
+when every freeman was his own avenger. But
+even in the earliest forms of English society of
+which we find traces this right of self-defence was
+being modified and restricted by a growing sense
+of public justice. The "blood-wite" or compensation
+in money for personal wrong was the first
+effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private
+revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's
+limb had each on this system its legal price.
+"Eye for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for
+life," or for each fair damages. We see a further
+step towards the modern recognition of a wrong as
+done not to the individual man but to the people
+at large in another custom of early date. The
+price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer
+to the man he wronged, but by the family or
+house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of
+the wronged. Order and law were thus made to
+rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond
+which knit its families together; every outrage
+was held to have been done by all who were
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-013"></a>1-013]</span>
+
+linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to
+have been done against all who were linked in
+blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense
+of the value of the family bond as a means of
+restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the
+tribe as a whole did not as yet possess sprang the
+first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman
+was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him
+from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and
+to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were
+done. So fully was this principle recognized that
+even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen
+with crime his kinsfolk still remained
+in fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn
+oath of his innocence or his guilt that he had to
+stand or fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Land</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the blood-bond gave its first form to English
+justice, so it gave their first forms to English
+society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
+side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings
+of honour and discipline which held the host
+together were drawn from the common duty of
+every man in each little group of warriors to his
+house. And as they fought side by side on the
+field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil.
+Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing;
+and each "wick" or "ham" or "stead" or "tun"
+took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
+together in it. In this way the home or "ham"
+of the Billings was Billingham, and the "tun" or
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-014"></a>1-014]</span>
+
+township of the Harlings was Harlington. But in
+such settlements the tie of blood was widened into
+the larger tie of land. Land with the German
+race seems at a very early time to have become
+everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom.
+The freeman was strictly the free-holder, and the
+exercise of his full rights as a free member of the
+community to which he belonged became inseparable
+from the possession of his "holding" in it.
+But property had not as yet reached that stage of
+absolutely personal possession which the social
+philosophy of a later time falsely regarded as its
+earliest state. The woodland and pasture-land of
+an English village were still undivided, and every
+free villager had the right of turning into it his
+cattle or swine. The meadow-land lay in like
+manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
+spring. It was only when grass began to grow
+afresh that the common meadow was fenced off
+into grass-fields, one for each household in the
+village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and
+division were at an end again. The plough-land
+alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
+both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of
+the freemen, though even the plough-land was;
+subject to fresh division as the number of claimants
+grew greater or less.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Læt and Slave</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this sharing in the common land which
+marked off the freeman or ceorl from the unfree
+man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-015"></a>1-015]</span>
+
+As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who,
+whether from their earlier arrival or from kinship
+with the original settlers of the village, had been
+admitted to a share in its land and its corporate
+life, so the læt was a descendant of later comers to
+whom such a share was denied, or in some cases
+perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
+had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern
+sense of freedom the læt was free enough. He
+had house and home of his own, his life and limb
+were as secure as the ceorl's--save as against his
+lord; it is probable from what we see in later
+laws that as time went on he was recognized
+as a member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot,
+allowed equal right at law, and called like
+the full free man to the hosting. But he was
+unfree as regards lord and land. He had neither
+part nor lot in the common land of the village.
+The ground which he tilled he held of some
+freeman of the tribe to whom he paid rent
+in labour or in kind. And this man was his
+lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might
+gain in the general social life of his fellow
+villagers, he had no rights as against his lord.
+He could leave neither land nor lord at his will.
+He was bound to render due service to his lord in
+tillage or in fight. So long however as these services
+were done the land was his own. His lord could not
+take it from him; and he was bound to give him
+aid and protection in exchange for his services.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-016"></a>1-016]</span>
+
+<p>
+Far different from the position of the læt was
+that of the slave, though there is no ground for
+believing that the slave class was other than a
+small one. It was a class which sprang mainly
+from debt or crime. Famine drove men to "bend
+their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
+unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground
+his freeman's sword and spear, took up the
+labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
+within a master's hands. The criminal whose
+kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a
+crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes
+a father pressed by need sold children and wife
+into bondage. In any case the slave became part
+of the live stock of his master's estate, to be willed
+away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree
+was kept as carefully as his own. His children
+were bondsmen like himself; even a freeman's
+children by a slave mother inherited the mother's
+taint. "Mine is the calf that is born of my cow,"
+ran an English proverb. Slave cabins clustered
+round the homestead of every rich landowner;
+ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd
+and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hayward
+and woodward, were often slaves. It was not
+indeed slavery such as we have known in modern
+times, for stripes and bonds were rare: if the slave
+was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash.
+But his master could slay him if he would; it was
+but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-017"></a>1-017]</span>
+
+the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance
+or guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him,
+his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of wrong-doing,
+"his skin paid for him" under his master's
+lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed
+beast, and when caught he might be flogged to
+death. If the wrong-doer were a woman-slave she
+might be burned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Moot</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the public life of the village however the
+slave had nothing, the last in early days little, to
+do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
+villagers for justice and government, a slave had
+no place or voice, while the last was originally
+represented by the lord whose land he tilled. The
+life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely
+in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay
+round the moot-hill or the sacred tree where the
+community met from time to time to deal out its
+own justice and to make its own laws. Here new
+settlers were admitted to the freedom of the
+township, and bye-laws framed and headman and
+tithing-man chosen for its governance. Here
+plough-land and meadow-land were shared in due
+lot among the villagers, and field and homestead
+passed from man to man by the delivery of a turf
+cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer with
+farmer was settled according to the "customs" of
+the township as its elder men stated them, and
+four men were chosen to follow headman or
+ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-018"></a>1-018]</span>
+
+reverence such as is stirred by the sight of the
+head-waters of some mighty river that one looks
+back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick.
+It was here that England learned to be a "mother
+of Parliaments." It was in these tiny knots of
+farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were
+to spring learned the worth of public opinion, of
+public discussion, the worth of the agreement, the
+"common sense," the general conviction to which
+discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their
+force from being expressions of that general
+conviction. A humourist of our own day has laughed
+at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh
+has been echoed by some who have taken humour
+for argument. But talk is persuasion, and persuasion
+is force, the one force which can sway
+freemen to deeds such as those which have made
+England what she is. The "talk" of the village
+moot, the strife and judgement of men giving
+freely their own rede and setting it as freely aside
+for what they learn to be the wiser rede of other
+men, is the groundwork of English history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Folk</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Small therefore as it might be, the township or
+village was thus the primary and perfect type of
+English life, domestic, social, and political. All
+that England has been since lay there. But
+changes of which we know nothing had long before
+the time at which our history opens grouped these
+little commonwealths together in larger communities,
+whether we name them Tribe, People, or
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-019"></a>1-019]</span>
+
+Folk. The ties of race and kindred were no doubt
+drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization
+of each Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood
+mainly from war, from a common greed of conquest,
+a common need of defence. Its form at any rate
+was wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact
+the war-host, the gathering of every freeman of
+the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head
+who existed only so long as war went on, was the
+leader whom the host chose to command it. Its
+Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the
+host's council of war, the gathering of those
+ealdormen who had brought the men of their
+villages to the field. The host was formed by
+levies from the various districts of the tribe; the
+larger of which probably owed their name of
+"hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each
+originally sent to it. In historic times however
+the regularity of such a military organization, if it
+ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas
+varied with the varying customs of each district.
+But men, whether many or few, were still due
+from each district to the host, and a cry of war at
+once called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with
+their followers to the field.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The military organization of the tribe thus
+gave from the first its form to the civil organization.
+But the peculiar shape which its civil
+organization assumed was determined by a
+principle familiar to the Germanic races and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-020"></a>1-020]</span>
+
+destined to exercise a vast influence on the future
+of mankind. This was the principle of representation.
+The four or ten villagers who followed
+the reeve of each township to the general muster
+of the hundred were held to represent the whole
+body of the township from whence they came.
+Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing,
+their pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a
+moot which was made by this gathering of the
+representatives of the townships that lay within
+its bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal
+from the moots of each separate village as well as
+of arbitration in dispute between township and
+township. The judgement of graver crimes and of
+life or death fell to its share; while it necessarily
+possessed the same right of law-making for the
+hundred that the village-moot possessed for each
+separate village. And as hundred-moot stood
+above town-moot, so above the hundred-moot
+stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the
+people in arms, at once war-host and highest law-court
+and general Parliament of the tribe. But
+whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the
+principle of representation was preserved. In
+both the constitutional forms, the forms of
+deliberation and decision, were the same. In each
+the priests proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of
+higher blood spoke, groups of freemen from each
+township stood round, shaking their spears in
+assent, clashing shields in applause, settling
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-021"></a>1-021]</span>
+
+matters in the end by loud shouts of "Aye" or
+"Nay."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Social Life</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the social or the industrial life of our
+fathers in this older England we know less than
+of their political life. But there is no ground for
+believing them to have been very different in
+these respects from the other German peoples
+who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world.
+Though their border nowhere touched the border
+of the Empire they were far from being utterly
+strange to its civilization. Roman commerce
+indeed reached the shores of the Baltic, and we
+have abundant evidence that the arts and refinement
+of Rome were brought into contact with
+these earlier Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts,
+and shield-bosses which have been found in
+Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than
+the close of the third century, are clearly either
+of Roman make or closely modelled on Roman
+metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in
+Sleswick peat-mosses afford a yet more
+conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the
+Empire. But apart from these outer influences
+the men of the three tribes were far from
+being mere savages. They were fierce warriors,
+but they were also busy fishers and tillers of the
+soil, as proud of their skill in handling plough
+and mattock or steering the rude boat with which
+they hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in
+handling sword and spear.  They were hard
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-022"></a>1-022]</span>
+
+drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and
+the "ale-feast" was the centre of their social life.
+But coarse as the revel might seem to modern
+eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which
+rose in the midst of their villages was often
+Homeric in its simplicity and dignity. Queen or
+Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl
+or mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle
+of King or Ealdorman in the midst to the mead
+benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman
+sang the hero-songs of his race. Dress and
+arms showed traces of a love of art and beauty,
+none the less real that it was rude and incomplete.
+Rings, amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved
+in their workmanship the deftness of the goldsmith's
+art. Cloaks were often fastened with
+golden buckles of curious and exquisite form, set
+sometimes with rough jewels and inlaid with
+enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's
+helmet, the intricate adornment of the warrior's
+shield, tell like the honour in which the smith
+was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
+twisted glass goblets, so common in the
+early graves of Kent, are shewn by their form to
+be of English workmanship. It is only in the
+English pottery, hand-made, and marked with
+coarse zigzag patterns, that we find traces of
+utter rudeness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Religion</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The religion of these men was the same as
+that of the rest of the German peoples. Christianity
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-023"></a>1-023]</span>
+
+had by this time brought about the
+conversion of the Roman Empire, but it had not
+penetrated as yet among the forests of the north.
+The common God of the English people was
+Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways and
+boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
+the invention of letters, and whom every tribe
+held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Our
+own names for the days of the week still recall to
+us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their
+German homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day,
+as Thursday is the day of Thunder, the god of
+air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the
+deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose
+emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought
+increase to every field and stall they visited.
+Saturday may commemorate an obscure god Sætere;
+Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was
+death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the
+spring, lends her name to the Christian festival of
+the Resurrection. Behind these floated the dim
+shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the
+death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in
+the "Weird" of northern superstition; or the
+Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an
+old rime tells us, "wrought on the battle-field
+their toil and hurled the thrilling javelins."
+Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood
+and fell, or hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor,
+the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-024"></a>1-024]</span>
+
+"Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty
+shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later
+home in the "Weyland's smithy" of Berkshire;
+Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with
+that of Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of
+this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a priesthood;
+and though a priestly class existed it seems
+at no time to have had much weight among
+Englishmen. As each freeman was his own judge
+and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest;
+and English worship lay commonly in the
+sacrifice which the house-father offered to the
+gods of his hearth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The English Temper</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the
+worship of the older gods of flood and fell that
+we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
+The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of
+English poems, is as we have it now a poem of
+the eighth century, the work it may be of some
+English missionary of the days of Bæda and
+Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of
+his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the
+thin veil of Christianity which he has flung over
+it fades away as we follow the hero-legend of our
+fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
+their conception of life breathes through every
+line. Life was built with them not on the hope
+of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
+of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these
+fifty winters," sings the hero-king as he sits death-smitten
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-025"></a>1-025]</span>
+
+beside the dragon's mound. "Lives there
+no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of
+them--dare in the war-strife welcome my onset!
+Time's change and chances I have abided, held my
+own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never
+sware I falsely against right. So for all this may
+I glad be at heart now, sick though I sit here,
+wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such
+a temper, strong with the strength of manhood
+and full of the vigour and the love of life, the
+sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all
+woke chords of a pathetic poetry. "Soon will it
+be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness or
+sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the
+fire ring thee, or the flood whelm thee, or the
+sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age o'ertake
+thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in
+darkness." Strong as he might be, man struggled
+in vain with the doom that encompassed him, that
+girded his life with a thousand perils and broke
+it at so short a span. "To us," cries Beowulf in
+his last fight, "to us it shall be as our Weird
+betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!"
+But the sadness with which these Englishmen
+fronted the mysteries of life and death had
+nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids
+men eat and drink for to-morrow they die. Death
+leaves man man and master of his fate. The
+thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger
+than the thought of doom. "Well shall a man
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-026"></a>1-026]</span>
+
+do when in the strife he minds but of winning
+longsome renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death
+is better than life of shame!" cries Beowulf's
+sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife
+with the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life
+is short, the more cause to work bravely till it
+is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end
+of his life-work; let him that may work, work his
+doomed deeds ere death come!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">English Piracy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The energy of these peoples found vent in a
+restlessness which drove them to take part in
+the general attack of the German race on the
+Empire of Rome. For busy tillers and busy
+fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart
+fighters; and their world was a world of war.
+Tribe warred with tribe, and village with village;
+even within the village itself feuds parted
+household from household, and passions of hatred
+and vengeance were handed on from father to
+son. Their mood was above all a mood of fighting
+men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a
+dash of hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled
+by the virtues which spring from war, by personal
+courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high
+and stern sense of manhood and the worth of
+man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
+a characteristic of the race. War was the
+Englishman's "shield-play" and "sword-game"; the
+gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the
+rush of the host and the crash of its shield-line.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-027"></a>1-027]</span>
+
+Their arms and weapons, helmet and mailshirt,
+tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
+broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle,
+gathered to them much of the legend and the
+art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
+Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a
+living thing. And next to their love of war
+came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
+Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout
+the life that it pictures, we catch the salt whiff
+of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
+sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he
+plunged into the sea to meet walrus and sea-lion;
+he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy waters
+of the north. Hardly less than his love for the
+sea was the love he bore to the ship that traversed
+it. In the fond playfulness of English verse the
+ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked,"
+"like a bird" as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like
+a swan" as its curved prow breasted the "swan-road"
+of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their passion for the sea marked out for them
+their part in the general movement of the German
+nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
+advancing over mountain and plain the boats of
+the Englishmen pushed faster over the sea. Bands
+of English rovers, outdriven by stress of fight,
+had long found a home there, and lived as they
+could by sack of vessel or coast. Chance has
+preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-028"></a>1-028]</span>
+
+war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is
+flat-bottomed, seventy feet long and eight or nine feet
+wide, its sides of oak boards fastened with bark
+ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
+waves with a freight of warriors whose arms,
+axes, swords, lances, and knives, were found
+heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of
+the Middle Ages such boats could only creep
+cautiously along from harbour to harbour in
+rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness
+fitted them admirably for the piracy by which
+the men of these tribes were already making
+themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled
+them to beach the vessel on any fitting coast;
+and a step on shore at once transformed the boatmen
+into a war-band. From the first the daring
+of the English race broke out in the secrecy and
+suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the fierceness
+of their onset, in the careless glee with which
+they seized either sword or oar. "Foes are they,"
+sang a Roman poet of the time, "fierce beyond
+other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea
+is their school of war and the storm their friend;
+they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the
+world!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Britain</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay
+nearest to the Empire, and they were naturally
+the first to touch the Roman world; at the
+close of the third century indeed their boats
+appeared in such force in the English Channel as
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-029"></a>1-029]</span>
+
+to call for a special fleet to resist them. The
+piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to
+the shores of a land which, dear as it is now to
+Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by
+English feet. This land was Britain. When the
+Saxon boats touched its coast the island was the
+westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In
+the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of
+Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
+and a century after Cæsar's landing the Emperor
+Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was
+swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were
+over the bulk of the island had passed beneath
+the Roman sway and the Roman frontier had
+been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde.
+The work of civilization followed fast on the
+work of the sword. To the last indeed the distance
+of the island from the seat of empire left
+her less Romanized than any other province of
+the west. The bulk of the population scattered
+over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts
+to have clung to their old law as to their old
+language, and to have retained some traditional
+allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman
+civilization rested mainly on city life, and in
+Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly
+Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York,
+governed by their own municipal officers, guarded
+by massive walls, and linked together by a network
+of magnificent roads which reached from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-030"></a>1-030]</span>
+
+one end of the island to the other, manners,
+language, political life, all were of Rome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For three hundred years the Roman sword
+secured order and peace without Britain and
+within, and with peace and order came a wide
+and rapid prosperity. Commerce sprang up in
+ports amongst which London held the first rank;
+agriculture flourished till Britain became one of
+the corn-exporting countries of the world; the
+mineral resources of the province were explored
+in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
+Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines
+of the Forest of Dean. But evils which sapped
+the strength of the whole Empire told at last on
+the province of Britain. Wealth and population
+alike declined under a crushing system of taxation,
+under restrictions which fettered industry, under
+a despotism which crushed out all local
+independence. And with decay within came danger
+from without. For centuries past the Roman
+frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond
+it, the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian
+of the African desert, the German of the Danube
+or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from
+Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the
+Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
+from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the
+Highlands. It was this mass of savage barbarism
+which broke upon the Empire as it sank into
+decay. In its western dominions the triumph of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-031"></a>1-031]</span>
+
+these assailants was complete. The Franks conquered
+and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered
+and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded
+a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped
+in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone.
+The East-Goths ruled at last in Italy itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquests of Jute and Saxon</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was to defend Italy against the Goths that
+Rome in the opening of the fifth century withdrew
+her legions from Britain, and from that
+moment the province was left to struggle unaided
+against the Picts. Nor were these its only enemies.
+While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants
+then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the
+boats of Saxon pirates, as we have seen, were swarming
+off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
+thirty years Britain held bravely out against these
+assailants; but civil strife broke its powers of
+resistance, and its rulers fell back at last on the
+fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom
+while striving to avert it, the policy of matching
+barbarian against barbarian. By the usual promises
+of land and pay a band of warriors was
+drawn for this purpose from Jutland in 449 with
+two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at their head.
+If by English history we mean the history of
+Englishmen in the land which from that time they
+made their own, it is with this landing of Hengest's
+war-band that English history begins. They
+landed on the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a
+spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No spot can be so
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-032"></a>1-032]</span>
+
+sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt
+the tread of English feet. There is little to catch
+the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of ground
+with a few grey cottages dotted over it, cut off
+nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow
+and a sea-wall. But taken as a whole the scene
+has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
+white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the
+crescent of Pegwell Bay; far away to the left
+across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths
+mark the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the
+coast-line trends dimly towards Deal. Everything
+in the character of the spot confirms the national
+tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our
+fathers; for the physical changes of the country
+since the fifth century have told little on its main
+features. At the time of Hengest's landing a
+broad inlet of sea parted Thanet from the mainland
+of Britain; and through this inlet the pirate
+boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind
+to what was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v1-map-1.png"><img src="images/v1-map-1t.png" alt="Britain and the English Conquest"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+The work for which the mercenaries had been
+hired was quickly done; and the Picts are said to
+have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
+on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from
+the Pict was hardly over when danger came from
+the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
+have flocked from the Channel to their settlement
+in Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the
+mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-033"></a>1-033]</span>
+
+their first victory over the Britons in forcing their
+passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford.
+A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove
+the British forces in terror upon London; but the
+ground was soon won back again, and it was not
+till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had
+gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for
+a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however
+the overthrow was so terrible that from this
+moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems
+to have been abandoned, and it was only along its
+southern shore that the Britons held their ground.
+Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over,
+and with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls
+look from the slope to which they cling over the
+great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
+English conqueror was done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from
+the Jutes, the smallest of the three tribes who
+were to blend in the English people. But the
+greed of plunder now told on the great tribe
+which stretched from the Elbe to the Rhine, and
+in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly
+along the strip of land which lay westward of
+Kent between the weald and the sea. Nowhere
+has the physical aspect of the country more utterly
+changed. A vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and
+waste which then bore the name of the Andredsweald
+stretched for more than a hundred miles
+from the borders of Kent to the Hampshire
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-034"></a>1-034]</span>
+
+Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
+and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now
+bears the name of Sussex between its southern
+edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
+fortress which occupied the spot now called
+Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman
+Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of Anderida
+in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons.
+"Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran
+the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and slew
+all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one
+Briton left." But Hengest and Ælle's men had
+touched hardly more than the coast, and the true
+conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a
+fresh band of Saxons, a tribe known as the
+Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
+Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and
+pushed to the great downs or Gwent where Winchester
+offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the strife
+fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a
+decisive victory at Charford ended the struggle for
+the "Gwent" and set the crown of the West-Saxons
+on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt
+around it checked any further advance; and
+only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
+under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the
+invaders as they pressed westward through the
+Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
+Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed
+by a long pause in the Saxon advance from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-035"></a>1-035]</span>
+
+the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested
+a series of victories whose history is lost was
+giving to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast
+district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
+probable however that the strength of Camulodunum,
+the predecessor of our modern Colchester,
+made the progress of these assailants a slow and
+doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled
+the East-Saxons to occupy the territory to
+which they have given their name of Essex a line
+of woodland which has left its traces in Epping
+and Hainault Forests checked their further
+advance into the island.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquests of the Eagle</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though seventy years had passed since the
+victory of Aylesford only the outskirts of Britain
+were won. The invaders were masters as yet but
+of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From
+London to St. David's Head, from the Andredsweald
+to the Firth of Forth the country still
+remained unconquered: and there was little in
+the years which followed Arthur's triumph to
+herald that onset of the invaders which was soon
+to make Britain England. Till now its assailants
+had been drawn from two only of the three tribes
+whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from
+the Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of
+conquest was to be done by the third, by the
+tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen
+which was to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to
+stamp itself on the people which sprang from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-036"></a>1-036]</span>
+
+union of the conquerors as on the land that they
+won. The Engle had probably been settling for
+years along the coast of Northumbria and in the
+great district which was cut off from the rest of
+Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia.
+But it was not till the moment we have
+reached that the line of defences which had
+hitherto held the invaders at bay was turned by
+their appearance in the Humber and the Trent.
+This great river-line led like a highway into the
+heart of Britain; and civil strife seems to have
+broken the strength of British resistance. But of
+the incidents of this final struggle we know
+nothing. One part of the English force marched
+from the Humber over the Yorkshire wolds to
+found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans.
+Under the Empire political power had centred in
+the district between the Humber and the Roman
+wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain;
+villas of rich landowners studded the valley of the
+Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison maintained in
+the island lay camped along its northern border.
+But no record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or
+how the Engle made themselves masters of the
+uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
+settlements that we follow their march into the
+heart of Britain. Seizing the valley of the Don
+and whatever breaks there were in the woodland
+that then filled the space between the Humber
+and the Trent, the Engle followed the curve of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-037"></a>1-037]</span>
+
+the latter river, and struck along the line of its
+tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ,
+the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe
+known as the Middle-English, while a small body
+pushed further southwards, and under the name
+of "South-Engle" occupied the oolitic upland that
+forms our present Northamptonshire. But the
+mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line
+of the Trent and to have pushed westward to its
+head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and Tamworth
+mark the country of these western Englishmen,
+whose older name was soon lost in that of
+Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
+was in fact a new march or borderland between
+conqueror and conquered; for here the impenetrable
+fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
+Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire
+enabled the Briton to make a fresh and desperate
+stand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquests of West-Saxons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain
+by the Engle that roused the West-Saxons to a
+new advance. For thirty years they had rested
+inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in
+552 their capture of the hill-fort of Old Sarum
+threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs,
+and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in
+571 made them masters of the districts which now
+form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing
+along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at
+Barbury Hill they swooped at last from their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-038"></a>1-038]</span>
+
+uplands on the rich prey that lay along the
+Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities
+which had leagued under their British kings to
+resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an
+English victory at Deorham, and the line of the
+great western river lay open to the arms of the
+conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated
+to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town
+beside the Wrekin which has been recently brought
+again to light, went up in flames. The raid
+ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
+strength, but a British poet in verses still
+left to us sings piteously the death-song of
+Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the
+town of white stone gleaming among the green
+woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a
+heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered
+through halls he had known in happier days, the
+halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without
+light, without song," their stillness broken only
+by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has
+swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan
+the fair."
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-039"></a>1-039]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1-Ch2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4534534"></a>CHAPTER II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4534540"></a>THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4534546"></a>577-796</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Britain becomes England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the
+bulk of Britain was complete. Eastward of a line
+which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands
+of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire
+and the Forest of Arden to the Lower
+Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
+island had passed into English hands. Britain
+had in the main become England. And within
+this new England a Teutonic society was settled
+on the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest
+had yet gone it had been complete. Not a Briton
+remained as subject or slave on English ground.
+Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back
+from the land which their conquerors had won;
+and eastward of the border line which the English
+sword had drawn all was now purely English.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is this which distinguishes the conquest
+of Britain from that of other provinces of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-040"></a>1-040]</span>
+
+Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or
+that of Italy by the Lombards proved little more
+than a forcible settlement of the one or the other
+among tributary subjects who were destined in a
+long course of ages to absorb their conquerors.
+French is the tongue, not of the Frank, but of the
+Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the
+Lombard is all but unknown in Lombardy. But
+the English conquest of Britain up to the point
+which we have reached was a sheer dispossession
+of the people whom the English conquered. It
+was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
+times they seem to have been, were more fierce or
+more cruel than other Germans who attacked the
+Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
+they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were
+utterly strange to the Roman civilization. Saxon
+mercenaries are found as well as Frank mercenaries
+in the pay of Rome; and the presence of
+Saxon vessels in the Channel for a century before
+the descent on Britain must have familiarized its
+invaders with what civilization was to be found in
+the Imperial provinces of the West. What really
+made the difference between the fate of Britain
+and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
+stubborn courage of the British themselves. In
+all the world-wide struggle between Rome and
+the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
+fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native
+resistance met Frank or Visigoth save from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-041"></a>1-041]</span>
+
+brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
+popular revolt broke out against the rule of
+Odoacer or Theodoric in Italy. But in Britain
+the invader was met by a courage almost equal
+to his own. Instead of quartering themselves
+quietly, like their fellows abroad, on subjects who
+were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
+the English had to make every inch of Britain
+their own by hard fighting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This stubborn resistance was backed too by
+natural obstacles of the gravest kind. Elsewhere
+in the Roman world the work of the conquerors
+was aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal
+and Frank marched along Roman highways over
+ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed
+river or ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so
+doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain.
+But though Britain had long been Roman, her
+distance from the seat of Empire left her less
+Romanized than any other province of the West.
+Socially the Roman civilization had made little
+impression on any but the townsfolk, and the
+material civilization of the island was yet more
+backward than its social. Its natural defences
+threw obstacles in its invaders' way. In the
+forest belts which stretched over vast spaces of
+country they found barriers which in all cases
+checked their advance and in some cases finally
+stopped it. The Kentishmen and the South-Saxons
+were brought utterly to a standstill by the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-042"></a>1-042]</span>
+
+Andredsweald. The East-Saxons could never
+pierce the woods of their western border. The
+Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the
+Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long
+and terrible struggle that the West-Saxons could
+hew their way through the forests which sheltered
+the "Gwent" of the southern coast. Their attempt
+to break out of the circle of woodland which girt
+in the downs was in fact fruitless for thirty years;
+and in the height of their later power they were
+thrown back from the forests of Cheshire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Withdrawal of the Britons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only by realizing in this way the physical
+as well as the moral circumstances of Britain that
+we can understand the character of its earlier
+conquest. Field by field, town by town, forest by
+forest, the land was won. And as each bit of
+ground was torn away by the stranger, the Briton
+sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly
+and fight for the next. There is no need to
+believe that the clearing of the land meant so
+impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the
+men who held it. Slaughter there was, no doubt,
+on the battle-field or in towns like Anderida whose
+long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But
+for the most part the Britons were not slaughtered;
+they were defeated and drew back. Such a withdrawal
+was only made possible by the slowness of
+the conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of
+its defence which distinguishes the conquest of
+Britain from that of the other provinces of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-043"></a>1-043]</span>
+
+Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the
+resistance of the Britons was greater than that of
+the other provincials of Rome so the forces of their
+assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy
+than attack by land, and the numbers who were
+brought across by the boats of Hengest or Cerdic
+cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric
+or Chlodewig across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing
+in small parties, and but gradually reinforced
+by after-comers, the English invaders could only
+slowly and fitfully push the Britons back. The
+absence of any joint action among the assailants
+told in the same way. Though all spoke the same
+language and used the same laws, they had no such
+bond of political union as the Franks; and though
+all were bent on winning the same land, each band
+and each leader preferred their own separate
+course of action to any collective enterprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The English settlement</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under such conditions the overrunning of
+Britain could not fail to be a very different matter
+from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
+countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English
+conquest was may be seen from the fact that it
+took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
+sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain,
+and that the conquest of the bulk of the island
+was only wrought out after two centuries of bitter
+warfare. But it was just through the length of
+the struggle that of all the German conquests this
+proved the most thorough and complete. So far
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-044"></a>1-044]</span>
+
+as the English sword in these earlier days had
+reached, Britain had become England, a land, that
+is, not of Britons but of Englishmen. Even if
+a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves
+round the homesteads of their English conquerors,
+or a few of their household words mingled with
+the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as
+these leave the main facts untouched. The keynote
+of the conquest was firmly struck. When
+the English invasion was stayed for a while by the
+civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had
+disappeared from the greater part of the land which
+had been his own; and the tongue, the religion,
+the laws of his English conquerors reigned without
+a break from Essex to Staffordshire and from the
+British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v1-map-2.jpg"><img src="images/v1-map-2t.jpg" alt="The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+For the driving out of the Briton was, as we
+have seen, but a prelude to the settlement of his
+conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
+England is this, that it was the one purely German
+nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In
+other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though
+they were equally conquered by German peoples,
+religion, social life, administrative order, still
+remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
+province of the Empire where Rome died into a
+vague tradition of the past. The whole organization
+of government and society disappeared with the
+people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led
+to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-045"></a>1-045]</span>
+
+and down. The old divisions of the land remained
+to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new
+settlers. The Roman church, the Roman country-house,
+was left standing, though reft of priest and
+lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the
+coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics
+of our English fathers, but of a world which our
+fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its
+literature, its manners, its faith, went with it.
+Nothing was a stronger proof of the completeness
+of this destruction of all Roman life than the
+religious change which passed over the land.
+Alone among the German assailants of Rome the
+English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire
+they helped to overthrow. The new England was
+a heathen country. Homestead and boundary, the
+very days of the week, bore the names of new
+gods who displaced Christ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we stand amidst the ruins of town or
+country-house which recall to us the wealth and
+culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that
+a conquest which left them heaps of crumbling
+stones was other than a curse to the land over
+which it passed. But if the new England which
+sprang from the wreck of Britain seemed for the
+moment a waste from which the arts, the letters,
+the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly
+away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler
+life than that which had been destroyed. The
+base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-046"></a>1-046]</span>
+
+the Roman world was the slave, the peasant
+who had been crushed by tyranny, political and
+social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
+society was the freeman whom we have seen
+tilling, judging, or fighting for himself by the
+Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with
+the material civilization of Britain while the
+struggle went on, it was impossible that such a man
+could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
+sooner over than the warrior settled down into the
+farmer, and the home of the ceorl rose beside the
+heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site
+of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the
+English in the conquered land was nothing less
+than an absolute transfer of English society in its
+completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness
+of their advance, the small numbers of each
+separate band in its descent upon the coast, made
+it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
+to call to them when their work was done, the
+wives and children, the læt and slave, even the
+cattle they had left behind them. The first wave
+of conquest was but the prelude to the gradual
+migration of a whole people. It was England
+which settled down on British soil, England with
+its own language, its own laws, its complete social
+fabric, its system of village life and village culture,
+its township and its hundred, its principle of kinship,
+its principle of representation. It was not as
+mere pirates or stray war-bands, but as peoples
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-047"></a>1-047]</span>
+
+already made, and fitted by a common temper and
+common customs to draw together into our English
+nation in the days to come, that our fathers left
+their German home-land for the land in which we
+live. Their social and political organization
+remained radically unchanged. In each of the little
+kingdoms which rose on the wreck of Britain, the
+host camped on the land it had won, and the
+divisions of the host supplied here as in its older
+home the rough groundwork of local distribution.
+The land occupied by the hundred warriors who
+formed the unit of military organization became
+perhaps the local hundred; but it is needless to
+attach any notion of precise uniformity, either in
+the number of settlers or in the area of their
+settlement, to such a process as this, any more than
+to the army organization which the process of
+distribution reflected. From the large amount of
+public land which we find existing afterwards it
+has been conjectured with some probability that
+the number of settlers was far too small to occupy
+the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
+unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common
+property of the tribe as at a later time of the
+nation. What ground was actually occupied may
+have been assigned to each group and each family
+in the group by lot, and Eorl and Ceorl gathered
+round them their læt and slave as in their
+homeland by the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the
+English people passed to the shores of Britain all
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-048"></a>1-048]</span>
+
+that was to make Englishmen what they are. For
+distant and dim as their life in that older England
+may have seemed to us, the whole after-life of
+Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay
+our Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts
+our Chaucer and our Shakspere; in the pirate-bark
+stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
+our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully
+formed. Civilization, letters, science, religion
+itself, have done little to change the inner mood of
+Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of
+the sea and the fight, that trust in manhood and
+the might of man, that silent awe of the mysteries
+of life and death which lay deep in English souls
+then as now, passed with Englishmen to the land
+which Englishmen had won.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The King</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But though English society passed thus in its
+completeness to the soil of Britain, its primitive
+organization was affected in more ways than one
+by the transfer. In the first place conquest begat
+the King. It seems probable that the English
+had hitherto known nothing of kings in their own
+fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace
+time with the customary government of village-reeve
+and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan, while it
+gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom
+it chose for each campaign. But in the long and
+obstinate warfare which they waged against the
+Britons it was needful to find a common leader
+whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-049"></a>1-049]</span>
+
+as those of Wessex or Mercia might follow; and
+the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
+intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into
+a higher position than that of temporary chieftains.
+It was no doubt from this cause that we find
+Hengest and his son Æsc raised to the kingdom
+in Kent, or Ælle in Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric
+among the West Saxons. The association of son
+with father in this new kingship marked the
+hereditary character which distinguished it from
+the temporary office of an ealdorman. The change
+was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than
+the modern conception of kingship would lead us
+to imagine. Hereditary as the succession was
+within a single house, each successive king was
+still the free choice of his people, and for
+centuries to come it was held within a people's
+right to pass over a claimant too weak or too
+wicked for the throne. In war indeed the king
+was supreme. But in peace his power was narrowly
+bounded by the customs of his people and
+the rede of his wise men. Justice was not as yet
+the king's justice, it was the justice of village and
+hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot
+and folk-moot. It was only with the assent of the
+wise men that the king could make laws and
+declare war and assign public lands and name
+public officers. Above all, should his will be to
+break through the free customs of his people, he
+was without the means of putting his will into
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-050"></a>1-050]</span>
+
+action, for the one force he could call on was the
+host, and the host was the people itself in arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Thegn</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the new English king rose a new order
+of English nobles. The social distinction of the
+eorl was founded on the peculiar purity of his
+blood, on his long descent from the original settler
+around whom township and thorpe grew up. A
+new distinction was now to be found in service
+done to the king. From the earliest times of
+German society it had been the wont of young
+men greedy of honour or seeking training in arms
+to bind themselves as "comrades" to king or chief.
+The leader whom they chose gave them horses, arms,
+a seat in his mead hall, and gifts from his hoard.
+The "comrade" on the other hand--the gesith or
+thegn, as he was called--bound himself to follow
+and fight for his lord. The principle of personal
+dependence as distinguished from the warrior's
+general duty to the folk at large was embodied in
+the thegn. "Chieftains fight for victory," says
+Tacitus; "comrades for their chieftain." When
+one of Beowulf's "comrades" saw his lord hard
+bested "he minded him of the homestead he had
+given him, of the folk right he gave him as his
+father had it; nor might he hold back then."
+Snatching up sword and shield he called on his
+fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. "I mind
+me of the day," he cried, "when we drank the
+mead, the day we gave pledge to our lord in the
+beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-051"></a>1-051]</span>
+
+we would pay him back our war-gear, our helms
+and our hard swords, if need befel him. Unmeet
+is it, methinks, that we should bear back our
+shields to our home unless we guard our lord's
+life." The larger the band of such "comrades,"
+the more power and repute it gave their lord. It
+was from among the chiefs whose war-band was
+strongest that the leaders of the host were
+commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into
+kings, the number of their thegns naturally
+increased. The rank of the "comrades" too rose
+with the rise of their lord. The king's thegns
+were his body-guard, the one force ever ready to
+carry out his will. They were his nearest and
+most constant counsellors. As the gathering of
+petty tribes into larger kingdoms swelled the
+number of eorls in each realm, and in a corresponding
+degree diminished their social importance, it
+raised in equal measure the rank of the king's
+thegns. A post among them was soon coveted and
+won by the greatest and noblest in the land.
+Their service was rewarded by exemption from
+the general jurisdiction of hundred-court or shire-court,
+for it was part of a thegn's meed for his
+service that he should be judged only by the lord
+he served. Other meed was found in grants of
+public land which made them a local nobility, no
+longer bound to actual service in the king's
+household or the king's war-band, but still bound
+to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-052"></a>1-052]</span>
+
+those which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader
+of his tribe. In a word, thegnhood contained
+within itself the germ of that later feudalism which
+was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom
+out of which it grew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Bernicians</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the strife between the conquering tribes
+which at once followed on their conquest of
+Britain was to bring about changes even more
+momentous in the development of the English
+people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle were
+making themselves masters of central and southern
+Britain, the English who had landed on its
+northernmost shores had been slowly winning for
+themselves the coast district between the Forth
+and the Tyne which bore the name of Bernicia.
+Their progress seems to have been small till they
+were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the
+"Flame-bearer," who found a site for his King's
+town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough;
+nor was it till the reign of his fourth son Æthelric
+that they gained full mastery over the Britons
+along their western border. But once masters of
+the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to
+conquer their English neighbours to the south,
+the men of Deira, whose first King Ælla was now
+sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the
+foreign markets with English slaves, and one of
+the most memorable stories in our history shows
+us a group of such captives as they stood in the
+market-place at Rome, it may be in the great
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-053"></a>1-053]</span>
+
+Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay recalled
+the glories of the Imperial City. Their white
+bodies, their fair faces, their golden hair was
+noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what
+country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked
+the trader who brought them. The slave-dealer
+answered "They are English," or as the word ran
+in the Latin form it would bear at Rome, "they are
+Angles." The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic
+humour. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with
+faces so angel-like! From what country come
+they?" "They come," said the merchant, "from
+Deira." "<i>De irâ!</i>" was the untranslatable wordplay
+of the vivacious Roman--"aye, plucked from
+God's ire and called to Christ's mercy! And
+what is the name of their king?" They told him
+"Ælla," and Gregory seized on the word as of
+good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in Ælla's
+land," he said, and passed on, musing how the
+angel-faces should be brought to sing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Gregory was thus playing with Ælla's
+name the old king passed away, and with his
+death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems
+to have ceased. His children fled over the western
+border to find refuge among the Welsh, and
+Æthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph.
+A new age of our history opens in this submission
+of one English people to another. When the two
+kingdoms were united under a common lord the
+period of national formation began.  If a new
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-054"></a>1-054]</span>
+
+England sprang out of the mass of English states
+which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe
+it to the gradual submission of the smaller peoples
+to the supremacy of a common political head.
+The difference in power between state and state
+which inevitably led to this process of union was
+due to the character which the conquest of Britain
+was now assuming. Up to this time all the kingdoms
+which had been established by the invaders
+had stood in the main on a footing of equality.
+All had taken an independent share in the work
+of conquest. Though the oneness of a common
+blood and a common speech was recognized by all
+we find no traces of any common action or
+common rule. Even in the two groups of kingdoms,
+the five English and the five Saxon kingdoms,
+which occupied Britain south of the Humber,
+the relations of each member of the group to its
+fellows seem to have been merely local. It was
+only locally that East and West and South and
+North English were grouped round the Middle
+English of Leicester, or East and West and South
+and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about
+London. In neither instance do we find any real
+trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of one
+member of the group over the others; while north
+of the Humber the feeling between the Englishmen
+of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
+settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of
+hostility rather than of friendship. But this age
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-055"></a>1-055]</span>
+
+of isolation, of equality, of independence, had now
+come to an end. The progress of the conquest had
+drawn a sharp line between the kingdoms of the
+conquerors. The work of half of them was done.
+In the south of the island not only Kent but
+Sussex, Essex, and Middlesex were surrounded by
+English territory, and hindered by that single fact
+from all further growth. The same fate had
+befallen the East Engle, the South Engle, the
+Middle and the North Engle. The West Saxons,
+on the other hand, and the West Engle, or
+Mercians, still remained free to conquer and
+expand on the south of the Humber, as the
+Englishmen of Deira and Bernicia remained free
+to the north of that river. It was plain, therefore,
+that from this moment the growth of these
+powers would throw their fellow kingdoms into
+the background, and that with an ever-growing
+inequality of strength must come a new arrangement
+of political forces. The greater kingdoms
+would in the end be drawn to subject and absorb
+the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman
+and Briton would be added a struggle between
+Englishman and Englishman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Kent</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was through this struggle and the establishment
+of a lordship on the part of the stronger
+and growing states over their weaker and stationary
+fellows that the English kingdoms were to make
+their first step towards union in a single England.
+Such an overlordship seemed destined but a few
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-056"></a>1-056]</span>
+
+years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The
+victories of Ceawlin and Cuthwulf left it the most
+powerful of the English kingdoms. None of its
+fellow states seemed able to hold their own
+against a power which stretched from the Chilterns
+to the Severn and from the Channel to the Ouse.
+But after its defeat in the march upon Chester
+Wessex suddenly broke down into a chaos of
+warring tribes; and her place was taken by two
+powers whose rise to greatness was as sudden as
+her fall. The first of these was Kent. The
+Kentish king Æthelberht found himself hemmed
+in on every side by English territory; and since
+conquest over Britons was denied him he sought a
+new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at
+the head of the conquerors of the south. The
+break up of Wessex no doubt aided his attempt;
+but we know little of the causes or events which
+brought about his success. We know only that
+the supremacy of the Kentish king was owned at
+last by the English peoples of the east and centre
+of Britain. But it was not by her political action
+that Kent was in the end to further the creation
+of a single England; for the lordship which
+Æthelberht built up was doomed to fall for ever
+with his death, and yet his death left Kent the
+centre of a national union far wider as it was far
+more enduring than the petty lordship which
+stretched over Eastern Britain. Only three or four
+years after Gregory had pitied the English slaves
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-057"></a>1-057]</span>
+
+in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as
+Bishop of the Imperial City in a position to carry
+out his dream of winning Britain to the faith; and
+an opening was given him by Æthelberht's marriage
+with Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king
+Charibert of Paris. Bertha like her Frankish
+kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop
+accompanied her from Gaul; and a ruined
+Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside
+the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for
+their worship. The king himself remained true
+to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no
+doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot,
+Augustine, at the head of a band of monks to
+preach the Gospel to the English people. The
+missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet,
+at the spot where Hengest had landed more than
+a century before; and Æthelberht received them
+sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above
+Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles
+away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury.
+The king listened patiently to the long
+sermon of Augustine as the interpreters the abbot
+had brought with him from Gaul rendered it in
+the English tongue. "Your words are fair,"
+Æthelberht replied at last with English good
+sense, "but they are new and of doubtful meaning."
+For himself, he said, he refused to forsake
+the gods of his fathers, but with the usual religious
+tolerance of the German race he promised shelter
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-058"></a>1-058]</span>
+
+and protection to the strangers. The band of
+monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a
+silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing
+in concert the strains of the litany of their Church.
+"Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, "Thine
+anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house,
+for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast
+came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew
+worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in
+prophetic earnestness from the name of the
+Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place,
+"Alleluia!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Christian England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was thus that the spot which witnessed the
+landing of Hengest became yet better known as
+the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
+landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a
+reversal and undoing of the first. "Strangers
+from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries
+first fronted the English king. The
+march of the monks as they chaunted their solemn
+litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
+legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric.
+It was to the tongue and the thought not of
+Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
+fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Æthelberht
+listened in the preaching of Augustine.
+Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
+England, became a centre of Latin influence. The
+Roman tongue became again one of the tongues
+of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-059"></a>1-059]</span>
+
+its literature. But more than the
+tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically
+his landing renewed that union with the
+Western world which the landing of Hengest had
+destroyed. The new England was admitted into
+the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
+art, letters, which had fled before the sword
+of the English conquerors returned with the
+Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law
+indeed never took root in England, but it is
+impossible not to recognize the result of the influence
+of the Roman missionaries in the fact that
+codes of the customary English law began to be
+put in writing soon after their arrival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Æthelfrith</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A year passed before Æthelberht yielded to
+the preaching of Augustine. But from the moment
+of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly
+and the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the
+train of their king. The new religion was carried
+beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy
+which Æthelberht wielded over the neighbouring
+kingdoms. Sæberht, King of the East-Saxons, received
+a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered
+him to build up again a Christian church in what
+was now his subject city of London, while soon after
+the East-Anglian king Rædwald resolved to serve
+Christ and the older gods together. But while
+Æthelberht was thus furnishing a future centre
+of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to which
+Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-060"></a>1-060]</span>
+
+was pointing it out as the coming political
+centre of the new England. In 593, four years
+before the landing of the missionaries in Kent,
+Æthelric was succeeded by his son Æthelfrith,
+and the new king took up the work of conquest
+with a vigour greater than had yet been shown
+by any English leader. For ten years he waged
+war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a tract
+which stretched along his western border from
+Dumbarton to Carlisle. The contest ended in a
+great battle at Dægsastan, perhaps Dawston in
+Liddesdale; and Æthelfrith turned to deliver a
+yet more crushing blow on his southern border.
+British kingdoms still stretched from Clyde-mouth
+to the mouth of Severn; and had their line
+remained unbroken the British resistance might
+yet have withstood the English advance. It was
+with a sound political instinct therefore that
+Æthelfrith marched in 613 upon Chester, the
+point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a kingdom
+which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked
+itself to the British states of what we now call
+Wales. Hard by the city two thousand monks
+were gathered in one of those vast religious
+settlements which were characteristic of Celtic
+Christianity, and after a three days' fast a crowd
+of these ascetics followed the British army to the
+field. Æthelfrith watched the wild gestures of
+the monks as they stood apart from the host with
+arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-061"></a>1-061]</span>
+
+them in the coming fight. "Bear they arms or no,"
+said the King, "they war against us when they cry
+against us to their God," and in the surprise and
+rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the battle of Chester Britain as a country
+ceased to exist. By their victory at Deorham the
+West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint,
+of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall,
+from the general body of their race. By Æthelfrith's
+victory at Chester and the reduction of
+southern Lancashire which followed it what remained
+of Britain was broken into two several
+parts. From this time therefore the character of the
+English conquest of Britain changes. The warfare
+of Briton and Englishman died down into a warfare
+of separate English kingdoms against separate
+British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians
+and Strathclyde, of Mercia against the Welsh
+between Anglesea and the British Channel, of
+Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip
+to the Land's End. But great as was the importance
+of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of Britain,
+it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of
+England itself. The drift towards national unity
+had already begun, but from the moment of
+Æthelfrith's victory this drift became the main
+current of our history. Masters of the larger and
+richer part of the land, its conquerors were no
+longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of
+plunder; while the severance of the British kingdoms
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-062"></a>1-062]</span>
+
+took from their enemies the pressure of a
+common danger. The conquests of Æthelfrith
+left him without a rival in military power, and he
+turned from victories over the Welsh, as their
+English foes called the Britons, to the building up
+of a lordship over his own countrymen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Eadwine</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The power of Æthelberht seems to have declined
+with old age, and though the Essex men
+still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of
+Mid-Britain shook it off. So strong however had
+the instinct of union now become, that we hear
+nothing of any return to their old isolation.
+Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and
+South-English now owned the lordship of the
+East-English King Rædwald. The shelter given
+by Rædwald to Ælla's son Eadwine served as a
+pretext for a Northumbrian attack. Fortune
+however deserted Æthelfrith, and a snatch of
+northern song still tells of the day when the river
+Idle by Retford saw his defeat and fall. But the
+greatness of Northumbria survived its king. In
+617 Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men
+of Deira; and his conquest of Bernicia maintained
+that union of the two realms which the Bernician
+conquest of Deira had first brought about. The
+greatness of Northumbria now reached its height.
+Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a
+genius for civil government which shows how
+utterly the mere age of conquest had passed away.
+With him began the English proverb so often
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-063"></a>1-063]</span>
+
+applied to after kings: "A woman with her babe
+might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine's
+day." Peaceful communication revived along the
+deserted highways; the springs by the roadside
+were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set
+beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some
+faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung
+their glory round this new "Empire of the
+English"; a royal standard of purple and gold
+floated before Eadwine as he rode through the
+villages; a feather tuft attached to a spear, the
+Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through
+the streets. The Northumbrian king became in
+fact supreme over Britain as no king of English
+blood had been before. Northward his frontier
+reached to the Firth of Forth, and here, if we
+trust tradition, Eadwine founded a city which
+bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's burgh. To
+the west his arms crushed the long resistance of
+Elmet, the district about Leeds; he was master
+of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued
+the isles of Anglesea and Man. South of
+the Humber he was owned as overlord by the five
+English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons
+remained awhile independent. But revolt and
+slaughter had fatally broken their power when
+Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by
+Bæda tells something of the fierceness of the
+struggle which ended in the subjection of the
+south to the overlordship of Northumbria. In an
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-064"></a>1-064]</span>
+
+Easter-court which he held in his royal city by
+the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to
+Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who brought a
+message from its king. In the midst of the
+conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger
+from his robe, and rushed on the Northumbrian
+sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's war-band,
+threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin;
+but so furious was the stroke that even through
+Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim. The
+king however recovered from his wound to march
+on the West-Saxons; he slew or subdued all who
+had conspired against him, and returned victorious
+to his own country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conversion of Northumbria</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its
+King's daughter as a wife, a step which probably
+marked political subordination; and with the
+Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's
+followers, whose tall stooping form, slender
+aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
+worn face, were long remembered in the North.
+Moved by his queen's prayers Eadwine promised
+to become Christian if he returned successful from
+Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria
+gathered to deliberate on the new faith to which
+he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as
+now in the light it threw on the darkness which
+encompassed men's lives, the darkness of the
+future as of the past. "So seems the life of man,
+O king," burst forth an aged ealdorman, "as a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-065"></a>1-065]</span>
+
+sparrow's flight through the hall when one is
+sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
+lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm
+without. The sparrow flies in at one door and
+tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
+hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other
+vanishes into the darkness whence it came.
+So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
+sight, but what is before it, what after it, we
+know not. If this new teaching tell us aught
+certainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser
+argument told on the crowd. "None of your
+people, Eadwine, have worshipped the gods more
+busily than I," said Coifi the priest, "yet there
+are many more favoured and more fortunate.
+Were these gods good for anything they would
+help their worshippers." Then leaping on horseback,
+he hurled his spear into the sacred temple
+at Godmanham, and with the rest of the Witan
+embraced the religion of the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Penda</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not
+to fall without a struggle. Even in Kent a
+reaction against the new creed began with the
+death of Æthelberht. The young kings of the
+East-Saxons burst into the church where the
+Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist
+to the people, crying, "Give us that white bread
+you gave to our father Saba," and on the bishop's
+refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier
+tide of reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion;
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-066"></a>1-066]</span>
+
+but Mercia, which had as yet owned the
+supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden
+greatness as the champion of the heathen gods.
+Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of the old
+religion a chance of winning back his people's
+freedom and giving it the lead among the tribes
+about it. Originally mere settlers along the
+Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the
+Welsh border invited them to widen their possessions
+by conquest while the rest of their Anglian
+neighbours were shut off from any chance of
+expansion. Their fights along the frontier too
+kept their warlike energy at its height. Penda
+must have already asserted his superiority over the
+four other English tribes of Mid-Britain before he
+could have ventured to attack Wessex and tear
+from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and
+Magesætas on the Severn. Even with this accession
+of strength however he was still no match for
+Northumbria. But the war of the English people
+with the Britons seems at this moment to have
+died down for a season, and the Mercian ruler
+boldly broke through the barrier which had
+parted the two races till now by allying himself
+with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a joint attack
+on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place
+called the Heathfield, and in the fight which
+followed Eadwine was defeated and slain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oswald</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall
+the line of Æthelfrith to its throne; and after a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-067"></a>1-067]</span>
+
+year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
+its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in
+the heart of the north, and Oswald's first fight
+was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian
+force gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and
+pledged itself at the new King's bidding to become
+Christian if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon
+fell fighting on the "Heaven's Field," as after
+times called the field of battle; the submission of
+Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of
+Northumbria; and for seven years the power of
+Oswald equalled that of Eadwine. It was not the
+Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this
+struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in
+Bernicia the work of conversion which his victory
+began. Paulinus fled from Northumbria at Eadwine's
+fall; and the Roman Church, though
+established in Kent, did little in contending elsewhere
+against the heathen reaction. Its place in
+the conversion of northern England was taken by
+missionaries from Ireland. To understand the
+true meaning of this change we must remember
+how greatly the Christian Church in the west had
+been affected by the German invasion. Before
+the landing of the English in Britain the Christian
+Church stretched in an unbroken line across
+Western Europe to the furthest coasts of Ireland.
+The conquest of Britain by the pagan English
+thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of
+this great communion and broke it into two
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-068"></a>1-068]</span>
+
+unequal parts. On one side lay Italy, Spain, and
+Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to and
+remained in direct contact with the See of Rome,
+on the other, practically cut off from the general
+body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland.
+But the condition of the two portions of Western
+Christendom was very different. While the
+vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and
+Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle for life,
+Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders,
+drew from its conversion an energy such as it has
+never known since. Christianity was received
+there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and
+letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train.
+The science and Biblical knowledge which fled
+from the Continent took refuge in its schools.
+The new Christian life soon beat too strongly to
+brook confinement within the bounds of Ireland
+itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island,
+had not been half a century dead when Irish
+Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into
+battle with the mass of heathenism which was
+rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries
+laboured among the Picts of the Highlands
+and among the Frisians of the northern
+seas. An Irish missionary, Columban, founded
+monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines.
+The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its
+name another Irish missionary before whom the
+spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over the waters
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-069"></a>1-069]</span>
+
+of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed
+as if the course of the world's history was to be
+changed, as if the older Celtic race that Roman
+and German had swept before them had turned to
+the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if
+Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould
+the destinies of the Churches of the West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Aidan</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the
+west coast of Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba,
+had raised the famous mission-station of Iona. It
+was within its walls that Oswald in youth found
+refuge, and on his accession to the throne of
+Northumbria he called for missionaries from among
+its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to
+his call obtained little success. He declared on his
+return that among a people so stubborn and
+barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was
+impossible. "Was it their stubbornness or your
+severity?" asked Aidan, a brother sitting by;
+"did you forget God's word to give them the milk
+first and then the meat?" All eyes turned on the
+speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned
+mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed
+his bishop's see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne.
+Thence, from a monastery which gave to
+the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers
+poured forth over the heathen realms. Aidan
+himself wandered on foot, preaching among the
+peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his
+own court the King acted as interpreter to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-070"></a>1-070]</span>
+
+Irish missionaries in their efforts to convert his
+thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed
+began to blend itself with that of the warlike glory
+of Æthelfrith or the wise administration of Eadwine,
+and the moral power which was to reach its
+height in Ælfred first dawns in the story of
+Oswald. For after times the memory of Oswald's
+greatness was lost in the memory of his piety.
+"By reason of his constant habit of praying or
+giving thanks to the Lord he was wont wherever
+he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees."
+As he feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the
+thegn, or noble of his war-band, whom he had set
+to give alms to the poor at his gate told him of a
+multitude that still waited fasting without. The
+king at once bade the untasted meat before him be
+carried to the poor, and his silver dish be parted
+piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal
+hand and blessed it. "May this hand," he cried,
+"never grow old."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over
+Britain as that of his predecessor Eadwine. In
+him even more than in Eadwine men saw some
+faint likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed
+a writer from the land of the Picts calls Oswald
+"Emperor of the whole of Britain." His power
+was bent to carry forward the conversion of all
+England, but prisoned as it was to the central
+districts of the country heathendom fought
+desperately for life. Penda was still its rallying-point.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-071"></a>1-071]</span>
+
+His long reign was one continuous battle
+with the new religion; but it was a battle rather
+with the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than
+with the supremacy of the Cross. East-Anglia
+became at last the field of contest between the
+two powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to
+deliver it from the Mercian rule. But his doom
+was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called
+the battle of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and
+slain. For a few years after his victory at the
+Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain.
+Heathenism triumphed with him. If Wessex did
+not own his overlordship as it had owned that of
+Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith
+which he had embraced but a few years back at
+the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira seems to
+have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though
+distracted by civil war between rival claimants for
+its throne, refused to yield. Year by year the
+Mercian king carried his ravages over the north;
+once he reached even the royal city, the impregnable
+rock-fortress of Bamborough. Despairing
+of success in an assault, he pulled down the
+cottages around, and piling their wood against its
+walls fired the mass in a fair wind that drove the
+flames on the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda
+is doing," cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the
+islet of Farne, as he saw the smoke drifting over
+the city, and a change of wind--so ran the legend
+of Northumbria's agony--drove back the flames
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-072"></a>1-072]</span>
+
+on those who kindled them. But burned and
+harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the
+Cross. Oswiu, a third son of Æthelfrith, held his
+ground stoutly against Penda's inroads till their
+cessation enabled him to build up again the old
+Northumbrian kingdom by a march upon Deira.
+The union of the two realms was never henceforth
+to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen
+in the renewal of Christianity throughout Britain.
+East-Anglia, conquered as it was, had clung to its
+faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again.
+Penda's own son, whom he had set over the
+Middle-English, received baptism and teachers from
+Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the new
+belief appeared fearlessly among the Mercians
+themselves. Penda gave them no hindrance. In
+words that mark the temper of a man of whom we
+would willingly know more, Bæda tells us that the
+old king only "hated and scorned those whom he
+saw not doing the works of the faith they had
+received." His attitude shows that Penda looked
+with the tolerance of his race on all questions of
+creed, and that he was fighting less for heathenism
+than for political independence. And now the
+growing power of Oswiu called him to the old
+struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met Oswiu
+in the field of Winwæd by Leeds. It was in vain
+that the Northumbrian sought to avert Penda's
+attack by offers of ornaments and costly gifts.
+"If the pagans will not accept them," Oswiu cried
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-073"></a>1-073]</span>
+
+at last, "let us offer them to One that will"; and
+he vowed that if successful he would dedicate his
+daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries
+in his realm. Victory at last declared for the
+faith of Christ. Penda himself fell on the field.
+The river over which the Mercians fled was swollen
+with a great rain; it swept away the fragments of
+the heathen host, and the cause of the older gods
+was lost for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oswiu</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The terrible struggle between heathendom and
+Christianity was followed by a long and profound
+peace. For three years after the battle of Winwæd
+Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in
+Oswiu's name. The winning of central England
+was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for
+Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathendom was
+dead with Penda. "Being thus freed," Bæda tells
+us, "the Mercians with their King rejoiced to
+serve the true King, Christ." Its three provinces,
+the earlier Mercia, the Middle-English, and the
+Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the
+missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield
+is still dedicated. Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne,
+so simple and lowly in temper that he
+travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till
+Archbishop Theodore with his own hands lifted
+him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry breaks
+out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of
+singers singing sweetly descended from heaven to
+the little cell beside St. Mary's Church where the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-074"></a>1-074]</span>
+
+bishop lay dying. Then "the same song ascended
+from the roof again, and returned heavenward by
+the way that it came." It was the soul of his
+brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of
+angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Cuthbert</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries
+has almost been lost in the glory of
+Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the
+new religious life of the time than the story of
+this Apostle of the Lowlands. Born on the
+southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert
+found shelter at eight years old in a widow's
+house in the little village of Wrangholm. Already
+in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
+which caught even in the chance word of a game
+a call to higher things, and a passing attack of
+lameness deepened the religious impression. A
+traveller coming in his white mantle over the
+hillside and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert's
+injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy's
+shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still
+famous as a sheepwalk, though a scant herbage
+scarce veils the whinstone rock. There meteors
+plunging into the night became to him a company
+of angelic spirits carrying the soul of Bishop
+Aidan heavenward, and his longings slowly settled
+into a resolute will towards a religious life. In
+651 he made his way to a group of straw-thatched
+log-huts, in the midst of an untilled solitude, where
+a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-075"></a>1-075]</span>
+
+the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land
+is a land of poetry and romance. Cheviot and
+Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
+Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and
+border minstrelsy. Agriculture has chosen its
+valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage and
+steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm
+and meadow. But to see the Lowlands as they
+were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow
+and farm away again, and replace them by vast
+solitudes, dotted here and there with clusters of
+wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
+which travellers rode spear in hand and eye
+kept cautiously about them. The Northumbrian
+peasantry among whom he journeyed were for
+the most part Christians only in name. With
+Teutonic indifference they yielded to their thegns
+in nominally accepting the new Christianity as
+these had yielded to the king. But they retained
+their old superstitions side by side with the new
+worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a
+reliance on their heathen charms and amulets;
+and if trouble befell the Christian preachers who
+came settling among them, they took it as proof
+of the wrath of the older gods. When some log-rafts
+which were floating down the Tyne for the
+construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with
+the monks who were at work on them out to sea,
+the rustic bystanders shouted, "Let nobody pray
+for them; let nobody pity these men; for they
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-076"></a>1-076]</span>
+
+have taken away from us our old worship, and
+how their new-fangled customs are to be kept
+nobody knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert
+wandered among listeners such as these, choosing
+above all the remoter mountain villages from
+whose roughness and poverty other teachers
+turned aside. Unlike his Irish comrades, he
+needed no interpreter as he passed from village
+to village; the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians
+listened willingly to one who was himself a
+peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught
+the rough Northumbrian burr along the banks of
+the Tweed. His patience, his humorous good
+sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him,
+and not less the stout vigorous frame which fitted
+the peasant-preacher for the hard life he had
+chosen. "Never did man die of hunger who
+served God faithfully," he would say, when nightfall
+found them supperless in the waste. "Look at
+the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him
+if He will"--and once at least he owed his meal to
+a fish that the scared bird let fall. A snowstorm
+drove his boat on the coast of Fife. "The snow
+closes the road along the shore," mourned his
+comrades; "the storm bars our way over sea."
+"There is still the way of heaven that lies open,"
+said Cuthbert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Cædmon</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While missionaries were thus labouring among
+its peasantry, Northumbria saw the rise of a number
+of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict ties
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-077"></a>1-077]</span>
+
+of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose
+Celtic model of the family or the clan round some
+noble and wealthy person who sought devotional
+retirement. The most notable and wealthy of
+these houses was that of Streoneshealh, where Hild,
+a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on the
+cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern
+Sea. Hild was a Northumbrian Deborah whose
+counsel was sought even by kings; and the double
+monastery over which she ruled became a seminary
+of bishops and priests. The sainted John of
+Beverley was among her scholars. But the name
+which really throws glory over Whitby is the
+name of a cowherd from whose lips during the
+reign of Oswiu flowed the first great English song.
+Though well advanced in years, Cædmon had
+learned nothing of the art of verse, the alliterative
+jingle so common among his fellows, "wherefore
+being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for
+glee's sake to sing in turn, he no sooner saw the
+harp come towards him than he rose from the
+board and went homewards. Once when he had
+done thus, and gone from the feast to the stable
+where he had that night charge of the cattle, there
+appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting
+him by name, 'Sing, Cædmon, some song to Me.'
+'I cannot sing,' he answered; 'for this cause left
+I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with
+him answered, 'However that be, you shall sing
+to Me.' 'What shall I sing?' rejoined Cædmon.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-078"></a>1-078]</span>
+
+'The beginning of created things,' replied He.
+In the morning the cowherd stood before Hild
+and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike
+concluded 'that heavenly grace had been conferred
+on him by the Lord.' They translated for
+Cædmon a passage in Holy Writ, 'bidding him,
+if he could, put the same into verse.' The next
+morning he gave it them composed in excellent
+verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the
+divine grace in the man, bade him quit the
+secular habit and take on him the monastic life."
+Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown
+into Cædmon's poem. "He sang of the creation
+of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the
+history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt
+and entering into the Promised Land; of the
+incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ,
+and of His ascension; of the terror of future
+judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys
+of heaven."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Synod of Whitby</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even while Cædmon was singing the glories
+of Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing
+away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as
+its fall. Only a few years after Penda's defeat
+the Mercians threw off Oswin's yoke and set Wulfhere,
+a son of Penda, on their throne. They were aided
+in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife
+which was now rending the Northumbrian realm.
+The labour of Aidan, the victories of Oswald and
+Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-079"></a>1-079]</span>
+
+Irish Church. The monks of Lindisfarne, or of
+the new religious houses whose foundation followed
+that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical
+tradition, not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted
+for their guidance the instructions, not of Gregory,
+but of Columba. Whatever claims of supremacy
+over the whole English Church might be pressed
+by the see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of
+the Church as it existed in the North of England
+was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's queen brought
+with her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish
+Church to the Roman See; and the visit of two
+young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love
+of Rome into a passionate fanaticism. The elder
+of these, Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce
+the usages in which the Irish Church differed from
+the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his
+comrade Wilfrid stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu
+was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great
+council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical
+allegiance of his realm should be decided. The
+points actually contested were trivial enough.
+Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded
+for the Irish fashion of the tonsure, and for the
+Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid pleaded for
+the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the
+authority of Columba, the other to that of St.
+Peter. "You own," cried the king at last to
+Colman, "that Christ gave to Peter the keys of
+the kingdom of heaven--has He given such power
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-080"></a>1-080]</span>
+
+to Columba?" The bishop could but answer
+"No." "Then will I rather obey the porter of
+heaven," said Oswiu, "lest when I reach its gates
+he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back
+on me, and there be none to open." The humorous
+tone of Oswiu's decision could not hide its
+importance, and the synod had no sooner broken
+up than Colman, followed by the whole of the
+Irish-born brethren and thirty of their English
+fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed
+away to Iona. Trivial in fact as were the actual
+points of difference which severed the Roman
+Church from the Irish, the question to which
+communion Northumbria should belong was of
+immense moment to the after fortunes of England.
+Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later
+ecclesiastical history of England would probably
+have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid of that
+power of organization which was the strength of
+the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own
+Irish home took the clan system of the country as
+the basis of its government. Tribal quarrels and
+ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably
+confounded; and the clergy, robbed of all really
+spiritual influence, contributed no element save
+that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering
+bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by
+hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from
+morality, the absence of those larger and more
+humanizing influences which contact with a wider
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-081"></a>1-081]</span>
+
+world alone can give, this is a picture which the
+Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was
+from such a chaos as this that England was saved
+by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
+But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
+danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church
+it must have remained spiritually isolated from
+the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
+might be from its older greatness, it preserved
+the traditions of civilization, of letters and art and
+law. Its faith still served as a bond which held
+together the nations that sprang from the wreck
+of the Empire. To fight against Rome was, as
+Wilfrid said, "to fight against the world." To
+repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation.
+Dimly as such thoughts may have presented
+themselves to Oswiu's mind, it was the instinct of
+a statesman that led him to set aside the love and
+gratitude of his youth and to link England to
+Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Theodore</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of
+organization undertaken by a Greek monk, Theodore
+of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to
+secure England to her sway as Archbishop of
+Canterbury, marked a yet more decisive step in
+the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly
+in the organization of the episcopate, and thus the
+Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the
+work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
+Theodore. His work was determined in its main
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-082"></a>1-082]</span>
+
+outlines by the previous history of the English
+people. The conquest of the Continent had been
+wrought either by races which were already Christian,
+or by heathens who bowed to the Christian
+faith of the nations they conquered. To this oneness
+of religion between the German invaders of
+the Empire and their Roman subjects was owing
+the preservation of all that survived of the Roman
+world. The Church everywhere remained untouched.
+The Christian bishop became the defender
+of the conquered Italian or Gaul against
+his Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator
+between the German and his subjects, the one
+bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression.
+To the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the
+representative of all that was venerable in the
+past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
+art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people
+had been driven out together. When Theodore
+came to organize the Church of England, the very
+memory of the older Christian Church which
+existed in Roman Britain had passed away. The
+first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in
+a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to
+the courts of the kings, who were their earliest
+converts, and whose conversion was generally
+followed by that of their people. The English
+bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and
+their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
+In this way realms which are all but forgotten
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-083"></a>1-083]</span>
+
+are commemorated in the limits of existing
+sees. That of Rochester represented till of late
+an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier
+of the original kingdom of Mercia may be
+recovered by following the map of the ancient
+bishopric of Lichfield. In adding many sees to
+those he found Theodore was careful to make their
+dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations.
+But he soon passed from this extension of
+the episcopate to its organization. In his arrangement
+of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped
+them round the see of Canterbury, in his national
+synods and ecclesiastical canons, Theodore did
+unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
+kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which
+had sprung for the most part from mere accidents
+of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
+The smaller states were by this time practically
+absorbed by the three larger ones, and of these
+three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
+to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency
+to national unity which was to characterize the
+new England had thus already declared itself; but
+the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form
+and surrounded with divine sanctions a unity
+which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
+The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury
+accustomed men's minds to the thought of a single
+throne for their one temporal overlord. The
+regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-084"></a>1-084]</span>
+
+to primate, in the administration of the Church,
+supplied a mould on which the civil organization
+of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the
+councils gathered by Theodore were the first of
+our national gatherings for general legislation. It
+was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
+Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to
+come together in the Witenagemot of all England.
+The synods which Theodore convened as religiously
+representative of the whole English nation led the
+way by their example to our national parliaments.
+The canons which these synods enacted led the
+way to a national system of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wulfhere</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The organization of the episcopate was followed
+by the organization of the parish system. The
+mission-station or monastery from which priest or
+bishop went forth on journey after journey to
+preach and baptize naturally disappeared as the
+land became Christian. The missionaries turned
+into settled clergy. As the king's chaplain became
+a bishop and the kingdom his diocese, so the
+chaplain of an English noble became the priest and
+the manor his parish. But this parish system is
+probably later than Theodore, and the system of
+tithes which has been sometimes coupled with his
+name dates only from the close of the eighth
+century. What was really due to him was the
+organization of the episcopate, and the impulse
+which this gave to national unity. But the movement
+towards unity found a sudden check in the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-085"></a>1-085]</span>
+
+revived strength of Mercia. Wulfhere proved a
+vigorous and active ruler, and the peaceful reign
+of Oswiu left him free to build up again during
+fifteen years of rule (659-675) that Mercian
+overlordship over the tribes of Mid-England which
+had been lost at Penda's death. He had more
+than his father's success. Not only did Essex
+again own his supremacy, but even London fell
+into Mercian hands. The West-Saxons were driven
+across the Thames, and nearly all their settlements
+to the north of that river were annexed to the
+Mercian realm. Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached
+even south of the Thames, for Sussex in its dread
+of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his
+overlordship, and its king was rewarded by a gift
+of the two outlying settlements of the Jutes--the
+Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras
+along the Southampton water--which we must
+suppose had been reduced by Mercian arms. The
+industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went
+hand in hand with its military advance. The
+forests of its western border, the marshes of its
+eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by
+monastic colonies, whose success shows the hold
+which Christianity had now gained over its people.
+Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild
+western woodlands and in the yet wilder
+fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom
+which stretched from the "Holland," the sunk,
+hollow land of Lincolnshire, to the channel of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-086"></a>1-086]</span>
+
+Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters and reedy
+islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted
+only by flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either
+quarter the new faith made its way. In the western
+woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey
+round which gathered the town of Evesham, and
+the eastern fen-land was soon filled with religious
+houses. Here through the liberality of King
+Wulfhere rose the Abbey of Peterborough. Here
+too, Guthlac, a youth of the royal race of Mercia,
+sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes of
+Crowland, and so great was the reverence he won,
+that only two years had passed since his death
+when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over his
+tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site;
+the buildings rested on oaken piles driven into the
+marsh; a great stone church replaced the hermit's
+cell; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed
+the pools around them into fertile meadow-land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Ecgfrith</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite however of this rapid recovery of its
+strength by Mercia, Northumbria remained the
+dominant state in Britain: and Ecgfrith, who
+succeeded Oswiu in 670, so utterly defeated Wulfhere
+when war broke out between them that he
+was glad to purchase peace by the surrender
+of Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased
+more hardly had not Ecgfrith's ambition
+turned rather to conquests over the Briton than
+to victories over his fellow Englishmen. The
+war between Briton and Englishman which had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-087"></a>1-087]</span>
+
+languished since the battle of Chester had been
+revived some twelve years before by an advance of
+the West-Saxons to the south-west. Unable to
+save the possessions of Wessex north of the Thames
+from the grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwealh,
+sought for compensation in an attack on his Welsh
+neighbours. A victory at Bradford on the Avon
+enabled him to overrun the country near Mendip
+which had till then been held by the Britons; and
+a second campaign in 658, which ended in a victory
+on the skirts of the great forest that covered
+Somerset to the east, settled the West-Saxons as
+conquerors round the sources of the Parret. It
+may have been the example of the West-Saxons
+which spurred Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon
+his British neighbours in the west which widened
+the bounds of his kingdom. His reign marks the
+highest pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies
+chased the Britons from the kingdom of Cumbria,
+and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A
+large part of the conquered country was bestowed
+upon the see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time
+filled by one whom we have seen before labouring
+as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had
+found a new mission-station in Holy Island, and
+preached among the moors of Northumberland as
+he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He
+remained there through the great secession which
+followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became
+prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-088"></a>1-088]</span>
+
+torn with endless disputes against which his patience
+and good humour struggled in vain. Worn out at
+last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
+of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of
+Bamborough, strewn for the most part with kelp
+and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
+In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and
+turf, dug down within deep into the rock, and
+roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence
+for his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the
+vacant see of Lindisfarne. He entered Carlisle,
+which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric,
+at a moment when all Northumbria was waiting
+for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith's against
+the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had
+long been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts
+to the north of it owned Ecgfrith's supremacy.
+In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
+subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense
+of coming ill weighed on Northumbria, and its
+dread was quickened by a memory of the curses
+which had been pronounced by the bishops of
+Ireland on its king, when his navy, setting out
+a year before from the newly-conquered western
+coast, swept the Irish shores in a raid which seemed
+like sacrilege to those who loved the home of
+Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over
+a Roman fountain which still stood unharmed
+amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
+bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-089"></a>1-089]</span>
+
+falling from the old man's lips. "Perhaps," he
+seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril
+of the fight is over and done." "Watch and
+pray," he said, when they questioned him on the
+morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more
+a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told
+that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as
+the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith
+and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of
+corpses, on the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Mercian greatness</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian
+greatness, for while the Picts pressed on the
+kingdom from the north Æthelred, Wulfhere's
+successor, attacked it on the Mercian border, and
+the war was only ended by a peace which left him
+master of Middle-England and free to attempt the
+direct conquest of the south. For the moment
+this attempt proved a fruitless one. Mercia was
+still too weak to grasp the lordship which was
+slipping from Northumbria's hands, while Wessex
+which seemed her destined prey rose at this
+moment into fresh power under the greatest of its
+early kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king whose
+reign covered the long period from 688 to 726,
+carried on during the whole of it the war which
+Cenwealh and Centwine had begun. He pushed his
+way southward round the marshes of the Parret to
+a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier
+of his new conquests by a fort on the banks of
+the Tone which has grown into the present Taunton.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-090"></a>1-090]</span>
+
+The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole
+district which now bears the name of Somerset.
+The conquest of Sussex and of Kent on his eastern
+border made Ine master of all Britain south of the
+Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king
+Ceolred in a bloody encounter at Wanborough in
+715 seemed to establish the threefold division of
+the English race between three realms of almost
+equal power. But able as Ine was to hold Mercia
+at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife that
+was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells
+the story of the disgust which drove him from the
+world. He had feasted royally at one of his
+country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode
+from it, his queen bade him turn back thither.
+The king returned to find his house stripped of
+curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the
+dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he
+had slept with Æthelburh rested a sow with her
+farrow of pigs. The scene had no need of the
+queen's comment: "See, my lord, how the fashion
+of this world passeth away!" In 726 he sought
+peace in a pilgrimage to Rome. The anarchy
+which had driven Ine from the throne broke out
+in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to
+Æthelbald, the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian
+realm. Æthelbald took up with better fortune
+the struggle of his people for supremacy over the
+south. He penetrated to the very heart of the
+West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege and capture
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-091"></a>1-091]</span>
+
+of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended
+the war. For twenty years the overlordship of
+Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of
+the Humber. It was at the head of the forces
+not of Mercia only but of East-Anglia and Kent,
+as well as of the West-Saxons, that Æthelbald
+marched against the Welsh on his western border.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Bæda</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In so complete a mastery of the south the
+Mercian King found grounds for a hope that
+Northern Britain would also yield to his sway.
+But the dream of a single England was again
+destined to be foiled. Fallen as Northumbria was
+from its old glory, it still remained a great power.
+Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors,
+Aldfrith and Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the
+literary centre of Western Europe. No schools
+were more famous than those of Jarrow and York.
+The whole learning of the age seemed to be
+summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. Bæda--the
+Venerable Bede as later times styled him--was
+born nine years after the Synod of Whitby
+on ground which passed a year later to Benedict
+Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he
+reared by the mouth of the Wear. His youth
+was trained and his long tranquil life was
+wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict's house
+which was founded by his friend Ceolfrid.
+Bæda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my
+whole life in the same monastery," he says, "and
+while attentive to the rule of my order and the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-092"></a>1-092]</span>
+
+service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in
+learning, or teaching, or writing." The words
+sketch for us a scholar's life, the more touching in
+its simplicity that it is the life of the first great
+English scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life
+consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure
+that lies in learning and teaching and writing,
+dawned for Englishmen in the story of Bæda.
+While still young he became a teacher, and six
+hundred monks besides strangers that flocked
+thither for instruction formed his school of
+Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how among the
+toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the
+monk, Bæda could have found time for the
+composition of the numerous works that made his
+name famous in the West. But materials for
+study had accumulated in Northumbria through
+the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and
+the libraries which were forming at Wearmouth
+and York. The tradition of the older Irish
+teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar
+into that path of Scriptural interpretation to which
+he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment
+in the West, came to him from the school
+which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded
+beneath the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the
+ecclesiastical chant was derived from a Roman
+cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of
+Benedict Biscop. Little by little the young
+scholar thus made himself master of the whole
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-093"></a>1-093]</span>
+
+range of the science of his time; he became, as
+Burke rightly styled him, "the father of English
+learning." The tradition of the older classic
+culture was first revived for England in his
+quotations of Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and
+Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
+him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses
+from the Æneid break his narratives of martyrdoms,
+and the disciple ventures on the track of
+the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of
+the approach of spring. His work was done with
+small aid from others. "I am my own secretary,"
+he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my
+own librarian." But forty-five works remained
+after his death to attest his prodigious industry.
+In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries
+the most important among these were the commentaries
+and homilies upon various books of the
+Bible which he had drawn from the writings of
+the Fathers. But he was far from confining
+himself to theology. In treatises compiled as
+textbooks for his scholars, Bæda threw together all
+that the world had then accumulated in astronomy
+and meteorology, in physics and music, in philosophy,
+grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine.
+But the encyclopædic character of his researches
+left him in heart a simple Englishman. He loved
+his own English tongue, he was skilled in English
+song, his last work was a translation into English
+of the Gospel of St. John, and almost the last
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-094"></a>1-094]</span>
+
+words that broke from his lips were some English
+rimes upon death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the noblest proof of his love of England lies
+in the work which immortalizes his name. In his
+"Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,"
+Bæda was at once the founder of mediæval history
+and the first English historian. All that we really
+know of the century and a half that follows the
+landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever
+his own personal observation extended, the
+story is told with admirable detail and force. He
+is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which
+he owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and
+Nothelm. What he owed to no informant was
+his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no
+story of his own telling is so touching as the story
+of his death. Two weeks before the Easter of 735
+the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
+and loss of breath. He still preserved however
+his usual pleasantness and gay good-humour, and
+in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his
+lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his
+own English tongue broke from time to time from
+the master's lip--rude rimes that told how before
+the "need-fare," Death's stern "must go," none
+can enough bethink him what is to be his doom
+for good or ill. The tears of Bæda's scholars
+mingled with his song. "We never read without
+weeping," writes one of them. So the days rolled
+on to Ascension-tide, and still master and pupils
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-095"></a>1-095]</span>
+
+toiled at their work, for Based longed to bring to
+an end his version of St. John's Gospel into the
+English tongue and his extracts from Bishop
+Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read a lie,"
+he answered those who would have had him rest,
+"or to work to no purpose after I am gone." A
+few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew
+upon him, but he spent the whole day in teaching,
+only saying cheerfully to his scholars, "Learn
+with what speed you may; I know not how long
+I may last." The dawn broke on another sleepless
+night, and again the old man called his scholars
+round him and bade them write. "There is still
+a chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning
+drew on, "and it is hard for thee to question
+thyself any longer." "It is easily done," said
+Bæda; "take thy pen and write quickly." Amid
+tears and farewells the day wore on till eventide.
+"There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear
+master," said the boy. "Write it quickly," bade
+the dying man. "It is finished now," said the
+little scribe at last. "You speak truth," said the
+master; "all is finished now." Placed upon the
+pavement, his head supported in his scholar's arms,
+his face turned to the spot where he was wont to
+pray, Bæda chanted the solemn "Glory to God."
+As his voice reached the close of his song he passed
+quietly away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Fall of Æthelbald</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First among English scholars, first among
+English theologians, first among English historians,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-096"></a>1-096]</span>
+
+it is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature
+strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars
+who gathered round him for instruction he is the
+father of our national education. In his physical
+treatises he is the first figure to which our science
+looks back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar's
+life was broken by the growing anarchy of
+Northumbria, and by threats of war from its
+Mercian rival. At last Æthelbald marched on a
+state which seemed exhausted by civil discord and
+ready for submission to his arms. But its king
+Eadberht showed himself worthy of the kings that
+had gone before him, and in 740 he threw back
+Æthelbald's attack in a repulse which not only
+ruined the Mercian ruler's hopes of northern
+conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
+Already goaded to revolt by exactions, the
+West-Saxons were roused to a fresh struggle for
+independence, and after twelve years of continued
+outbreaks the whole people mustered at Burford
+under the golden dragon of their race. The fight
+was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the
+Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a
+decisive victory freed Wessex from the Mercian
+yoke. Æthelbald's own throne seems to have
+been shaken; for three years later, in 757, the
+Mercian king was surprised and slain in a night
+attack by his ealdormen, and a year of confusion
+passed ere his kinsman Offa could avenge him on
+his murderers and succeed to the realm.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-097"></a>1-097]</span>
+
+<p>
+But though Eadberht might beat back the
+inroads of the Mercians and even conquer Strathclyde,
+before the anarchy of his own kingdom he
+could only fling down his sceptre and seek a
+refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne. From the
+death of Bæda the history of Northumbria became
+in fact little more than a wild story of lawlessness
+and bloodshed. King after king was swept away
+by treason and revolt, the country fell into the
+hands of its turbulent nobles, its very fields lay
+waste, and the land was scourged by famine and
+plague. An anarchy almost as complete fell on
+Wessex after the recovery of its freedom. Only
+in Mid-England was there any sign of order and
+settled rule. The crushing defeat at Burford,
+though it had brought about revolts which
+stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had
+made, was far from having broken the Mercian
+power. Under the long reign of Offa, which
+went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all
+but its old dominion. Since the dissolution of
+the temporary alliance which Penda formed with
+the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with the
+Britons in the west had been the one great
+hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under
+Offa Mercia braced herself to the completion of
+her British conquests. Pushing after 779 over
+the Severn, and carrying his ravages into the
+heart of Wales, Offa drove the King of Powys
+from his capital, which changed its old name
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-098"></a>1-098]</span>
+
+of Pengwern for the significant English title of
+the Town in the Scrub or Bush, Scrobbesbyryg,
+Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught the
+Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and
+Offa resolved to create a military border by
+planting a settlement of Englishmen between the
+Severn, which had till then served as the western
+boundary of the English race, and the huge
+"Offa's Dyke" which he drew from the mouth of
+Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later
+conquests of the West-Saxons, the old plan of
+extermination was definitely abandoned and the
+Welsh who chose to remain dwelled undisturbed
+among their English conquerors. From these
+conquests over the Britons Offa turned to build
+up again the realm which had been shattered at
+Burford. But his progress was slow. A reconquest
+of Kent in 775 woke anew the jealousy
+of the West-Saxons; and though Offa defeated
+their army at Bensington in 779 the victory was
+followed by several years of inaction. It was not
+till Wessex was again weakened by fresh anarchy
+that he was able in 794 to seize East-Anglia and
+restore his realm to its old bounds under Wulfhere.
+Further he could not go. A Kentish revolt
+occupied him till his death in 796, and his
+successor Cenwulf did little but preserve the
+realm he bequeathed him. At the close of the
+eighth century the drift of the English peoples
+towards a national unity was in fact utterly
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-099"></a>1-099]</span>
+
+arrested. The work of Northumbria had been
+foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of
+Mercia had broken down before the resistance of
+Wessex. A threefold division seemed to have
+stamped itself upon the land; and so complete
+was the balance of power between the three
+realms which parted it that no subjection of one
+to the other seemed likely to fuse the English
+tribes into an English people.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-100"></a>1-100]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1-Ch3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4538593"></a>CHAPTER III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4538599"></a>WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4538605"></a>796-947</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Northmen</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The union which each English kingdom in turn
+had failed to bring about was brought about by
+the pressure of the Northmen. The dwellers in
+the isles of the Baltic or on either side of
+the Scandinavian peninsula had lain hidden
+till now from Western Christendom, waging their
+battle for existence with a stern climate, a barren
+soil, and stormy seas. It was this hard fight for
+life that left its stamp on the temper of Dane,
+Swede, or Norwegian alike, that gave them their
+defiant energy, their ruthless daring, their passion
+for freedom and hatred of settled rule. Forays
+and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty
+livelihood, and at the close of the eighth century
+these raids found a wider sphere than the waters
+of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth
+garnered in the abbeys and towns of the new
+Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-101"></a>1-101]</span>
+
+Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the
+coasts of Northern Gaul; and just before Offa's
+death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
+To men of that day it must have seemed as
+though the world had gone back three hundred
+years. The same northern fiords poured forth
+their pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or
+Cerdic. There was the same wild panic as the
+black boats of the invaders struck inland along
+the river-reaches or moored round the river isles,
+the same sights of horror, firing of homesteads,
+slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or
+shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the
+market-place, as when the English themselves had
+attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
+slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden;
+letters, arts, religion, government disappeared
+before these northmen as before the northmen of
+three centuries before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Ecgberht</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries
+of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and the presence of
+the freebooters soon told on the political balance
+of the English realms. A great revolution was
+going on in the south, where Mercia was torn by
+civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death, while
+the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by
+a new king, Ecgberht. In Offa's days Ecgberht
+had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex and
+had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of
+the Franks.  He remained there through the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-102"></a>1-102]</span>
+
+memorable year during which Charles the Great
+restored the Empire of the West, and returned in
+802 to be quietly welcomed as King by the West-Saxon
+people. A march into the heart of Cornwall
+and the conquest of this last fragment of the
+British kingdom in the south-west freed his hands
+for a strife with Mercia, which broke out in 825
+when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into
+the heart of Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at
+Ellandun gave all England south of Thames to the
+West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred
+the men of East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt
+against Mercia. Two great overthrows at
+their hands had already spent its strength when
+Ecgberht crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm
+of Penda and Offa bowed without a struggle to its
+conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than
+those of supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream
+of a union of all England drew him to the north.
+Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts
+it stood at the head of the English race; and
+under a king like Eadberht it would have withstood
+Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood
+Æthelbald. But the ruin of Jarrow and Wearmouth
+had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn by
+civil strife, and desperate of finding in itself the
+union needed to meet the northmen, Northumbria
+sought union and deliverance in subjection to
+a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in
+Derbyshire, and owned the supremacy of Wessex.
+</p>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-103"></a>1-103]</span>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquests of the Northmen</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the submission of Northumbria the work
+which Oswiu and Æthelbald had failed to do was
+done, and the whole English race was for the first
+time knit together under a single rule. The union
+came not a moment too soon. Had the old severance
+of people from people, the old civil strife
+within each separate realm, gone on it is hard to
+see how the attacks of the northmen could have
+been withstood. They were already settled in
+Ireland; and from Ireland a northern host landed
+in 836 at Charmouth in Dorsetshire strong enough
+to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet them,
+from the field. His victory the year after at
+Hengestdun won a little rest for the land; but
+Æthelwulf who mounted the throne on Ecgberht's
+death in 839 had to face an attack which was
+only beaten off by years of hard fighting. Æthelwulf
+fought bravely in defence of his realm; in
+his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at
+Aclea in 851 he led his troops in person against
+the sea-robbers; and his success won peace for
+the land through the short and uneventful reigns
+of his sons Æthelbald and Æthelberht. But the
+northern storm burst in full force upon England
+when a third son, Æthelred, followed his brothers
+on the throne. The northmen were now settled
+on the coast of Ireland and the coast of Gaul;
+they were masters of the sea; and from west and
+east alike they closed upon Britain. While one
+host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-104"></a>1-104]</span>
+
+of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia
+landed in 866 on the coast of East-Anglia under
+Ivar the Boneless and marched the next year upon
+York. A victory over two claimants of its crown
+gave the pirates Northumbrian and seizing the
+passage of the Trent they threatened an attack on
+the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a march
+of King Æthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he
+made there with the northmen left them leisure to
+prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose
+under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before
+their leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to
+death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen
+made Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend;
+in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured
+windows of church after church along the eastern
+coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury
+rose over his relics. With him ended the line of
+East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not
+only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of
+the pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its
+crown. Already the northmen had turned to the
+richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough,
+Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their
+monks fled or lay slain among the ruins. Mercia,
+though still free from actual attack, cowered
+panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment
+of tribute owned them as its overlords.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v1-map-3.jpg"><img src="images/v1-map-3t.jpg" alt="England and the Danelaw"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Wessex and the Northmen</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In five years the work of Ecgberht had been
+undone, and England north of the Thames had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-105"></a>1-105]</span>
+
+been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So
+rapid a change could only have been made possible
+by the temper of the conquered kingdoms. To
+them the conquest was simply their transfer from
+one overlord to another, and it may be that in all
+there were men who preferred the overlordship of
+the Northman to the overlordship of the West-Saxon.
+But the loss of the subject kingdoms left
+Wessex face to face with the invaders. The time
+had now come for it to fight, not for supremacy,
+but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by
+terror. With the exception of his one march on
+Nottingham, King Æthelred had done nothing to
+save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the
+pirates no sooner pushed up Thames to Reading
+in 871 than the West-Saxons, attacked on their
+own soil, turned fiercely at bay. A desperate
+attack drove the northmen from Ashdown on the
+heights that overlook the Vale of White Horse,
+but their camp in the tongue of land between the
+Kennet and Thames proved impregnable. Æthelred
+died in the midst of the struggle, and his
+brother Ælfred, who now became king, bought
+the withdrawal of the pirates and a few years'
+breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the
+quick eye of Ælfred to see that the northmen had
+withdrawn simply with the view of gaining firmer
+footing for a new attack; three years indeed had
+hardly passed before Mercia was invaded and its
+under-king driven over sea to make place for a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-106"></a>1-106]</span>
+
+tributary of the invaders. From Repton half
+their host marched northwards to the Tyne,
+while Guthrum led the rest to Cambridge to
+prepare for their next year's attack on Wessex.
+In 876 his fleet appeared before Wareham, and
+in spite of a treaty bought by Ælfred, the
+northmen threw themselves into Exeter. Their
+presence there was likely to stir a rising of the
+Welsh, and through the winter Ælfred girded
+himself for this new peril. At break of spring
+his army closed round the town, a hired fleet
+cruised off the coast to guard against rescue, and
+the defeat of their fellows at Wareham in an attempt
+to relieve them drove the pirates to surrender.
+They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
+Gloucester. But Ælfred had hardly disbanded his
+troops when his enemies, roused by the arrival of
+fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at
+Chippenham, and in the opening of 878 marched
+ravaging over the land. The surprise of Wessex
+was complete, and for a month or two the general
+panic left no hope of resistance. Ælfred, with his
+small band of followers, could only throw himself
+into a fort raised hastily in the isle of Athelney
+among the marshes of the Parret, a position from
+which he could watch closely the movements of his
+foes. But with the first burst of spring he called
+the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still
+gathering troops as he moved marched through
+Wiltshire on the northmen. He found their host
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-107"></a>1-107]</span>
+
+at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after
+a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender
+and to bind themselves by a solemn peace or
+"frith" at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the
+Peace of Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk
+of Britain to its invaders. All Northumbria, all
+East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line
+which stretched from Thames' mouth along the
+Lea to Bedford, thence along the Ouse to Watling
+Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left
+subject to the northmen. Throughout this "Danelaw"--as
+it was called--the conquerors settled
+down among the conquered population as lords of
+the soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly
+in its central districts, but everywhere guarding
+jealously their old isolation and gathering in
+separate "heres" or armies round towns which
+were only linked in loose confederacies. The
+peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex
+itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England.
+The spell of terror was broken. The tide of invasion
+turned. From an attitude of attack the
+northmen were thrown back on an attitude of
+defence. The whole reign of Ælfred was a preparation
+for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back
+from the pirates the land they had won.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Ælfred</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What really gave England heart for such a
+struggle was the courage and energy of the King
+himself. Alfred was the noblest as he was the
+most complete embodiment of all that is great, all
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-108"></a>1-108]</span>
+
+that is loveable, in the English temper. He combined
+as no other man has ever combined its
+practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its
+profound sense of duty, the reserve and self-control
+that steadies in it a wide outlook and a restless
+daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank
+geniality, its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic
+tenderness, its deep and passionate religion.
+Religion indeed was the groundwork of Ælfred's
+character. His temper was instinct with piety.
+Everywhere throughout his writings that remain
+to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir
+him to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he
+was no mere saint. He felt none of that scorn of
+the world about him which drove the nobler souls
+of his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he
+was by sickness and constant pain, his temper took
+no touch of asceticism. His rare geniality, a
+peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave
+colour and charm to his life. A sunny frankness
+and openness of spirit breathes in the pleasant
+chat of his books, and what he was in his books he
+showed himself in his daily converse. Ælfred was
+in truth an artist, and both the lights and shadows
+of his life were those of the artistic temperament.
+His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings
+of travellers and scholars, betray an
+imaginative restlessness that longs to break out of
+the narrow world of experience which hemmed him
+in. At one time he jots down news of a voyage to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-109"></a>1-109]</span>
+
+the unknown seas of the north. At another he
+listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from
+the churches of Malabar. And side by side with this
+restless outlook of the artistic nature he showed its
+tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid apprehension
+of unseen danger, its craving for affection,
+its sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself
+rather than with his reader that he communed as
+thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and
+opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory
+or Boethius. "Oh, what a happy man was he," he
+cries once, "that man that had a naked sword
+hanging over his head from a single thread; so as
+to me it always did!" "Desirest thou power?"
+he asks at another time. "But thou shalt never
+obtain it without sorrows--sorrows from strange
+folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own
+kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks
+out again, "not a king but would wish to be
+without these if he could. But I know that he
+cannot!" The loneliness which breathes in words
+like these has often begotten in great rulers a
+cynical contempt of men and the judgements of
+men. But cynicism found no echo in the large
+and sympathetic temper of Ælfred. He not only
+longed for the love of his subjects, but for the
+remembrance of "generations" to come. Nor did
+his inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his
+vivid and versatile activity. To the scholars he
+gathered round him he seemed the very type of a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-110"></a>1-110]</span>
+
+scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read
+or listen to books read to him. The singers of his
+court found in him a brother singer, gathering the
+old songs of his people to teach them to his children,
+breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple
+verse, solacing himself in hours of depression with
+the music of the Psalms. He passed from court and
+study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in
+gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers
+their business. But all this versatility and ingenuity
+was controlled by a cool good sense.
+Ælfred was a thorough man of business. He was
+careful of detail, laborious, methodical. He
+carried in his bosom a little handbook in which he
+noted things as they struck him--now a bit of
+family genealogy, now a prayer, now such a story
+as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the bridge.
+Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there
+was the same order in the division of his revenue
+and in the arrangement of his court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wide however and various as was the King's
+temper, its range was less wonderful than its
+harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion,
+of the predominance of one quality
+over another which goes commonly with an
+intensity of moral purpose Ælfred showed not a
+trace. Scholar and soldier, artist and man of
+business, poet and saint, his character kept that
+perfect balance which charms us in no other
+Englishman save Shakspere. But full and harmonious
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-111"></a>1-111]</span>
+
+as his temper was, it was the temper of a
+king. Every power was bent to the work of rule.
+His practical energy found scope for itself in the
+material and administrative restoration of the
+wasted land. His intellectual activity breathed
+fresh life into education and literature. His
+capacity for inspiring trust and affection drew the
+hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began
+the upbuilding of a new England. And all was
+guided, controlled, ennobled by a single aim. "So
+long as I have lived," said the King as life closed
+about him, "I have striven to live worthily."
+Little by little men came to know what such a life
+of worthiness meant. Little by little they came to
+recognize in Ælfred a ruler of higher and nobler
+stamp than the world had seen. Never had it
+seen a King who lived solely for the good of
+his people. Never had it seen a ruler who set
+aside every personal aim to devote himself solely
+to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was
+this grand self-mastery that gave him his power
+over the men about him. Warrior and conqueror
+as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the
+warrior's dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement
+of Wedmore struck the key-note of his reign.
+But still more is it this height and singleness of
+purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest
+faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts Ælfred out
+of the narrow bounds of Wessex. If the sphere
+of his action seems too small to justify the comparison
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-112"></a>1-112]</span>
+
+of him with the few whom the world owns
+as its greatest men, he rises to their level in the
+moral grandeur of his life. And it is this which
+has hallowed his memory among his own English
+people. "I desire," said the King in some of his
+latest words, "I desire to leave to the men that
+come after me a remembrance of me in good
+works." His aim has been more than fulfilled.
+His memory has come down to us with a living
+distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and
+legend which time gathered round it. The
+instinct of the people has clung to him with a
+singular affection. The love which he won a
+thousand years ago has lingered round his name
+from that day to this. While every other name of
+those earlier times has all but faded from the
+recollection of Englishmen, that of Ælfred remains
+familiar to every English child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">English Literature</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The secret of Ælfred's government lay in his
+own vivid energy. He could hardly have chosen
+braver or more active helpers than those whom he
+employed both in his political and in his
+educational efforts. The children whom he
+trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their
+time. But at the outset of his reign he stood
+alone, and what work was to be done was done
+by the King himself. His first efforts were
+directed to the material restoration of his realm.
+The burnt and wasted country saw its towns built
+again, forts erected in positions of danger, new
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-113"></a>1-113]</span>
+
+abbeys founded, the machinery of justice and
+government restored, the laws codified and
+amended. Still more strenuous were Ælfred's
+efforts for its moral and intellectual restoration.
+Even in Mercia and Northumbria the pirates'
+sword had left few survivors of the schools of
+Ecgberht or Bæda, and matters were even worse
+in Wessex which had been as yet the most
+ignorant of the English kingdoms. "When I
+began to reign," said Ælfred, "I cannot remember
+one priest south of the Thames who could render
+his service-book into English." For instructors
+indeed he could find only a few Mercian prelates
+and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser.
+"In old times," the King writes sadly, "men
+came hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction,
+and now if we are to have it we can
+only get it from abroad." But his mind was far
+from being prisoned within his own island. He
+sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the
+White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of
+Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
+churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual
+mission carried Peter's-pence to Rome. But it
+was with the Franks that his intercourse was
+closest, and it was from them that he drew the
+scholars to aid him in his work of education.
+Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over
+his new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old
+Saxon, was fetched it may be from the Westphalian
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-114"></a>1-114]</span>
+
+abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that
+Ælfred's gratitude for his deliverance from the
+Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The
+real work however to be done was done, not by
+these teachers but by the King himself. Ælfred
+established a school for the young nobles at his
+own court, and it was to the need of books for
+these scholars in their own tongue that we owe
+his most remarkable literary effort. He took his
+books as he found them--they were the popular
+manuals of his age--the Consolation of Boethius,
+the Pastoral Book of Pope Gregory, the compilation
+of "Orosius," then the one accessible handbook
+of universal history, and the history of his own
+people by Bæda. He translated these works into
+English, but he was far more than a translator, he
+was an editor for his people. Here he omitted,
+there he expanded. He enriched "Orosius" by a
+sketch of the new geographical discoveries in
+the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his
+selections from Bæda. In one place he stops to
+explain his theory of government, his wish for
+a thicker population, his conception of national
+welfare as consisting in a due balance of the priest,
+the thegn, and the churl. The mention of Nero
+spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power.
+The cold Providence of Boethius gives way to an
+enthusiastic acknowledgement of the goodness of
+God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature
+flings off its royal mantle, and he talks as a man
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-115"></a>1-115]</span>
+
+to men. "Do not blame me," he prays with a
+charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better
+than I, for every man must say what he says
+and do what he does according to his ability."
+But simple as was his aim, Ælfred changed the
+whole front of our literature. Before him,
+England possessed in her own tongue one great
+poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs.
+Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the
+prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
+translations of Ælfred, and above all with the
+chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the
+King's rendering of Bæda's history gave the first
+impulse towards the compilation of what is known
+as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which
+was certainly thrown into its present form during
+his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of
+Wessex and the bishops of Winchester, which
+had been preserved from older times, were
+roughly expanded into a national history by
+insertions from Bæda: but it is when it reaches
+the reign of Ælfred that the chronicle suddenly
+widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and
+originality, that marks the gift of a new power to
+the English tongue. Varying as it does from age
+to age in historic value, it remains the first
+vernacular history of any Teutonic people, and
+save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors
+among his Gothic people, the earliest and
+most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.
+</p>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-116"></a>1-116]</span>
+
+<p>
+But all this literary activity was only a part
+of that general upbuilding of Wessex by which
+Ælfred was preparing for a fresh contest with the
+stranger. He knew that the actual winning back
+of the Danelaw must be a work of the sword,
+and through these long years of peace he was
+busy with the creation of such a force as might
+match that of the northmen. A fleet grew out
+of the little squadron which Ælfred had been
+forced to man with Frisian seamen. The national
+fyrd or levy of all freemen at the King's call was
+reorganized. It was now divided into two halves,
+one of which served in the field while the other
+guarded its own burhs and townships and served
+to relieve its fellow when the men's forty days of
+service were ended. A more disciplined military
+force was provided by subjecting all owners of
+five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which
+recognized the change that had now substituted
+the thegn for the eorl and in which we see the
+beginning of a feudal system. How effective
+these measures were was seen when the new
+resistance they met on the Continent drove the
+northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893
+a large fleet steered for the Andredsweald, while
+the sea-king Hasting entered the Thames. Ælfred
+held both at bay through the year till the men of
+the Danelaw rose at their comrades' call. Wessex
+stood again front to front with the northmen.
+But the King's measures had made the realm
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-117"></a>1-117]</span>
+
+strong enough to set aside its old policy of defence
+for one of vigorous attack. His son
+Eadward and his son-in-law Æthelred, whom he
+had set as Ealdorman over what remained of
+Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active
+as the King. The aim of the northmen was to
+rouse again the hostility of the Welsh, but while
+Ælfred held Exeter against their fleet, Eadward
+and Æthelred caught their army near the Severn
+and overthrew it with a vast slaughter at Buttington.
+The destruction of their camp on the
+Lea by the united English forces ended the war;
+in 897 Hasting again withdrew across the Channel,
+and the Danelaw made peace. It was with the
+peace he had won still about him that Ælfred died
+in 901, and warrior as his son Eadward had shown
+himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest.
+It was not till 910 that a fresh rising of the
+northmen forced Ælfred's children to gird themselves
+to the conquest of the Danelaw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Eadward the Elder</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister
+Æthelflæd, in whose hands Æthelred's death left
+English Mercia, attacked the "Five Boroughs," a
+rude confederacy which had taken the place of
+the older Mercian kingdom. Derby represented
+the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln
+the Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English,
+Stamford the province of the Gyrwas, Nottingham
+probably that of the Southumbrians. Each
+of these "Five Boroughs" seems to have been
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-118"></a>1-118]</span>
+
+ruled by its earl with his separate "host"; within
+each twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law,
+while a common "Thing" may have existed for the
+whole district. In her attack on this powerful
+league Æthelflæd abandoned the older strategy of
+battle and raid for that of siege and fortress-building.
+Advancing along the line of Trent, she
+fortified Tamworth and Stafford on its head-waters;
+when a rising in Gwent called her back to the
+Welsh border, her army stormed Brecknock; and
+its king no sooner fled for shelter to the northmen
+in whose aid he had risen than Æthelflæd at
+once closed on Derby. Raids from Middle-England
+failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her
+prey; and Derby was hardly her own when,
+turning southward, she forced the surrender of
+Leicester. Nor had the brilliancy of his sister's
+exploits eclipsed those of the King, for the son
+of Ælfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he
+had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the northmen
+from France, summoned no doubt by the cry of
+distress from their brethren in England, and had
+bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection
+of forts at Hertford and Witham. On the death
+of Æthelflæd in 918 he came boldly to the front.
+Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering
+the whole strength of the kingdom into his single
+hand, he undertook the systematic reduction of
+the Danelaw. South of the Middle-English and
+the Fens lay a tract watered by the Ouse and the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-119"></a>1-119]</span>
+
+Nen--originally the district of a tribe known as
+the South-English, and now, like the Five
+Boroughs of the north, grouped round the towns
+of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The
+reduction of these was followed by that of East-Anglia;
+the northmen of the Fens submitted
+with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham.
+Eadward's Mercian troops had already
+seized Manchester; he himself was preparing to
+complete his conquests, when in 924 the whole
+of the North suddenly laid itself at his feet.
+Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the
+Britons of Strathclyde "chose him to father and
+lord."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Æthelstan</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumph was his last. Eadward died in
+925, but the reign of his son Æthelstan, Ælfred's
+golden-haired grandson whom the King had girded
+as a child with a sword set in a golden scabbard
+and a gem-studded belt, proved even more glorious
+than his own. In spite of its submission the
+North had still to be won. Dread of the northmen
+had drawn Scot and Cumbrian to their
+acknowledgement of Eadward's overlordship, but
+Æthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria
+with his dominions than dread of Wessex took
+the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot
+King Constantine organized a league of Scot,
+Cumbrian, and Welshman with the northmen.
+The league was broken by Æthelstan's rapid
+action in 926; the North-Welsh were forced to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-120"></a>1-120]</span>
+
+pay annual tribute, to march in his armies, and
+to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall
+were reduced to a like vassalage, and
+finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
+till then with its English inhabitants, But eight
+years later the same league called Æthelstan
+again to the North; and though Constantine was
+punished by an army which wasted his kingdom
+while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness the
+English army had no sooner withdrawn than
+Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a
+fleet of pirates from Ireland under the sea-king
+Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
+beside the northmen against the West-Saxon
+King; but his victory at Brunanburh crushed
+the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
+brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession
+in 940, and the North again rose in revolt. The
+men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
+in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a
+peace which left him king but south of the
+Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting
+again laid the Danelaw at his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Dunstan</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But policy was now to supplement the work
+of the sword. The completion of the West-Saxon
+realm was in fact reserved for the hands,
+not of a king or warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan
+stands first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen
+who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey
+and ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-121"></a>1-121]</span>
+
+in himself, in his own vivid personality after
+eight centuries of revolution and change. He
+was born in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the
+home of his father, Heorstan, a man of wealth
+and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester.
+It must have been in his father's hall
+that the fair, diminutive boy, with scant but
+beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain
+songs of heathendom, the trifling legends, the
+funeral chaunts," which afterwards roused against
+him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might
+have derived his passionate love of music, and his
+custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey
+or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left
+their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as
+they left them along the Rhine and the Danube;
+and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred
+and profane letters till his brain broke down in
+delirium. So famous became his knowledge in the
+neighbourhood that news of it reached the court
+of Æthelstan, but his appearance there was the
+signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers.
+Again they drove him from Eadmund's train,
+threw him from his horse as he passed through
+the marshes, and with the wild passion of their
+age trampled him under foot in the mire. The
+outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from
+his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession
+was then little more than a vow of celibacy and
+his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-122"></a>1-122]</span>
+
+fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; full of strong
+affections, and capable of inspiring others with
+affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious
+memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and
+genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was
+at the same time an indefatigable worker alike
+at books or handicraft. As his sphere began
+to widen we see him followed by a train of
+pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping,
+painting, designing. One morning a lady summons
+him to her house to design a robe which
+she is embroidering, and as he bends with her
+maidens over their toil his harp hung upon the
+wall sounds without mortal touch tones which the
+excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Conquest of the Danelaw</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to
+a wider sphere of activity towards the close of
+Eadmund's reign. But the old jealousies revived
+at his reappearance at court, and counting the game
+lost Dunstan prepared again to withdraw. The
+king had spent the day in the chase; the red
+deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar
+cliffs, and his horse only checked itself on the
+brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund
+in the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice
+to Dunstan. He was at once summoned
+on the king's return. "Saddle your horse," said
+Eadmund, "and ride with me." The royal train
+swept over the marshes to his home; and the
+king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-123"></a>1-123]</span>
+
+him in the abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury.
+Dunstan became one of Eadmund's councillors,
+and his hand was seen in the settlement of the
+north. It was the hostility of the states around
+it to the West-Saxon rule which had roused so
+often revolt in the Danelaw; but from the time of
+Brunanburh we hear nothing more of the hostility
+of Bernicia, while Cumbria was conquered by
+Eadmund and turned adroitly to account in winning
+over the Scots to his cause. The greater part of it
+was granted to their king Malcolm on terms that
+he should be Eadmund's "fellow-worker by sea and
+land." The league of Scot and Briton was thus
+finally broken up, and the fidelity of the Scots
+secured by their need of help in holding down
+their former ally. The settlement was soon
+troubled by the young king's death. As he
+feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946,
+Leofa, a robber whom Eadmund had banished
+from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at
+the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer
+when he bade him retire. The king sprang in
+wrath to his thegn's aid, and seizing Leofa by the
+hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle
+the robber drove his dagger to Eadmund's heart.
+His death at once stirred fresh troubles in the
+north; the Danelaw rose against his brother and
+successor, Eadred, and some years of hard fighting
+were needed before it was again driven to own the
+English supremacy.  But with its submission in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-124"></a>1-124]</span>
+
+954 the work of conquest was done. Dogged as
+his fight had been, the Dane at last owned
+himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's
+final triumph all resistance came to an end. The
+Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.
+North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire
+might again cross swords with men of Hampshire;
+but their strife was henceforth a local strife
+between men of the same people; it was a strife of
+Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of Englishmen
+with Northmen.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-125"></a>1-125]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk1-Ch4"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4540289"></a>CHAPTER IV</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4540295"></a>FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4540301"></a>954-1071</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Absorption of the Northmen</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fierceness of the northman's onset had hidden
+the real character of his attack. To the men who
+first fronted the pirates it seemed as though the
+story of the world had gone back to the days
+when the German barbarians first broke in upon
+the civilized world. It was so above all in
+Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's
+own attack on the island was seen in the
+northmen's attack on it. Boats of marauders from
+the northern seas again swarmed off the British
+coast; church and town were again the special
+object of attack; the invaders again settled on the
+conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger
+than the faith of Christ. But the issues of the
+two attacks showed the mighty difference between
+them. When the English ceased from their onset
+upon Roman Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared,
+and a new people of conquerors stood
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-126"></a>1-126]</span>
+
+alone on the conquered land. The Northern
+storm on the other hand left land, people,
+government unchanged. England remained a
+country of Englishmen. The conquerors sank
+into the mass of the conquered, and Woden yielded
+without a struggle to Christ. The strife
+between Briton and Englishman was in fact a
+strife between men of different races, while the
+strife between northman and Englishman was a
+strife between men whose race was the same. The
+followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
+alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts,
+its culture, its wealth, as they were strange to the
+social degradation which Rome had brought on its
+province. But the northman was little more than
+an Englishman bringing back to an England which
+had drifted far from its origin the barbaric life
+of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
+Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere
+else were the fighters men of one blood and one
+speech. But just for this reason the union of the
+combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete.
+The victory of the house of Ælfred only
+hastened a process of fusion which was already
+going on. From the first moment of his settlement
+in the Danelaw the northman had been
+passing into an Englishman. The settlers were
+few; they were scattered among a large population;
+in tongue, in manner, in institutions there
+was little to distinguish them from the men among
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-127"></a>1-127]</span>
+
+whom they dwelt. Moreover their national temper
+helped on the process of assimilation. Even in
+France, where difference of language and difference
+of custom seemed to interpose an impassable
+barrier between the northman settled in Normandy
+and his neighbours, he was fast becoming
+a Frenchman. In England, where no such barriers
+existed, the assimilation was even quicker. The
+two peoples soon became confounded. In a few
+years a northman in blood was Archbishop of
+Canterbury and another northman in blood was
+Archbishop of York.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The three Northern Kingdoms</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fusion might have been delayed if not
+wholly averted by continued descents from the
+Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign
+the long attack which the northman had directed
+against western Christendom came, for a while at
+least, to an end. On the world which it assailed
+its results had been immense. It had utterly
+changed the face of the west. The empire of
+Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had
+been alike dashed to pieces. But break and
+change as it might, Christendom had held the
+northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power
+which had grown up on the western seas had
+disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the northman's
+rule had dwindled to the holding of a few
+coast towns. In France his settlements had
+shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In
+England every northman was a subject of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-128"></a>1-128]</span>
+
+English King. Even the empire of the seas
+had passed from the sea-kings' hands. It was
+an English and not a Scandinavian fleet that for
+fifty years to come held mastery in the English
+and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory
+in fact the struggle seemed to have reached its
+close. Stray pirate boats still hung off headland
+and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide
+to gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century
+to come no great pirate fleet made its way to the
+west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
+energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed
+through these years in the political changes of
+Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from
+fiord and dale from dale was breaking down.
+The little commonwealths which had held so
+jealously aloof from each other were being drawn
+together whether they would or no. In each of
+the three regions of the north great kingdoms
+were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made
+himself lord of the petty states about him. In
+Denmark King Gorm built up in the same way
+a monarchy of the Danes. Norway itself was
+the first to become a single monarchy. Legend
+told how one of its many rulers, Harald of
+Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of
+Hordaland, a girl he had chosen for wife, and how
+Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his
+petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald
+vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-129"></a>1-129]</span>
+
+made all Norway his own. So every springtide
+came war and hosting, harrying and burning, till
+a great fight at Hafursfiord settled the matter, and
+Harald "Ugly-Head," as men called him while the
+strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again
+and became Harald "Fair-Hair." The Northmen
+loved no master, and a great multitude fled out of
+the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and
+colonizing it, some swarming to the Orkneys and
+Hebrides till Harald harried them out again and
+the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum's
+host in the Rhine country or follow Hrolf to his
+fights on the Seine. But little by little the land
+settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian
+realms gathered strength for new efforts
+which were to leave their mark on our after
+history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England and its King</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But of the new danger which threatened it in
+this union of the north England knew little. The
+storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and
+the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless
+conflict into a time of peace. Here as elsewhere
+the northman had failed in his purpose of conquest;
+but here as elsewhere he had done a
+mighty work. In shattering the empire of Charles
+the Great he had given birth to the nations of
+modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen
+he had created an English people. The
+national union which had been brought about
+for a moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-130"></a>1-130]</span>
+
+union of sheer force which broke down at the first
+blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of the
+northmen were so many wedges that split up the
+fabric of the roughly-built realm. But the very
+agency which destroyed the new England was
+destined to bring it back again, and to breathe
+into it a life that made its union real. The
+peoples who had so long looked on each other as
+enemies found themselves fronted by a common
+foe. They were thrown together by a common
+danger and the need of a common defence. Their
+common faith grew into a national bond as religion
+struggled hand in hand with England itself against
+the heathen of the north. They recognized a
+common king as a common struggle changed
+Ælfred and his sons from mere leaders of West-Saxons
+into leaders of all Englishmen in their
+fight with the stranger. And when the work
+which Ælfred set his house to do was done, when
+the yoke of the northman was lifted from the
+last of his conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian
+and Mercian, spent with the battle for a
+common freedom and a common country, knew
+themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an
+English people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The new people found its centre in the King.
+The heightening of the royal power was a direct
+outcome of the war. The dying out of other
+royal stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line
+of hereditary kingship. But it was the war with
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-131"></a>1-131]</span>
+
+the northmen that raised Ælfred and his sons
+from tribal leaders into national kings. The long
+series of triumphs which wrested the land from the
+stranger begot a new and universal loyalty; while
+the wider dominion which their success bequeathed
+removed the kings further and further from their
+people, lifted them higher and higher above the
+nobles, and clothed them more and more with
+a mysterious dignity. Above all the religious
+character of the war against the northmen gave
+a religious character to the sovereigns who waged
+it. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the
+son of Woden, became yet more sacred as "the
+Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration
+he was pledged to a religious rule, to
+justice, mercy, and good government; but his
+"hallowing" invested him also with a power
+drawn not from the will of man or the assent of
+his subjects but from the will of God, and treason
+against him became the worst of crimes. Every
+reign lifted the sovereign higher in the social
+scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with him
+in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman.
+The ealdorman himself, once the hereditary
+ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate
+of the national king, with an authority curtailed
+in every shire by that of the royal shire-reeves,
+officers charged with levying the royal revenues and
+destined ultimately to absorb judicial authority.
+Among the later nobility of the thegns personal
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-132"></a>1-132]</span>
+
+service with such a lord was held not to degrade
+but to ennoble. "Horse-thegn," and "cup-thegn,"
+and "border," the constable, butler, and treasurer,
+found themselves officers of state; and the developement
+of politics, the wider extension of home
+and foreign affairs were already transforming these
+royal officers into a standing council or ministry
+for the transaction of the ordinary administrative
+business and the reception of judicial appeals.
+Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates
+nominated by the king, and constituting in itself
+a large part of the Witenagemot when that
+assembly was gathered for legislative purposes,
+drew the actual control of affairs more and more
+into the hands of the sovereign himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Growth of Feudalism</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the king's power was still a personal power.
+He had to be everywhere and to see for himself
+that everything he willed was done. The royal
+claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of
+the Crown. There was a want of administrative
+machinery in actual connexion with the government,
+responsible to it, drawing its force directly
+from it, and working automatically in its name
+even in moments when the royal power was itself
+weak or wavering. The Crown was strong under
+a king who was strong, whose personal action was
+felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose
+dread lay on every reeve and ealdorman. But
+with a weak king the Crown was weak. Ealdor-men,
+provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-133"></a>1-133]</span>
+
+ceased to move at the royal bidding the
+moment the direct royal pressure was loosened
+or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old
+provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance
+and isolation lingered on and woke afresh
+when the crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a
+child. And at the moment we have reached the
+royal power and the national union it embodied
+had to battle with fresh tendencies towards
+national disintegration which sprang like itself
+from the struggle with the northman. The tendency
+towards personal dependence and towards a
+social organization based on personal dependence
+received an overpowering impulse from the strife.
+The long insecurity of a century of warfare drove
+the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to seek protection
+more and more from the thegn beside him.
+The freeman "commended" himself to a lord who
+promised aid, and as the price of this shelter he
+surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a
+fief laden with conditions of military service.
+The principle of personal allegiance which was
+embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself
+tended to widen into a theory of general dependence.
+From Ælfred's day it was assumed that no
+man could exist without a lord. The "lordless
+man" became a sort of outlaw in the realm. The
+free man, the very base of the older English constitution,
+died down more and more into the
+"villein," the man who did suit and service to a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-134"></a>1-134]</span>
+
+master, who followed him to the field, who looked
+to his court for justice, who rendered days of
+service in his demesne. The same tendencies
+drew the lesser thegns around the greater nobles,
+and these around the provincial ealdormen. The
+ealdormen had hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants
+of the national sovereign before they again
+began to rise into petty kings, and in the century
+which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian
+thegns following a Mercian or Northumbrian
+ealdorman to the field though it were against the
+lord of the land. Even the constitutional forms
+which sprang from the old English freedom
+tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding
+power. In the "great meeting" of the
+Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
+rule of the realm. It represented the whole
+English people, as the wise-moots of each kingdom
+represented the separate peoples of each; and its
+powers were as supreme in the wider field as
+theirs in the narrower. It could elect or depose
+the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the
+imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion
+of treaties, the control of wars, the disposal
+of public lands, the appointment of great officers
+of state. But such a meeting necessarily differed
+greatly in constitution from the Witan of the
+lesser kingdoms. The individual freeman, save
+when the host was gathered together, could hardly
+take part in its deliberations. The only relic of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-135"></a>1-135]</span>
+
+its popular character lay at last in the ring of
+citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at
+London or Winchester, and shouted their "aye"
+or "nay" at the election of a king. Distance and
+the hardships of travel made the presence of the
+lesser thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and
+the national council practically shrank into a
+gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and the
+officers of the crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Feudalism and the Monarchy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old English democracy had thus all but
+passed into an oligarchy of the narrowest kind.
+The feudal movement which in other lands was
+breaking up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit
+states with nobles at their head who owned
+little save a nominal allegiance to their king
+threatened to break up England itself. What
+hindered its triumph was the power of the Crown,
+and it is the story of this struggle between the
+monarchy and these tendencies to feudal isolation
+which fills the period between the death of Eadred
+and the conquest of the Norman. It was a
+struggle which England shared with the rest of
+the western world, but its issue here was a peculiar
+one. In other countries feudalism won an easy
+victory over the central government. In England
+alone the monarchy was strong enough to hold
+feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might be, the
+English ealdorman never succeeded in becoming
+really hereditary or independent of the Crown.
+Kings as weak as Æthelred could drive ealdormen
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-136"></a>1-136]</span>
+
+into exile and could replace them by fresh nominees.
+If the Witenagemot enabled the great
+nobles to bring their power to bear directly on
+the Crown, it preserved at any rate a feeling of
+national unity and was forced to back the Crown
+against individual revolt. The Church too never
+became feudalized. The bishop clung to the
+Crown, and the bishop remained a great social
+and political power. As local in area as the
+ealdorman, for the province was his diocese and
+he sat by his side in the local Witenagemot, he
+furnished a standing check on the independence
+of the great nobles. But if feudalism proved too
+weak to conquer the monarchy, it was strong
+enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the
+two forces could master the other, but each could
+weaken the other, and throughout the whole
+period of their conflict England lay a prey to
+disorder within and to insult from without.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first sign of these troubles was seen when
+the death of Eadred in 955 handed over the realm
+to a child king, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig
+was swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu;
+and the quarrel between her and the older
+counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the
+coronation feast. On the young king's insolent
+withdrawal to her chamber Dunstan, at the bidding
+of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat.
+But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence
+of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-137"></a>1-137]</span>
+
+triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the
+marriage of her daughter to the king and the
+spoliation of the monasteries which Dunstan had
+befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig's
+kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded
+his marriage as incestuous, and it was
+followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958
+Archbishop Odo parted the King from his wife
+by solemn sentence; while the Mercians and
+Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's
+brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan.
+The death of Eadwig a few months later restored
+the unity of the realm; but his successor Eadgar
+was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his
+reign the direction of affairs must have lain in the
+hands of Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of
+Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as
+of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies
+in the silence of our chroniclers. His work indeed
+was a work of settlement, and such a work was
+best done by the simple enforcement of peace.
+During the years of rest in which King and
+Primate enforced justice and order northman
+and Englishman drew together into a single
+people. Their union was the result of no direct
+policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan's policy
+preserved to the conquered Danelaw its local
+rights and local usages. But he recognized the
+men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed
+northmen in the royal service, and promoted
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-138"></a>1-138]</span>
+
+them to high posts in Church and State. For the
+rest he trusted to time, and time justified his
+trust. The fusion was marked by a memorable
+change in the name of the land. Slowly as the
+conquering tribes had learned to know themselves,
+by the one national name of Englishmen, they
+learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on
+the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's
+day that the name of Britain passed into the
+name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen,
+England. The same vigorous rule which secured
+rest for the country during these years of national
+union told on the growth of material prosperity.
+Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its extension
+is seen in the complaint that men learned fierceness
+from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
+the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.
+The laws of Æthelred which provide for the protection
+and regulation of foreign trade only recognize
+a state of things which grew up under
+Eadgar. "Men of the Empire," traders of Lower
+Lorraine and the Rhine-land, "Men of Rouen,"
+traders from the new Norman duchy of the Seine,
+were seen in the streets of London. It was in
+Eadgar's day indeed that London rose to the
+commercial greatness it has held ever since.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Eadward the Martyr</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he
+was still in the prime of manhood when he died
+in 975. His death gave a fresh opening to the
+great nobles. He had bequeathed the crown to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-139"></a>1-139]</span>
+
+his elder son Eadward; but the ealdorman of
+East-Anglia, Æthelwine, rose at once to set a
+younger child, Æthelred, on the throne. But the
+two primates of Canterbury and York who had
+joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar
+now joined in setting it on the head of Eadward,
+and Dunstan remained as before master of the
+realm. The boy's reign however was troubled
+by strife between the monastic party and their
+opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short
+by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of
+Æthelred, the power of Dunstan made way for
+that of ealdorman Æthelwine and the queen-mother.
+Some years of tranquillity followed this
+victory; but though Æthelwine preserved order
+at home he showed little sense of the danger
+which threatened from abroad. The North was
+girding itself for a fresh, onset on England. The
+Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into
+their kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway;
+and it was no longer in isolated bands but
+in national hosts that they were about to seek
+conquests in the South. As Æthelred drew to
+manhood some chance descents on the coast told
+of this fresh stir in the North, and the usual
+result of the northman's presence was seen in
+new risings among the Welsh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Æthelred</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 991 ealdorman Brihtnoth of East-Anglia
+fell in battle with a Norwegian force at Maldon,
+and the withdrawal of the pirates had to be
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-140"></a>1-140]</span>
+
+bought by money. Æthelwine too died at this
+moment, and the death of the two ealdormen left
+Æthelred free to act as King. But his aim was
+rather to save the Crown from his nobles than
+England from the northmen. Handsome and
+pleasant of address, the young King's pride showed
+itself in a string of imperial titles, and his restless
+and self-confident temper drove him to push the
+pretensions of the Crown to their furthest extent.
+His aim throughout his reign was to free himself
+from the dictation of the great nobles, and it was
+his indifference to their "rede" or counsel that
+won him the name of "Æthelred the Redeless."
+From the first he struck boldly at his foes, and
+Ælfric, the ealdorman of Central Wessex, whom the
+death of his rival Æthelwine left supreme in the
+realm, was driven possibly by fear to desert to
+a Danish force which he was sent in 992 to drive
+from the coast. Æthelred turned from his triumph
+at home to meet the forces of the Danish and
+Norwegian kings, Swein and Olaf, which
+anchored off London in 994. His policy through-out
+was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
+arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for
+intrigues which parted the invaders till troubles
+at home drew both again to the North. Æthelrod
+took quick advantage of his success at home
+and abroad; the place of the great ealdormen in
+the royal councils was taken by court-thegns, in
+whom we see the rudiments of a ministry, while
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-141"></a>1-141]</span>
+
+the king's fleet attacked the pirates' haunts in
+Cumberland and the Cotentin. But in spite of
+all this activity the news of a fresh invasion found
+England more weak and broken than ever. The
+rise of the "new men" only widened the breach
+between the court and the great nobles, and their
+resentment showed itself in delays which foiled
+every attempt of Æthelred to meet the pirate-bands
+who still clung to the coast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Swein</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They came probably from the other side of the
+Channel, and it was to clear them away as well
+as secure himself against Swein's threatened
+descent that Æthelred took a step which brought
+England in contact with a land over-sea. Normandy,
+where the northmen had settled a hundred
+years before, was now growing into a great power,
+and it was to win the friendship of Normandy
+and to close its harbours against Swein that
+Æthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke's
+daughter, Emma, to wife. The same dread of
+invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the
+northern mercenaries whom the king had drawn
+to settle in the land as a fighting force against
+their brethren; and an order of Æthelred brought
+about a general massacre of them on St. Brice's
+day. Wedding and murder however proved
+feeble defences against Swein. His fleet reached
+the coast in 1003, and for four years he marched
+through the length and breadth of southern and
+eastern England, "lighting his war-beacons as he
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-142"></a>1-142]</span>
+
+went" in blazing homestead and town. Then for
+a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare for a later
+and more terrible onset. But there was no rest
+for the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian
+jarls took his place, and from Wessex the war
+extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012
+Canterbury was taken and sacked, Æltheah the
+Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there in
+default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set
+him in the midst of their husting, pelting him
+with bones and skulls of oxen, till one more
+pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe.
+Meanwhile the court was torn with intrigue and
+strife, with quarrels between the court-thegns in
+their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels
+between these favourites and the nobles whom
+they superseded in the royal councils.  The
+King's policy of finding aid among his new
+ministers broke down when these became themselves
+ealdormen. With their local position they
+took up the feudal claims of independence; and
+Eadric, whom Æthelred raised to be ealdorman
+of Mercia, became a power that overawed the
+Crown. In this paralysis of the central authority
+all organization and union was lost.  "Shire
+would not help other" when Swein returned in
+1013. The war was terrible but short. Everywhere
+the country was pitilessly harried, churches
+plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one
+exception of London, there was no attempt at
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-143"></a>1-143]</span>
+
+resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung open
+their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to
+the northmen at Bath. Even London was forced
+at last to give way, and Æthelred fled over-sea to
+a refuge in Normandy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Cnut</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was soon called back again. In the opening
+of 1014 Swein died suddenly at Gainsborough;
+and the spell of terror was broken. The Witan
+recalled "their own born lord," and Æthelred
+returned to see the Danish fleet under Swein's
+son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to
+plan a more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as
+he was, Cnut showed from the first the vigour of
+his temper. Setting aside his brother he made
+himself king of Denmark; and at once gathered
+a splendid fleet for a fresh attack on England,
+whose king and nobles were again at strife, and
+where a bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric
+of Mercia and Æthelred's son Eadmund Ironside
+broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of
+Eadric to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the
+coast threw open England to his arms; Wessex
+and Mercia submitted to him; and though the
+loyalty of London enabled Eadmund, when his
+father's death raised him in 1016 to the throne, to
+struggle bravely for a few months against the
+Danes, a decisive overthrow at Assandun and a
+treaty of partition which this wrested from him at
+Olney were soon followed by the young king's
+death. Cnut was left master of the realm. His
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-144"></a>1-144]</span>
+
+first acts of government showed little but the
+temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
+uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst
+for blood. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given
+him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the
+king's signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the
+brother of Eadmund Ironside, while the children
+of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
+his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this
+the young conqueror rose abruptly into a wise and
+temperate king. His aim during twenty years
+seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds
+the foreign character of his rule and the bloodshed
+in which it had begun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no
+foreigner in the sense that the Norman was a
+foreigner after him. His language differed little
+from the English tongue. He brought in no new
+system of tenure or government. Cnut ruled in
+fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native
+king. He dismissed his Danish host, and retaining
+only a trained band of household troops or
+"hus-carls" to serve as a body-guard relied boldly
+for support within his realm on the justice and
+good government he secured it. He fell back on
+"Eadgar's Law," on the old constitution of the
+realm, for his rule of government; and owned no
+difference between Dane and Englishman among
+his subjects. He identified himself even with the
+patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-145"></a>1-145]</span>
+
+Church had been the centre of the national resistance;
+Archbishop Ælfheah had been slain by
+Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of
+the Church; he translated Ælfheah's body with
+great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his
+father's ravages by gifts to the religious houses;
+he protected English pilgrims even against the
+robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks
+broke out in a song which he composed as he
+listened to their chaunt at Ely. "Merrily sang
+the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by"
+across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their
+abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear
+we these monks sing." A letter which Cnut wrote
+after twelve years of rule to his English subjects
+marks the grandeur of his character and the noble
+conception he had formed of kingship. "I have
+vowed to God to lead a right life in all things,"
+wrote the king, "to rule justly and piously my
+realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement
+to all. If heretofore I have done aught beyond
+what was just, through headiness or negligence of
+youth, I am ready, with God's help, to amend it
+utterly." No royal officer, either for fear of the
+king or for favour of any, is to consent to injustice,
+none is to do wrong to rich or poor "as they
+would value my friendship and their own well-being."
+He especially denounces unfair exactions:
+"I have no need that money be heaped together
+for me by unjust demands." "I have sent this
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-146"></a>1-146]</span>
+
+letter before me," Cnut ends, "that all the people
+of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for as
+you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will
+I spare, to spend myself and my toil in what is
+needful and good for my people."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Cnut and Scotland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of
+peace. With him began the long internal tranquillity
+which was from this time to be the keynote
+of the national history. Without, the Dane
+was no longer a terror; on the contrary it was
+English ships and English soldiers who now
+appeared in the North and followed Cnut in his
+campaigns against Wend or Norwegian. Within,
+the exhaustion which follows a long anarchy gave
+fresh strength to the Crown, and Cnut's own
+ruling temper was backed by the force of hus-carls
+at his disposal. The four Earls of Northumberland,
+Mercia, Wessex, and East-Anglia, whom
+he set in the place of the older caldormen, knew
+themselves to be the creatures of his will; the
+ablest indeed of their number, Godwine, earl of
+Wessex, was the minister or close counsellor of the
+King. The troubles along the Northern border
+were ended by a memorable act of policy. From
+Eadgar's day the Scots had pressed further and
+further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of
+their king Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham
+in 1018 made him master of Northern Northumbria.
+In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the
+quarrel ended in a formal cession of the district
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-147"></a>1-147]</span>
+
+between the Forth and the Tweed, Lothian as it
+was called, to the Scot-king on his doing homage
+to Cnut. The gain told at once on the character
+of the Northern kingdom. The kings of the Scots
+had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and
+Celtic peoples; but from the moment that Lothian
+with its English farmers and English seamen
+became a part of their dominions it became the
+most important part. The kings fixed their seat
+at Edinburgh, and in the midst of an English
+population passed from Gaelic chieftains into the
+Saxon rulers of a mingled people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Cnut's Sons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the greatness of Cnut's rule hung solely on
+the greatness of his temper, and the Danish power
+was shaken by his death in 1035. The empire he
+had built up at once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed
+both England and Denmark to his son
+Harthacnut; but the boy's absence enabled his
+brother, Harald Harefoot, to acquire all England
+save Godwine's earldom of Wessex, and in the end
+even Godwine was forced to submit to him.
+Harald's death in 1040 averted a conflict between
+the brothers, and placed Harthacnut quietly on
+the throne. But the love which Cnut's justice
+had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness
+of his successors. The long peace sickened men of
+their bloodshed and violence. "Never was a
+bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes
+came," ran a popular song, when Harald's men
+seized Ælfred, a brother of Eadmund Ironside,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-148"></a>1-148]</span>
+
+who returned to England from Normandy where
+he had found a refuge since his father's flight to
+its shores. Every tenth man among his followers
+was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and Ælfred's
+eyes torn out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage
+than his predecessor, dug up his brother's body
+and flung it into a marsh; while a rising at
+Worcester against his hus-carls was punished by
+the burning of the town and the pillage of the
+shire. The young king's death was no less brutal
+than his life; in 1042 "he died as he stood at his
+drink in the house of Osgod Clapa at Lambeth."
+England wearied of rulers such as these: but their
+crimes helped her to free herself from the impossible
+dream of Cnut. The North, still more
+barbarous than herself, could give her no new
+element of progress or civilization. It was the
+consciousness of this and a hatred of rulers such
+as Harald and Harthacnut which co-operated with
+the old feeling of reverence for the past in calling
+back the line of Ælfred to the throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Eadward the Confessor</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in such transitional moments of a nation's
+history that it needs the cool prudence, the sensitive
+selfishness, the quick perception of what is
+possible, which distinguished the adroit politician
+whom the death of Cnut left supreme in England.
+Originally of obscure origin, Godwine's ability had
+raised him high in the royal favour; he was allied
+to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with the
+earldom of Wessex, and at last made the Viceroy
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-149"></a>1-149]</span>
+
+or justiciar of the King in the government of the
+realm. In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown
+courage and skill at the head of a body of English
+troops, but his true field of action lay at home.
+Shrewd, eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine
+united vigilance, industry, and caution with
+a singular dexterity in the management of men.
+During the troubled years that followed the death
+of Cnut he did his best to continue his master's
+policy in securing the internal union of England
+under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her
+connexion with the North. But at the death of
+Harthacnut Cnut's policy had become impossible,
+and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
+with the tide of popular feeling which called
+Eadward, the one living son of Æthelred, to the
+throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in
+exile at the court of Normandy. A halo of
+tenderness spread in after-time round this last
+king of the old English stock; legends told of his
+pious simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of
+mood, the holiness that gained him his name of
+"Confessor" and enshrined him as a saint in his
+abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in
+manlier tones of the long peace and glories of his
+reign, how warriors and wise counsellors stood
+round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton
+obeyed him. His was the one figure that stood
+out bright against the darkness when England lay
+trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-150"></a>1-150]</span>
+
+so dear became his memory that liberty and independence
+itself seemed incarnate in his name.
+Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or
+Henry called for the "good laws of Eadward the
+Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the
+past that the exile really returned to the throne
+of Ælfred; there was something shadow-like in
+his thin form, his delicate complexion, his transparent
+womanly hands; and it is almost as a
+shadow that he glides over the political stage.
+The work of government was done by sterner
+hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Godwine</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England
+lay in the hands of its three Earls, Siward of
+Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of
+Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency
+to provincial separation against which Æthelred
+had struggled was to triumph with the death of
+Cnut. What hindered this severance was the
+greed of Godwine. Siward was isolated in the
+North: Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of
+Mercia. But the Earl of Wessex, already master
+of the wealthiest part of England, seized district
+after district for his house. His son Swein
+secured an earldom in the south-west; his son
+Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his nephew
+Beorn was established in Central England: while
+the marriage of his daughter Eadgyth to the king
+himself gave Godwine a hold upon the throne.
+Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-151"></a>1-151]</span>
+
+at winning England itself than at breaking up
+England to win a mere fief in it. But his aim
+found a sudden check through the lawlessness of
+his son Swein. Swein seduced the abbess of
+Leominster, sent her home again with a yet more
+outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and
+on the king's refusal to grant it fled from the
+realm. Godwine's influence secured his pardon,
+but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered
+his cousin Beorn who had opposed the reconciliation
+and again fled to Flanders. A storm of
+national indignation followed him over-sea. The
+meeting of the Wise men branded him as
+"nithing," the "utterly worthless," yet in a year
+his father wrested a new pardon from the King
+and restored him to his earldom. The scandalous
+inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in
+a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself.
+The king was a stranger in his realm, and
+his sympathies lay naturally with the home and
+friends of his youth and exile. He spoke the
+Norman tongue. He used in Norman fashion a
+seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites
+in the highest posts of Church and State.
+Foreigners such as these, though hostile to the
+minister, were powerless against Godwine's influence
+and ability, and when at a later time they
+ventured to stand alone against him they fell
+without a blow. But the general ill-will at
+Swein's inlawing enabled them to stir Eadward
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-152"></a>1-152]</span>
+
+to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel
+brought the opportunity of a decisive break with
+him. On his return from a visit to the court
+Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of the
+king's sister, demanded quarters for his train in
+Dover. Strife arose, and many both of the
+burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine's
+better nature withstood Eadward when the
+king angrily bade him exact vengeance from the
+town for the affront to his kinsman; and he
+claimed a fair trial for the townsmen. But
+Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and
+the quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine
+at once gathered his forces and marched upon
+Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign
+favourites. But even in a just quarrel the country
+was cold in his support. The earls of Mercia and
+Northumberland united their forces to those of
+Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the
+king to a gathering of the Witenagemot at
+London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but
+Swein's outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of
+Wessex, declining with his usual prudence a useless
+struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Harold</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the wrath of the nation was appeased by
+his fall. Great as were Godwine's faults, he was
+the one man who now stood between England and
+the rule of the strangers who flocked to the
+Court; and a year had hardly passed when he
+was strong enough to return. At the appearance
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-153"></a>1-153]</span>
+
+of his fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was
+once more forced to yield. The foreign prelates
+and bishops fled over sea, outlawed by the same
+meeting of the Wise men which restored Godwine
+to his home. But he returned only to die, and
+the direction of affairs passed quietly to his son
+Harold. Harold came to power unfettered by the
+obstacles which beset his father, and for twelve
+years he was the actual governor of the realm.
+The courage, the ability, the genius for administration,
+the ambition and subtlety of Godwine were
+found again in his son. In the internal government
+of England he followed out his father's
+policy while avoiding its excesses. Peace was
+preserved, justice administered, and the realm
+increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work
+and embroidery became famous in the markets of
+Flanders and France. Disturbances from without
+were crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold's military
+talents displayed themselves in a campaign
+against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity
+with which, arming his troops with weapons
+adapted for mountain conflict, he penetrated to
+the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country
+to complete submission. With the gift of the
+Northumbrian earldom on Siward's death to his
+brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
+older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of
+Godwine, and as the waning health of the king,
+the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-154"></a>1-154]</span>
+
+had returned from Hungary as his heir, and the
+childhood of the Ætheling Eadgar who stood next
+in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
+plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward
+to the throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Normandy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his advance was watched by one even more
+able and ambitious than himself. For the last
+half-century England had been drawing nearer to
+the Norman land which fronted it across the
+Channel. As we pass nowadays through Normandy,
+it is English history which is round about
+us. The name of hamlet after hamlet has memories
+for English ears; a fragment of castle wall marks
+the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves
+the name of the Percy. The very look of the
+country and its people seem familiar to us; the
+Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
+build and features of the small English farmer;
+the fields about Caen, with their dense hedgerows,
+their elms, their apple-orchards, are the very picture
+of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift
+themselves over the red-tiled roofs of little market
+towns, the models of stately fabrics which superseded
+the lowlier churches of Ælfred or Dunstan,
+while the windy heights that look over orchard
+and meadowland are crowned with the square grey
+keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of
+Richmond and the banks of Thames. It was
+Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader like
+Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-155"></a>1-155]</span>
+
+the French king, Charles the Simple, in 912, at
+the moment when Ælfred's children were beginning
+their conquest of the English Danelaw. The
+treaty of Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased
+peace by this cession of the coast was a close imitation
+of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
+was baptized, received the king's daughter in
+marriage, and became his vassal for the territory
+which now took the name of "the Northman's
+land" or Normandy. But vassalage and the new
+faith sat lightly on the Dane. No such ties of
+blood and speech tended to unite the northman
+with the French among whom he settled along the
+Seine as united him to the Englishmen among
+whom he settled along the Humber. William
+Longsword, the son of Hrolf, though wavering
+towards France and Christianity, remained a northman
+in heart; he called in a Danish colony to
+occupy his conquest of the Cotentin, the peninsula
+which runs out from St. Michael's Mount to the
+cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the
+northmen of Bayeux where the Danish tongue and
+fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
+heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk
+of the Normans, with the child Duke Richard, fell
+away for the time from Christianity, while new
+pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. To the
+close of the century the whole people were still
+"Pirates" to the French around them, their land
+the "Pirates' land," their Duke the "Pirates'
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-156"></a>1-156]</span>
+
+Duke." Yet in the end the same forces which
+merged the Dane in the Englishman told even
+more powerfully on the Dane in France. No race
+has ever shown a greater power of absorbing all
+the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom
+they came in contact, or of infusing their own
+energy into them. During the long reign of
+Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William
+Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996,
+the heathen Norman pirates became French
+Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse
+language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local
+names. As the old Northern freedom died silently
+away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal
+nobles and the "Pirates' land" sank into the most
+loyal of the fiefs of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Duke William</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the moment of their settlement on the
+Frankish coast, the Normans had been jealously
+watched by the English kings; and the anxiety of
+Æthelred for their friendship set a Norman woman
+on the English throne. The marriage of Emma
+with Æthelred brought about a close political connexion
+between the two countries. It was in
+Normandy that the King found a refuge from
+Swein's invasion, and his younger boys grew up
+in exile at the Norman court. Their presence
+there drew the eyes of every Norman to the rich
+land which offered so tempting a prey across the
+Channel. The energy which they had shown in
+winning their land from the Franks, in absorbing
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-157"></a>1-157]</span>
+
+the French civilization and the French religion,
+was now showing itself in adventures on far-off
+shores, in crusades against the Moslem of Spain or
+the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of adventure
+that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against
+England in Cnut's day under pretext of setting
+Æthelred's children on its throne, but the wreck
+of his fleet in a storm put an end to a project which
+might have anticipated the work of his son. It
+was that son, William the Great, as men of his
+own day styled him, William the Conqueror as he
+was to stamp himself by one event on English
+history, who was now Duke of Normandy. The
+full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and
+patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which
+lifts him out of the petty incidents of his age, were
+as yet only partly disclosed. But there never had
+been a moment from his boyhood when he was not
+among the greatest of men. His life from the very
+first was one long mastering of difficulty after
+difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in
+his name of "the Bastard." His father Robert
+had seen Arlotta, a tanner's daughter of the town,
+as she washed her linen in a little brook by Falaise;
+and loving her he had made her the mother of his
+boy. The departure of Robert on a pilgrimage
+from which he never returned left William a child-ruler
+among the most turbulent baronage in
+Christendom; treason and anarchy surrounded
+him as he grew to manhood; and disorder broke
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-158"></a>1-158]</span>
+
+at last into open revolt. But in 1047 a fierce
+combat of horse on the slopes of Val-ès-dunes
+beside Caen left the young Duke master of his
+duchy and he soon made his mastery felt. "Normans"
+said a Norman poet "must be trodden down
+and kept under foot, for he only that bridles them
+may use them at his need." In the stern order he
+forced on the land Normandy from this hour felt
+the bridle of its Duke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William and France</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Secure at home, William seized the moment of
+Godwine's exile to visit England, and received from
+his cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards asserted,
+a promise of succession to his throne. Such a
+promise however, unconfirmed by the Witenagemot,
+was valueless; and the return of Godwine
+must have at once cut short the young Duke's
+hopes. He found in fact work enough to do in
+his own duchy, for the discontent of his baronage
+at the stern justice of his rule found support in the
+jealousy which his power raised in the states around
+him, and it was only after two great victories at
+Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard
+fighting that outer and inner foes were alike trodden
+under foot. In 1060 William stood first among
+the princes of France. Maine submitted to his
+rule. Britanny was reduced to obedience by a
+single march. While some of the rebel barons
+rotted in the Duke's dungeons and some were
+driven into exile, the land settled down into a
+peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-159"></a>1-159]</span>
+
+wealth and culture. Learning and education found
+their centre in the school of Bec, which the teaching
+of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised in a few
+years into the most famous school of Christendom.
+Lanfranc's first contact with William, if it showed
+the Duke's imperious temper, showed too his marvellous
+insight into men. In a strife with the
+Papacy which William provoked by his marriage
+with Matilda, a daughter of the Count of Flanders,
+Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition
+was met by a sentence of banishment, and the
+Prior had hardly set out on a lame horse, the only
+one his house could afford, when he was overtaken
+by the Duke, impatient that he should quit Normandy.
+"Give me a better horse and I shall go
+the quicker," replied the imperturbable Lombard,
+and William's wrath passed into laughter and
+good will. From that hour Lanfranc became his
+minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in the
+duchy itself or for the more daring schemes of
+ambition which opened up across the Channel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William and England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+William's hopes of the English crown are said
+to have been revived by a storm which threw
+Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the
+coast of Ponthieu. Its count sold him to the
+Duke; and as the price of return to England
+William forced him to swear on the relics of saints
+to support his claim to its throne. But, true or
+no, the oath told little on Harold's course. As
+the childless King drew to his grave one obstacle
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-160"></a>1-160]</span>
+
+after another was cleared from the earl's path.
+His brother Tostig had become his most dangerous
+rival; but a revolt of the Northumbrians drove
+Tostig to Flanders, and the earl was able to win
+over the Mercian house of Leofric to his cause by
+owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian Earl
+Eadwine, as his brother's successor. His aim was
+in fact attained without a struggle. In the opening
+of 1066 the nobles and bishops who gathered
+round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly
+from it to the election and coronation of Harold.
+But at Eouen the news was welcomed with a burst
+of furious passion, and the Duke of Normandy at
+once prepared to enforce his claim by arms.
+William did not claim the Crown. He claimed
+simply the right which he afterwards used when
+his sword had won it of presenting himself for
+election by the nation, and he believed himself
+entitled so to present himself by the direct commendation
+of the Confessor. The actual election
+of Harold which stood in his way, hurried as it
+was, he did not recognize as valid. But with this
+constitutional claim was inextricably mingled
+resentment at the private wrong which Harold
+had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance
+on the man whom he regarded as untrue to his
+oath. The difficulties in the way of his enterprise
+were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no
+support within England itself. At home he had
+to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage;
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-161"></a>1-161]</span>
+
+to gather a motley host from every quarter of
+France and to keep it together for months; to
+create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build,
+to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time
+amidst all this for the common business of government,
+for negotiations with Denmark and the
+Empire, with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with
+Flanders and with Rome which had been estranged
+from England by Archbishop Stigand's acceptance
+of his pallium from one who was not owned as a
+canonical Pope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Stamford Bridge</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his rival's difficulties were hardly less than
+his own. Harold was threatened with invasion
+not only by William but by his brother Tostig,
+who had taken refuge in Norway and secured the
+aid of its king, Harald Hardrada. The fleet and
+army he had gathered lay watching for months
+along the coast. His one standing force was his
+body of hus-carls, but their numbers only enabled
+them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the
+other hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of
+fighting-men was a body easy to raise for any
+single encounter but hard to keep together. To
+assemble such a force was to bring labour to a
+standstill. The men gathered under the King's
+standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their
+fields. The ships were the fishing-vessels of the
+coast. In September the task of holding them
+together became impossible, but their dispersion
+had hardly taken place when the two clouds which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-162"></a>1-162]</span>
+
+had so long been gathering burst at once upon the
+realm. A change of wind released the landlocked
+armament of William; but before changing, the
+wind which prisoned the Duke brought the host
+of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of
+Yorkshire. The King hastened with his household
+troops to the north and repulsed the
+Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford
+Bridge, but ere he could hurry back to London the
+Norman host had crossed the sea and William,
+who had anchored on the twenty-eighth of
+September off Pevensey, was ravaging the coast
+to bring his rival to an engagement. His merciless
+ravages succeeded in drawing Harold from
+London to the south; but the King wisely refused
+to attack with the troops he had hastily summoned
+to his banner. If he was forced to give battle,
+he resolved to give it on ground he had himself
+chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to
+check William's ravages he entrenched himself on
+a hill known afterwards as that of Senlac, a low
+spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His
+position covered London and drove William to
+concentrate his forces. With a host subsisting by
+pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no alternative
+was left to the Duke but a decisive victory
+or ruin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Battle of Hastings</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the fourteenth of October William led his
+men at dawn along the higher ground that leads
+from Hastings to the battle-field which Harold
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-163"></a>1-163]</span>
+
+had chosen. From the mound of Telham the
+Normans saw the host of the English gathered
+thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on
+the height of Senlac. Marshy ground covered
+their right; on the left, the most exposed part of
+the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold,
+men in full armour and wielding huge axes, were
+grouped round the Golden Dragon of Wessex and
+the Standard of the King. The rest of the ground
+was covered by thick masses of half-armed rustics
+who had flocked at Harold's summons to the fight
+with the stranger. It was against the centre of
+this formidable position that William arrayed his
+Norman knighthood, while the mercenary forces
+he had gathered in France and Britanny were
+ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge of
+the Norman foot opened the battle; in front rode
+the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air
+and catching it again while he chaunted the song
+of Roland. He was the first of the host who
+struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The
+charge broke vainly on the stout stockade behind
+which the English warriors plied axe and javelin
+with fierce cries of "Out, out," and the repulse of
+the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse of
+the Norman horse. Again and again the Duke
+rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All
+the fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman's
+blood, all the headlong valour that spurred him
+over the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, mingled that day
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-164"></a>1-164]</span>
+
+with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance,
+the inexhaustible faculty of resource which shone
+at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton troops,
+entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke
+in disorder, and as panic spread through the army
+a cry arose that the Duke was slain. William tore
+off his helmet; "I live," he shouted, "and by
+God's help I will conquer yet." Maddened by a
+fresh repulse, the Duke spurred right at the
+Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down
+Gyrth, the King's brother; again dismounted, a
+blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
+unmannerly rider who would not lend him his
+steed. Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle
+he turned the flight he had arrested into the means
+of victory. Broken as the stockade was by his
+desperate onset, the shield-wall of the warriors
+behind it still held the Normans at bay till
+William by a feint of flight drew a part of the
+English force from their post of vantage. Turning
+on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to
+pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and
+made himself master of the central ground. Meanwhile
+the French and Bretons made good their
+ascent on either flank. At three the hill seemed
+won, at six the fight still raged around the Standard
+where Harold's hus-carls stood stubbornly at bay
+on a spot marked afterwards by the high altar of
+Battle Abbey. An order from the Duke at last
+brought his archers to the front. Their arrow-flight
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-165"></a>1-165]</span>
+
+told heavily on the dense masses crowded
+around the King and as the sun went down a shaft
+pierced Harold's right eye. He fell between the
+royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate
+melly over his corpse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night covered the flight of the English army:
+but William was quick to reap the advantage of
+his victory. Securing Romney and Dover, he
+marched by Canterbury upon London. Faction
+and intrigue were doing his work for him as he
+advanced; for Harold's brothers had fallen with
+the King on the field of Senlac, and there was
+none of the house of Godwine to contest the
+crown. Of the old royal line there remained but
+a single boy, Eadgar the Ætheling. He was
+chosen king; but the choice gave little strength
+to the national cause. The widow of the
+Confessor surrendered Winchester to the Duke.
+The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission.
+The citizens themselves faltered as
+William, passing by their walls, gave Southwark
+to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really
+rested for support on the Earls of Mercia and
+Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and William,
+crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching
+into Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from
+their earldoms. The masterly movement forced
+the Earls to hurry home, and London gave way at
+once. Eadgar himself was at the head of the
+deputation who came to offer the crown to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-166"></a>1-166]</span>
+
+Norman Duke. "They bowed to him," says the
+English annalist pathetically, "for need." They
+bowed to the Norman as they had bowed to the
+Dane, and William accepted the crown in the
+spirit of Cnut. London indeed was secured by
+the erection of a fortress which afterwards grew
+into the Tower, but William desired to reign not
+as a Conqueror but as a lawful king. At Christmas
+he received the crown at Westminster from the
+hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of "Yea,
+Yea," from his new English subjects. Fines from
+the greater landowners atoned for a resistance
+which now counted as rebellion; but with this
+exception every measure of the new sovereign
+showed his desire of ruling as a successor of
+Eadward or Ælfred. As yet indeed the greater
+part of England remained quietly aloof from him,
+and he can hardly be said to have been recognized
+as king by Northumberland or the greater part of
+Mercia. But to the east of a line which stretched
+from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was unquestioned,
+and over this portion he ruled as an
+English king. His soldiers were kept in strict
+order. No change was made in law or custom.
+The privileges of London were recognized by a
+royal writ which still remains, the most venerable
+of its muniments, among the city's archives. Peace
+and order were restored. William even attempted,
+though in vain, to learn the English tongue that
+he might personally administer justice to the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-167"></a>1-167]</span>
+
+suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so
+tranquil that only a few months had passed after
+the battle of Senlac when leaving England in
+charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and
+his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, the King
+returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The
+peace he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop
+Odo's tyranny forced the Kentishmen to seek aid
+from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the Welsh
+princes supported a similar rising against Norman
+oppression in the west. But as yet the bulk of the
+land held fairly to the new king. Dover was
+saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled
+over sea to seek refuge in lands as far off as
+Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time
+formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians
+of the Eastern Emperors. William returned to
+take his place again as an English king. It was
+with an English force that he subdued a rising in
+the south-west with Exeter at its head, and it was
+at the head of an English army that he completed
+his work by marching to the North. His march
+brought Eadwine and Morkere again to submission;
+a fresh rising ended in the occupation of York, and
+England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's
+feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Norman Conquest</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068
+that transformed the King into a conqueror. The
+signal for this revolt came from Swein, king of
+Denmark, who had for two years past been
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-168"></a>1-168]</span>
+
+preparing to dispute England with the Norman,
+but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber
+all northern, all western and south-western England
+rose as one man. Eadgar the Ætheling with a
+band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland
+took the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the
+south-west the men of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset
+gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute;
+while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone
+bridled a rising in the West. So ably had the
+revolt been planned that even William was taken
+by surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a
+storm of York and the slaughter of three thousand
+Normans who formed its garrison. The news of
+this slaughter reached William as he was hunting
+in the forest of Dean; and in a wild outburst of
+wrath he swore "by the splendour of God" to
+avenge himself on the North. But wrath went
+hand in hand with the coolest statesmanship. The
+centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and
+pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of
+horsemen William bought at a heavy price its
+inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward
+with the troops that gathered round him he swept
+the Welsh border and relieved Shrewsbury while
+William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around
+Exeter. His success set the King free to fulfil his
+oath of vengeance on the North. After a long
+delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he
+entered York and ravaged the whole country as
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-169"></a>1-169]</span>
+
+far as the Tees. Town and village were harried
+and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven
+over the Scottish border. The coast was especially
+wasted that no hold might remain for future
+landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very
+implements of husbandry were so mercilessly
+destroyed that a famine which followed is said to
+have swept off more than a hundred thousand
+victims. Half a century later indeed the land still
+lay bare of culture and deserted of men for sixty
+miles northward of York. The work of vengeance
+once over, William led his army back from the
+Tees to York, and thence to Chester and the West.
+Never had he shown the grandeur of his character
+so memorably as in this terrible march. The
+winter was hard, the roads choked with snowdrifts
+or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his
+army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses
+for food, broke out into mutiny at the order to
+cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire from
+the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and
+Britanny demanded their release from service.
+William granted their prayer with scorn. On
+foot, at the head of the troops which still clung to
+him, he forced his way by paths inaccessible to
+horses, often helping the men with his own hands
+to clear the road, and as the army descended upon
+Chester the resistance of the English died away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For two years William was able to busy himself
+in castle-building and in measures for holding
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-170"></a>1-170]</span>
+
+down the conquered land. How effective these
+were was seen when the last act of the conquest
+was reached. All hope of Danish aid was now
+gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to
+Scotland where Eadgar the Ætheling had again
+found refuge and where his sister Margaret had
+become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably
+some assurance of Malcolm's aid which roused the
+Mercian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to a fresh
+rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled
+by the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell
+in an obscure skirmish, while Morkere found
+shelter for a while in the fen country where a
+desperate band of patriots gathered round an
+outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had William
+found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway
+two miles long was at last driven across the
+marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom
+died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the
+unquestioned master of England that William
+marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands and
+the Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp
+upon the Tay to swear fealty at his feet.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-171"></a>1-171]</span>
+
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4543374"></a>BOOK II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543380"></a>ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543386"></a>1071-1204</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-173"></a>1-173]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2-Auth"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4543453"></a> </li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543458"></a>AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543464"></a>1071-1204</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from
+this point particularly valuable and detailed. The Chronicle
+and Florence of Worcester remain the primary English
+authorities, while Simeon of Durham gives much special
+information on northern matters. For the reign of William
+the Red the chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk
+of Canterbury, in his "Historia Noverum" and "Life of
+Anselm." William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon
+are both contemporary authorities during that of
+Henry the First; the latter remains a brief but accurate
+annalist; the former is the leader of a new historic school,
+who treat English events as part of the history of the world,
+and emulate classic models by a more philosophical arrangement
+of their materials. To these the opening of Stephen's
+reign adds the "Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail
+by one of the King's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this wealth of historical material however suddenly
+leaves us in the chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle
+dies out in the midst of Stephen's reign, and the close
+at the same time of the works we have noted leaves a
+blank in our historical literature which extends over the
+early years of Henry the Second. But this dearth is
+followed by a vast outburst of historical industry. For the
+Beket struggle we have the mass of the Archbishop's own
+correspondence with that of Foliot and John of Salisbury.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-174"></a>1-174]</span>
+
+From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is the Chronicle
+known as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose authorship
+Professor Stubbs has shown to be more probably due
+to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Neal. This is
+continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of equally
+official value. William of Newburgh's history, which ends
+in 1198, is a work of the classical school, like William of
+Malmesbury's. It is distinguished by its fairness and good
+sense. To these may be added the Chronicle of Ralph
+Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall, that of
+Gervase of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh
+of Lincoln.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second's time
+is shown even more remarkably in the mass of general
+literature which lies behind these distinctively historical
+sources, in the treatises of John of Salisbury, the voluminous
+works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the "Trifles" and satires of
+Walter Map, Glanvill's treatise on Law, Richard Fitz-Neal's
+"Dialogue on the Exchequer," to which we owe
+our knowledge of Henry's financial system, the romances of
+Gaimar and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal. But this
+intellectual fertility is far from ceasing with Henry the
+Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun when
+the romantic impulse quickens even the old English tongue
+in the long poem of Layamon. The Chronicle of Richard
+of Devizes and an "Itinerarium Regis" supplement Roger
+of Howden for Richard's reign. With John we enter upon
+the Annals of Barnwell and are aided by the invaluable
+series of the Chroniclers of St. Albans. Among the side
+topics of the time, we may find much information as to the
+Jews in Toovey's "Anglia Judaica"; the Chronicle of
+Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep into social and
+monastic life; the Cistercian revival may be traced in the
+records of the Cistercian abbeys in Dugdale's Monasticon;
+the Charter Rolls give some information as to municipal
+history; and constitutional developement may be traced
+in the documents collected by Professor Stubbs in his
+"Select Charters."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-175"></a>1-175]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2-Ch1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4543652"></a>CHAPTER I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543658"></a>THE CONQUEROR</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4543664"></a>1071-1085</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Foreign Kings</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the five hundred years that followed the
+landing of Hengest Britain had become England,
+and its conquest had ended in the settlement of
+its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity,
+in the birth of a national literature, of an imperfect
+civilization, of a rough political order.
+But through the whole of this earlier age every
+attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors
+into a single nation had failed. The effort of
+Northumbria to extend her rule over all England
+had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia;
+that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
+Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great
+kings and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the
+country to a seeming unity than local independence
+rose again at the call of the Northmen. The
+sense of a single England deepened with the
+pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of Ælfred
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-176"></a>1-176]</span>
+
+and his house broadened into an English kingdom;
+but still tribal jealousies battled with national
+unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon,
+Northman from Englishman. A common national
+sympathy held the country roughly together, but
+a real national union had yet to come. It came
+with foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings
+broke local jealousies as they had never been
+broken before, and bequeathed a new England to
+Godwine and the Confessor. But Cnut was more
+Englishman than Northman, and his system of
+government was an English system. The true
+foreign yoke was only felt when England saw its
+conqueror in William the Norman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For nearly a century and a half, from the hour
+when William turned triumphant from the fens of
+Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
+Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters.
+Kings from Normandy were followed by kings
+from Anjou. But whether under Norman or
+Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, conquered
+and ruled by men of strange blood and of
+strange speech. And yet it was in these years of
+subjection that England first became really England.
+Provincial differences were finally crushed
+into national unity by the pressure of the stranger.
+The firm government of her foreign kings secured
+the land a long and almost unbroken peace in
+which the new nation grew to a sense of its
+oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-177"></a>1-177]</span>
+
+by the political ability which in Henry the First
+gave it administrative order and in Henry the
+Second built up the fabric of its law. New
+elements of social life were developed alike by the
+suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
+wrong which had been done by the degradation of
+the free landowner into a feudal dependant was
+partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
+of the English lords themselves into a middle
+class as they were pushed from their place by the
+foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
+this social change was accompanied by a gradual
+enrichment and elevation of the class of servile
+and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted them
+at the close of this period into almost complete
+freedom. The middle class which was thus created
+was reinforced by the upgrowth of a corresponding
+class in our towns. Commerce and trade were
+promoted by the justice and policy of the foreign
+kings; and with their advance rose the political
+importance of the trader. The boroughs of
+England, which at the opening of this period were
+for the most part mere villages, were rich enough
+at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to
+stand ready for the mightier part they were to
+play in the developement of our parliament. The
+shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
+begot a moral and religious revival which
+raised religion into a living thing; while the close
+connexion with the Continent which foreign
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-178"></a>1-178]</span>
+
+conquest brought about secured for England a
+new communion with the artistic and intellectual
+life of the world without her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William the Conqueror</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our
+foreign kings that we owe not merely English
+wealth and English freedom but England herself.
+And of these foreign masters the greatest was
+William of Normandy. In William the wild impulses
+of the northman's blood mingled strangely
+with the cool temper of the modern statesman.
+As he was the last, so he was the most terrible
+outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of
+the sea-robbers from whom he sprang seemed
+embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
+strength, his savage countenance, his desperate
+bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of
+his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his
+enemies owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he
+was at Val-ès-dunes, horse and man went down
+before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his
+nature broke out in the warfare of his youth, in
+his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five men at
+his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
+Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk
+on fist as if war and the chase were one. No man
+could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its
+way through a ring of English warriors to the foot
+of the Standard. He rose to his greatest height
+at moments when other men despaired. His voice
+rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-179"></a>1-179]</span>
+
+the English charge at Senlac, and his rally turned
+the flight into a means of victory. In his winter
+march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
+his fainting troops and helped with his own hand
+to clear a road through the snowdrifts. And with
+the northman's daring broke out the northman's
+pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon
+hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of the
+"tanner's" grandson, William tore out his prisoners'
+eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung
+them into the town. Hundreds of Hampshire
+men were driven from their homes to make him
+a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria
+left Northern England a desolate waste. Of men's
+love or hate he recked little. His grim look, his
+pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion,
+left William lonely even in his court. His subjects
+trembled as he passed. "So stark and
+fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that
+none dared resist his will." His very wrath was
+solitary. "To no man spake he and no man dared
+speak to him" when the news reached him of
+Harold's seizure of the throne. It was only when
+he passed from his palace to the loneliness of the
+woods that the King's temper unbent. "He loved
+the wild deer as though he had been their father."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">His rule</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the genius of William which lifted him
+out of this mere northman into a great general
+and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his
+French campaigns, the organization of his attack
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-180"></a>1-180]</span>
+
+upon England, the victory at Senlac, the quick
+resource, the steady perseverance which achieved
+the Conquest showed the wide range of his generalship.
+His political ability had shown itself from
+the first moment of his accession to the ducal
+throne. William had the instinct of government.
+He had hardly reached manhood when Normandy
+lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was crushed.
+Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke
+"could never love a robber," be he baron or knave.
+The sternness of his temper stamped itself throughout
+upon his rule. "Stark he was to men that
+withstood him," says the Chronicler of his English
+system of government; "so harsh and cruel was
+he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that
+did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds;
+bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots
+of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother:
+first he was in the land, but the King cast him
+into bondage. If a man would live and hold his
+lands, need it were he followed the King's will."
+Stern as such a rule was, its sternness gave rest to
+the land. Even amidst the sufferings which
+necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
+Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the
+enclosure of forests or the exactions which built
+up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen
+were unable to forget "the good peace he made in
+the land, so that a man might fare over his realm
+with a bosom full of gold." Strange touches too
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-181"></a>1-181]</span>
+
+of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted
+with this general temper of the Conqueror's government.
+One of the strongest traits in his
+character was an aversion to shed blood by process
+of law; he formally abolished the punishment of
+death, and only a single execution stains the
+annals of his reign. An edict yet more honourable
+to his humanity put an end to the slave-trade
+which had till then been carried on at the port of
+Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness
+and pitifulness of his public acts sprang indeed
+from a contrast within his temper itself. The
+pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a
+tender and faithful husband, an affectionate father.
+The lonely silence of his bearing broke into gracious
+converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm.
+If William was "stark" to rebel and baron, men
+noted that he was "mild to those that loved God."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William and feudalism</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in
+more than the order and peace which he imposed
+upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
+greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of
+stamping his own genius on the destinies of a
+people; and it is the way in which he seized on
+this opportunity which has set William among the
+foremost statesmen of the world. The struggle
+which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
+his position. He no longer held the land merely
+as its national and elected King. To his elective
+right he added the right of conquest. It is the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-182"></a>1-182]</span>
+
+way in which William grasped and employed this
+double power that marks the originality of his
+political genius, for the system of government
+which he devised was in fact the result of this
+double origin of his rule. It represented neither
+the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the
+system of the older English royalty: more truly
+perhaps it may be said to have represented both.
+As the conqueror of England William developed
+the military organization of feudalism so far as
+was necessary for the secure possession of his
+conquests. The ground was already prepared for
+such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
+of English feudalism in the warriors, the
+"companions" or "thegns" who were personally
+attached to the king's war-band and received
+estates from the folk-land in reward for their
+personal services. In later times this feudal distribution
+of estates had greatly increased as the
+bulk of the nobles followed the king's example
+and bound their tenants to themselves by a similar
+process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders
+on the other hand, the class which formed the basis
+of the original English society, had been gradually
+reduced in number, partly through imitation of
+the class above them, but more through the
+pressure of the Danish wars and the social disturbance
+consequent upon them which forced these
+freemen to seek protectors among the thegns at
+the cost of their independence. Even before the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-183"></a>1-183]</span>
+
+reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding
+the older freedom in England as it had
+already superseded it in Germany or France. But
+the tendency was quickened and intensified by the
+Conquest. The desperate and universal resistance
+of the country forced William to hold by the sword
+what the sword had won; and an army strong
+enough to crush at any moment a national revolt
+was needful for the preservation of his throne.
+Such an army could only be maintained by a vast
+confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the
+English risings cleared the ground for its establishment.
+The greater part of the higher nobility
+fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower
+thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their lands
+or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest.
+We see the completeness of the confiscation in the
+vast estates which William was enabled to grant
+to his more powerful followers. Two hundred
+manors in Kent with more than an equal number
+elsewhere rewarded the services of his brother
+Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's
+counsellors Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to
+barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares. But
+the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the
+spoil. The meanest Norman rose to wealth and
+power in this new dominion of his lord. Great
+or small, each manor thus granted was granted
+on condition of its holder's service at the King's
+call; a whole army was by this means encamped
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-184"></a>1-184]</span>
+
+upon the soil; and William's summons could at
+any hour gather an overwhelming force around
+his standard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such a force however, effective as it was against
+the conquered English, was hardly less formidable
+to the Crown itself. When once it was established,
+William found himself fronted in his new realm
+by a feudal baronage, by the men whom he had so
+hardly bent to his will in Normandy, and who
+were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal
+power, as eager for an unbridled military and
+judicial independence within their own manors,
+here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror
+was shown in his appreciation of this
+danger and in the skill with which he met it.
+Large as the estates he granted were, they were
+scattered over the country in such a way as to
+render union between the great landowners or the
+hereditary attachment of great areas of population
+to any one separate lord equally impossible. A
+yet wiser measure struck at the very root of
+feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided
+by their owners into smaller sub-tenancies, the
+under-tenants were bound by the same conditions
+of service to their lord as he to the Crown.
+"Hear, my lord," swore the vassal as kneeling
+bareheaded and without arms he placed his hands
+within those of his superior, "I become liege man
+of yours for life and limb and earthly regard; and
+I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-185"></a>1-185]</span>
+
+death, God help me!" Then the kiss of his lord
+invested him with land as a "fief" to descend to
+him and his heirs for ever. In other countries
+such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes,
+be they king or no. By the usage however which
+William enacted in England each sub-tenant, in
+addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore
+fealty directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the
+King was thus established as the supreme and
+universal duty of all Englishmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William and England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so
+much in these inner checks upon feudalism as in
+the counterbalancing forces which he provided
+without it. He was not only the head of the
+great garrison that held England down, he was
+legal and elected King of the English people. If
+as Conqueror he covered the country with a new
+military organization, as the successor of Eadward
+he maintained the judicial and administrative organization
+of the old English realm. At the
+danger of a severance of the land between the
+greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
+abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire
+became the largest unit of local government, and
+in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs for
+its administration concentrated the whole executive
+power in the King's hands. The old legal constitution
+of the country gave him the whole judicial
+power, and William was jealous to retain and
+heighten this. While he preserved the local courts
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-186"></a>1-186]</span>
+
+of the hundred and the shire he strengthened
+the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems
+even in the Confessor's day to have become more
+and more a court of highest appeal with a right to
+call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to its
+bar. The control over the national revenue which
+had rested even in the most troubled times in the
+hands of the King was turned into a great financial
+power by the Conqueror's system. Over the
+whole face of the land a large part of the manors
+were burthened with special dues to the Crown:
+and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and
+recording these that William sent into each
+county the commissioners whose enquiries are
+recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled
+in each hundred declared on oath the
+extent and nature of each estate, the names,
+number, and condition of its inhabitants, its value
+before and after the Conquest, and the sums due
+from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
+or land-tax levied since the days of Æthelred,
+formed as yet the main financial resources of the
+Crown, and their exaction carried the royal
+authority in its most direct form home to every
+landowner. But to these were added a revenue
+drawn from the old Crown domain, now largely
+increased by the confiscations of the Conquest, the
+ever-growing income from the judicial "fines"
+imposed by the King's judges in the King's courts,
+and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-187"></a>1-187]</span>
+
+on the grant or renewal of every privilege or
+charter. A new source of revenue was found in
+the Jewish traders, many of whom followed
+William from Normandy, and who were glad to
+pay freely for the royal protection which enabled
+them to settle in their quarters or "Jewries" in all
+the principal towns of England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+William found a yet stronger check on his
+baronage in the organization of the Church. Its
+old dependence on the royal power was strictly
+enforced. Prelates were practically chosen by the
+King. Homage was exacted from bishop as from
+baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated
+save by the King's leave. No synod could legislate
+without his previous assent and subsequent
+confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters
+could be received within the realm save by his
+permission. The King firmly repudiated the
+claims which were beginning to be put forward by
+the court of Rome. When Gregory VII. called on
+him to do fealty for his kingdom the King sternly
+refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I have never
+willed to do, nor will I do it now. I have never
+promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did
+it to yours." William's reforms only tended to
+tighten this hold of the Crown on the clergy.
+Stigand was deposed; and the elevation of
+Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed
+by the removal of most of the English prelates
+and by the appointment of Norman ecclesiastics
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-188"></a>1-188]</span>
+
+in their place. The new archbishop did much to
+restore discipline, and William's own efforts were
+no doubt partly directed by a real desire for the
+religious improvement of his realm. But the
+foreign origin of the new prelates cut them off
+from the flocks they ruled and bound them firmly
+to the foreign throne; while their independent
+position was lessened by a change which seemed
+intended to preserve it. Ecclesiastical cases had
+till now been decided, like civil cases, in shire or
+hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by side
+with ealdorman or sheriff. They were now withdrawn
+from it to the separate court of the bishop.
+The change was pregnant with future trouble to
+the Crown; but for the moment it told mainly in
+removing the bishop from his traditional contact
+with the popular assembly and in effacing the
+memory of the original equality of the religious
+with the civil power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William's death</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In any struggle with feudalism a national
+king, secure of the support of the Church, and
+backed by the royal hoard at Winchester, stood
+in different case from the merely feudal sovereigns
+of the Continent. The difference of power was
+seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over, and
+the struggle which William had anticipated
+opened between the baronage and the Crown.
+The wisdom of his policy in the destruction of
+the great earldoms which had overshadowed the
+throne was shown in an attempt at their restoration
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-189"></a>1-189]</span>
+
+made in 1075 by Roger, the son of his
+minister William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton,
+Ralf de Guader, whom the King had rewarded
+for his services at Senlac with the earldom of
+Norfolk. The rising was quickly suppressed,
+Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven over
+sea. The intrigues of the baronage soon found
+another leader in William's half-brother, the
+Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring
+by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo collected
+money and men, but the treasure was at once
+seized by the royal officers and the bishop
+arrested in the midst of the court. Even at the
+King's bidding no officer would venture to seize
+on a prelate of the Church; and it was with his
+own hands that William was forced to effect his
+arrest. The Conqueror was as successful against
+foes from without as against foes from within.
+The fear of the Danes, which had so long hung
+like a thunder-cloud over England, passed away
+before the host which William gathered in 1085
+to meet a great armament assembled by king
+Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, and
+the murder of its king removed all peril from the
+north. Scotland, already humbled by William's
+invasion, was bridled by the erection of a strong
+fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and after penetrating
+with his army to the heart of Wales the
+King commenced its systematic reduction by
+settling three of his great barons along its
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-190"></a>1-190]</span>
+
+frontier. It was not till his closing years that
+William's unvarying success was troubled by a
+fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage under
+his son Robert and by an attack which he was
+forced to meet in 1087 from France. Its king
+mocked at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk and at
+the sickness which bound him to his bed at
+Rouen. "King William has as long a lying-in,"
+laughed Philip, "as a woman behind her
+curtains." "When I get up," William swore
+grimly, "I will go to mass in Philip's land and
+bring a rich offering for my churching. I will
+offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming
+brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over
+the fire they make." At harvest-tide town and
+hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border
+fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode
+down the steep street of Mantes which he had
+given to the flames his horse stumbled among
+the embers, and William was flung heavily against
+his saddle. He was borne home to Rouen to die.
+The sound of the minster bell woke him at dawn
+as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking
+the city--it was the hour of prime--and
+stretching out his hands in prayer the King
+passed quietly away. Death itself took its colour
+from the savage solitude of his life. Priests and
+nobles fled as the last breath left him, and the
+Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the
+floor.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-191"></a>1-191]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2-Ch2"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4544775"></a>CHAPTER II</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4544781"></a>THE NORMAN KINGS</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4544787"></a>1085-1154</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William the Red</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the death of the Conqueror passed the
+terror which had held the barons in awe, while
+the severance of his dominions roused their hopes
+of successful resistance to the stern rule beneath
+which they had bowed. William bequeathed
+Normandy to his eldest son Robert; but William
+the Red, his second son, hastened with his father's
+ring to England where the influence of Lanfranc
+secured him the crown. The baronage seized the
+opportunity to rise in arms under pretext of
+supporting the claims of Robert, whose weakness
+of character gave full scope for the growth of
+feudal independence; and Bishop Odo, now freed
+from prison, placed himself at the head of the
+revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly
+on the loyalty of his English subjects. But the
+national stamp which William had given to his
+kingship told at once. The English rallied to
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-192"></a>1-192]</span>
+
+the royal standard; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester,
+the one surviving bishop of English blood, defeated
+the insurgents in the west; while the
+King, summoning the freemen of country and
+town to his host under pain of being branded as
+"nithing" or worthless, advanced with a large
+force against Rochester where the barons were
+concentrated. A plague which broke out among
+the garrison forced them to capitulate, and as
+the prisoners passed through the royal army cries
+of "gallows and cord" burst from the English
+ranks. The failure of a later conspiracy whose
+aim was to set on the throne a kinsman of the
+royal house, Stephen of Albemarle, with the
+capture and imprisonment of its head, Robert
+Mowbray, the Earl of Northumberland, brought
+home at last to the baronage their helplessness
+in a strife with the King. The genius of the
+Conqueror had saved England from the danger
+of feudalism. But he had left as weighty a
+danger in the power which trod feudalism
+under foot. The power of the Crown was a
+purely personal power, restrained under the Conqueror
+by his own high sense of duty, but
+capable of becoming a pure despotism in the
+hands of his son. The nobles were at his feet,
+and the policy of his minister, Ranulf Flambard,
+loaded their estates with feudal obligations. Each
+tenant was held as bound to appear if needful
+thrice a year at the royal court, to pay a heavy
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-193"></a>1-193]</span>
+
+fine or rent on succession to his estate, to
+contribute aid in case of the king's capture in
+war or the knighthood of the king's eldest son
+or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir
+who was still a minor passed into the king's
+wardship, and all profit from his lands went
+during the period of wardship to the king.
+If the estate fell to an heiress, her hand was at
+the king's disposal, and was generally sold by
+him to the highest bidder. These rights of
+"marriage" and "wardship" as well as the exaction
+of aids at the royal will poured wealth
+into the treasury while they impoverished and
+fettered the baronage. A fresh source of revenue
+was found in the Church. The same principles
+of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as
+to those of the nobles; and during the vacancy
+of a see or abbey its profits, like those of a minor,
+were swept into the royal hoard. William's
+profligacy and extravagance soon tempted him
+to abuse this resource, and so steadily did he
+refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom
+death removed that at the close of his reign one
+archbishoprick, four bishopricks, and eleven abbeys
+were found to be without pastors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vile as was this system of extortion and misrule
+but a single voice was raised in protest
+against it. Lanfranc had been followed in his
+abbey at Bec by the most famous of his scholars,
+Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like himself. Friends
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-194"></a>1-194]</span>
+
+as they were, no two men could be more strangely
+unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the
+quiet solitude of his mountain-valley, a tenderhearted
+poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the
+Alpine snows above him, and an intelligence keen
+and clear as the mountain-air. The whole temper
+of the man was painted in a dream of his youth.
+It seemed to him as though heaven lay, a stately
+palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, while the
+women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley
+became harvest-maidens of its king. They reaped
+idly, and Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily
+climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their
+lord. As he reached the palace the king's voice
+called him to his feet and he poured forth his
+tale; then at the royal bidding bread of an unearthly
+whiteness was set before him, and he ate
+and was refreshed. The dream passed with the
+morning; but the sense of heaven's nearness to
+earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord,
+the tender restfulness and peace in the Divine
+presence which it reflected lived on in the life of
+Anselm. Wandering like other Italian scholars to
+Normandy, he became a monk under Lanfranc,
+and on his teacher's removal to higher duties
+succeeded him in the direction of the Abbey of
+Bec. No teacher has ever thrown a greater spirit
+of love into his toil. "Force your scholars to
+improve!" he burst out to another teacher who
+relied on blows and compulsion. "Did you ever
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-195"></a>1-195]</span>
+
+see a craftsman fashion a fair image out of a golden
+plate by blows alone? Does he not now gently press
+it and strike it with his tools, now with wise art
+yet more gently raise and shape it? What do
+your scholars turn into under this ceaseless beating?"
+"They turn only brutal," was the reply.
+"You have bad luck," was the keen answer, "in
+a training that only turns men into beasts." The
+worst natures softened before this tenderness and
+patience. Even the Conqueror, so harsh and
+terrible to others, became another man, gracious
+and easy of speech, with Anselm. But amidst his
+absorbing cares as a teacher, the Prior of Bec found
+time for philosophical speculations to which we
+owe the scientific inquiries which built up the
+theology of the Middle Ages. His famous works
+were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to
+elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the
+human reason. His passion for abstruse thought
+robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he
+could hardly pray. Often the night was a long
+watch till he could seize his conception and write
+it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But
+not even a fever of intense thought such as this
+could draw Anselm's heart from its passionate
+tenderness and love. Sick monks in the infirmary
+could relish no drink save the juice which his hand
+squeezed for them from the grape-bunch. In the
+later days of his archbishoprick a hare chased by
+the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-196"></a>1-196]</span>
+
+gentle voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman
+to stir in the chase while the creature darted off
+again to the woods. Even the greed of lands for
+the Church to which so many religious men yielded
+found its characteristic rebuke as the battling
+lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm quietly close his
+eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">William and Anselm</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sudden impulse of the Red King drew the
+abbot from these quiet studies into the storms of
+the world. The see of Canterbury had long been
+left without a Primate when a dangerous illness
+frightened the king into the promotion of Anselm.
+The Abbot, who happened at the time to be in
+England on the business of his house, was dragged
+to the royal couch and the cross forced into his
+hands. But William had no sooner recovered from
+his sickness than he found himself face to face with
+an opponent whose meek and loving temper rose
+into firmness and grandeur when it fronted the
+tyranny of the king. Much of the struggle
+between William and the Archbishop turned on
+questions such as the right of investiture, which
+have little bearing on our history, but the particular
+question at issue was of less importance than the
+fact of a contest at all. The boldness of Anselm's
+attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical
+servitude but infused through the nation
+at large a new spirit of independence. The real
+character of the strife appears in the Primate's
+answer when his remonstrances against the lawless
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-197"></a>1-197]</span>
+
+exactions from the Church were met by a demand
+for a present on his own promotion, and his first
+offer of five hundred pounds was contemptuously
+refused. "Treat me as a free man," Anselm
+replied, "and I devote myself and all that I have
+to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you
+shall have neither me nor mine." A burst of the
+Red King's fury drove the Archbishop from court,
+and he finally decided to quit the country, but his
+example had not been lost, and the close of William's
+reign found a new spirit of freedom in England
+with which the greatest of the Conqueror's sons
+was glad to make terms. His exile however left
+William without a check. Supreme at home, he
+was full of ambition abroad. As a soldier the Red
+King was little inferior to his father. Normandy
+had been pledged to him by his brother Robert in
+exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to
+march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the
+Holy Land, and a rebellion at Le Mans was subdued
+by the fierce energy with which William
+flung himself at the news of it into the first boat
+he found, and crossed the Channel in face of a
+storm. "Kings never drown," he replied contemptuously
+to the remonstrances of his followers.
+Homage was again wrested from Malcolm by a
+march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
+death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder
+which enabled an army under Eadgar Ætheling to
+establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an English
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-198"></a>1-198]</span>
+
+feudatory on the throne. In Wales William was
+less triumphant, and the terrible losses inflicted on
+the heavy Norman cavalry in the fastnesses of
+Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but
+wiser policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and
+defeat alike ended in a strange and tragical close.
+In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants
+in a glade of the New Forest, with the arrow
+either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry the First</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert was at this moment on his return from
+the Holy Land, where his bravery had redeemed
+much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown
+was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite
+of the opposition of the baronage, who clung to
+the Duke of Normandy and the union of their
+estates on both sides the Channel under a single
+ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it had
+thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and
+the two great measures which followed his coronation,
+his grant of a charter, and his marriage with
+Matilda, mark the new relation which this support
+brought about between the people and their king.
+Henry's Charter is important, not merely as a
+direct precedent for the Great Charter of John,
+but as the first limitation on the despotism established
+by the Conqueror and carried to such a
+height by his son. The "evil customs" by which
+the Red King had enslaved and plundered the
+Church were explicitly renounced in it, the unlimited
+demands made by both the Conqueror and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-199"></a>1-199]</span>
+
+his son on the baronage exchanged for customary
+fees, while the rights of the people itself, though
+recognized more vaguely, were not forgotten. The
+barons were held to do justice to their undertenants
+and to renounce tyrannical exactions from
+them, the king promising to restore order and the
+"law of Eadward," the old constitution of the
+realm, with the changes which his father had introduced.
+His marriage gave a significance to these
+promises which the meanest English peasant could
+understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter
+of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret, the
+sister of Eadgar Ætheling. She had been brought
+up in the nunnery of Romsey where her aunt Christina
+was a nun; and the veil which she had taken
+there formed an obstacle to her union with the
+King, which was only removed by the wisdom of
+Anselm. While Flambard, the embodiment of the
+Red King's despotism, was thrown into the Tower,
+the Archbishop's recall had been one of Henry's
+first acts after his accession. Matilda appeared
+before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate
+earnestness. She had been veiled in her childhood,
+she asserted, only to save her from the
+insults of the rude soldiery who infested the land,
+had flung the veil from her again and again, and
+had yielded at last to the unwomanly taunts, the
+actual blows of her aunt. "As often as I stood in
+her presence," the girl pleaded, "I wore the veil,
+trembling as I wore it with indignation and grief.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-200"></a>1-200]</span>
+
+But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used
+to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground,
+and trample it under foot. That was the way,
+and none other, in which I was veiled." Anselm
+at once declared her free from conventual bonds,
+and the shout of the English multitude when he
+set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the
+murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery
+of the Norman nobles, who nicknamed the king
+and his spouse Godric and Godgifu, was lost in the
+joy of the people at large. For the first time since
+the Conquest an English sovereign sat on the
+English throne. The blood of Cerdic and Ælfred
+was to blend itself with that of Hrolf and the
+Conqueror. Henceforth it was impossible that
+the two peoples should remain parted from each
+other; so quick indeed was their union that the
+very name of Norman had passed away in half a
+century, and at the accession of Henry's grandson
+it was impossible to distinguish between the
+descendants of the conquerors and those of the
+conquered at Senlac.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry and the Barons</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm
+among his subjects which enabled Henry to defy
+the claims of his brother and the disaffection of
+his nobles. Early in 1101 Robert landed at
+Portsmouth to win the crown in arms. The
+great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof
+from the king. But the Norman Duke found
+himself face to face with an English army which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-201"></a>1-201]</span>
+
+gathered at Anselm's summons round Henry's
+standard. The temper of the English had rallied
+from the panic of Senlac. The soldiers who came
+to fight for their king "nowise feared the Normans."
+As Henry rode along their lines showing
+them how to keep firm their shield-wall against
+the lances of Robert's knighthood, he was met
+with shouts for battle. But king and duke alike
+shrank from a contest in which the victory of
+either side would have undone the Conqueror's
+work. The one saw his effort was hopeless, the
+other was only anxious to remove his rival from
+the realm, and by a peace which the Count of
+Meulan negotiated Robert recognized Henry as
+King of England while Henry gave up his fief
+in the Cotentin to his brother the Duke. Robert's
+retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the
+barons who had forsaken him. Robert de Lacy
+was stripped of his manors in Yorkshire; Robert
+Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk; Ivo
+of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to
+the Holy Land as a pilgrim. But greater even
+than these was Robert of Belesme, the son of
+Roger of Montgomery, who held in England the
+earldoms of Shrewsbury and Arundel, while in
+Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and Alençon.
+Robert stood at the head of the baronage in wealth
+and power: and his summons to the King's Court
+to answer for his refusal of aid to the king was
+answered by a haughty defiance. But again
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-202"></a>1-202]</span>
+
+the Norman baronage had to feel the strength
+which English loyalty gave to the Crown. Sixty
+thousand Englishmen followed Henry to the attack
+of Robert's strongholds along the Welsh border.
+It was in vain that the nobles about the king,
+conscious that Robert's fall left them helpless in
+Henry's hands, strove to bring about a peace.
+The English soldiers shouted "Heed not these
+traitors, our lord King Henry," and with the
+people at his back the king stood firm. Only
+an early surrender saved Robert's life. He was
+suffered to retire to his estates in Normandy, but
+his English lands were confiscated to the Crown.
+"Rejoice, King Henry," shouted the English
+soldiers, "for you began to be a free king on
+that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme
+and drove him from the land." Master of his
+own realm and enriched by the confiscated lands
+of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy,
+where the misgovernment of the Duke
+had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk, and
+where the outrages of nobles like Robert of
+Belesme forced the more peaceful classes to call
+the king to their aid. In 1106 his forces met
+those of his brother on the field of Tenchebray,
+and a decisive English victory on Norman soil
+avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered
+duchy became a dependency of the English crown,
+and Henry's energies were frittered away through
+a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts, the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-203"></a>1-203]</span>
+
+hostility of the French, and the efforts of his
+nephew William, the son of Robert, to regain
+the crown which his father had lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry's rule</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was
+free to enter on that work of administration
+which was to make his reign memorable in our
+history. Successful as his wars had been he was
+in heart no warrior but a statesman, and his
+greatness showed itself less in the field than in
+the council chamber. His outer bearing like his
+inner temper stood in marked contrast to that
+of his father. Well read, accomplished, easy and
+fluent of speech, the lord of a harem of mistresses,
+the centre of a gay court where poet and jongleur
+found a home, Henry remained cool, self-possessed,
+clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless himself,
+and neither seeking nor desiring his people's love,
+but wringing from them their gratitude and regard
+by sheer dint of good government. His work of
+order was necessarily a costly work; and the
+steady pressure of his taxation, a pressure made
+the harder by local famines and plagues during
+his reign, has left traces of the grumbling it
+roused in the pages of the English Chronicle.
+But even the Chronicler is forced to own amidst
+his grumblings that Henry "was a good man,
+and great was the awe of him." He had little
+of his father's creative genius, of that far-reaching
+originality by which the Conqueror stamped himself
+and his will on the very fabric of our history.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-204"></a>1-204]</span>
+
+But he had the passion for order, the love of
+justice, the faculty of organization, the power of
+steady and unwavering rule, which was needed
+to complete the Conqueror's work. His aim was
+peace, and the title of the Peace-loving King
+which was given him at his death showed with
+what a steadiness and constancy he carried out
+his aim. In Normandy indeed his work was ever
+and anon undone by outbreaks of its baronage,
+outbreaks sternly repressed only that the work
+might be patiently and calmly taken up again
+where it had been broken off. But in England
+his will was carried out with a perfect success.
+For more than a quarter of a century the land
+had rest. Without, the Scots were held in friendship,
+the Welsh were bridled by a steady and
+well-planned scheme of gradual conquest. Within,
+the licence of the baronage was held sternly down,
+and justice secured for all. "He governed with
+a strong hand," says Orderic, but the strong hand
+was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant. "Great
+was the awe of him," writes the annalist of Peterborough.
+"No man durst ill-do to another in
+his days. Peace he made for man and beast."
+Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles
+who withstood him, they were blows which his
+English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.
+"While he mastered by policy the foremost counts
+and lords and the boldest tyrants, he ever cherished
+and protected peaceful men and men of religion
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-205"></a>1-205]</span>
+
+and men of the middle class." What impressed
+observers most was the unswerving, changeless
+temper of his rule. The stern justice, the terrible
+punishments he inflicted on all who broke his
+laws, were parts of a fixed system which differed
+widely from the capricious severity of a mere
+despot. Hardly less impressive was his unvarying
+success. Heavy as were the blows which destiny
+levelled at him, Henry bore and rose unconquered
+from all. To the end of his life the proudest
+barons lay bound and blinded in his prison. His
+hoard grew greater and greater. Normandy, toss
+as she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last.
+In England it was only after his death that men
+dared mutter what evil things they had thought
+of Henry the Peace-lover, or censure the pitilessness,
+the greed, and the lust which had blurred
+the wisdom and splendour of his rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry's Administration</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His vigorous administration carried out into
+detail the system of government which the Conqueror
+had sketched. The vast estates which had
+fallen to the crown through revolt and forfeiture
+were granted out to new men dependent on royal
+favour. On the ruins of the great feudatories
+whom he had crushed Henry built up a class of
+lesser nobles, whom the older barons of the
+Conquest looked down on in scorn, but who were
+strong enough to form a counterpoise to their
+influence, while they furnished the Crown with a
+class of useful administrators whom Henry employed
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-206"></a>1-206]</span>
+
+as his sheriffs and judges. A new organization
+of justice and finance bound the kingdom
+more tightly together in Henry's grasp.  The
+Clerks of the Royal Chapel were formed into a
+body of secretaries or royal ministers, whose head
+bore the title of Chancellor. Above them stood
+the Justiciar, or Lieutenant-General of the kingdom,
+who in the frequent absence of the king
+acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff,
+selected from the barons connected with the royal
+household, were formed into a Supreme Court of
+the realm. The King's Court, as this was called,
+permanently represented the whole court of royal
+vassals which had hitherto been summoned thrice
+in the year. As the royal council, it revised and
+registered laws, and its "counsel and consent,"
+though merely formal, preserved the principle of
+the older popular legislation. As a court of justice,
+it formed the highest court of appeal: it could
+call up any suit from a lower tribunal on the
+application of a suitor, while the union of several
+sheriffdoms under some of its members connected
+it closely with the local courts. As a financial
+body, its chief work lay in the assessment and
+collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took
+the name of the Court of Exchequer from the
+chequered table, much like a chess-board, at which
+it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In
+their financial capacity its justices became "barons
+of the Exchequer." Twice every year the sheriff
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-207"></a>1-207]</span>
+
+of each county appeared before these barons and
+rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal
+domains, the Danegeld or land tax, the fines of the
+local courts, the feudal aids from the baronial
+estates, which formed the chief part of the royal
+revenue. Local disputes respecting these payments
+or the assessment of the town-rents were settled
+by a detachment of barons from the court who
+made the circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal
+visitations led to the judicial visitations, the
+"judges' circuits," which still form so marked a
+feature in our legal system.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Angevin Marriage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Measures such as these changed the whole
+temper of the Norman rule. It remained a despotism,
+but from this moment it was a despotism
+regulated and held in check by the forms of administrative
+routine. Heavy as was the taxation
+under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering
+throughout his reign from famine and plague,
+the peace and order which his government secured
+through thirty years won a rest for the land in which
+conqueror and conquered blended into a single people
+and in which this people slowly moved forward to
+a new freedom. But while England thus rested
+in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her
+king. In 1120 his son, William the "Ætheling,"
+with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry on his
+return from Normandy; but the White Ship in
+which he embarked lingered behind the rest of the
+royal fleet till the guards of the king's treasure
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-208"></a>1-208]</span>
+
+pressed its departure. It had hardly cleared the
+harbour when the ship's side struck on a rock, and
+in an instant it sank beneath the waves. One
+terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the
+night, was heard by the royal fleet; but it was not
+till the morning that the fatal news reached the
+king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to
+the ground, and rose never to smile again. He had
+no other son, and the circle of his foreign foes
+closed round him the more fiercely that William,
+the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his
+natural heir. Henry hated William while he loved
+his own daughter Maud, who had been married to
+the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been
+restored by his death to her father's court. The
+succession of a woman was new in English history;
+it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when
+all hope of issue from a second wife whom he
+wedded was over Henry forced priests and nobles
+to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress,
+and affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the
+son of the one foe whom he dreaded, Count Fulk
+of Anjou.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Anjou</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the
+wonderful history by which the descendants of a
+Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou
+only, but of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of
+Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and Normandy,
+and sovereigns at last of the great realm
+which Normandy had won. The legend of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-209"></a>1-209]</span>
+
+father of their race carries us back to the times of
+our own Ælfred, when the Danes were ravaging
+along Loire as they ravaged along Thames. In
+the heart of the Breton border, in the debateable
+land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf
+the Forester, half-brigand, half-hunter as the
+gloomy days went, living in free outlaw-fashion in
+the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in
+his rough forest school "how to strike the foe, to
+sleep on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil,
+summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear
+nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the
+Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman
+won broad lands along Loire, and his son Ingelger,
+who had swept the northmen from Touraine and
+the land to the west, which they had burned and
+wasted into a vast solitude, became the first Count
+of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is
+a mere creation of some twelfth century jongleur.
+The earliest Count whom history recognizes is
+Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes
+of France who were now drawing nearer to the
+throne, and between 909 and 929 he received
+from them in guerdon the county of Anjou. The
+story of his son is a story of peace, breaking like a
+quiet idyll the war-storms of his house. Alone of
+his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight
+was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called
+"Canon." One Martinmas eve Fulk was singing
+there in clerkly guise when the French king,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-210"></a>1-210]</span>
+
+Lewis d'Outremer, entered the church. "He
+sings like a priest," laughed the king as his nobles
+pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon.
+But Fulk was ready with his reply.
+"Know, my lord," wrote the Count of Anjou,
+"that a king unlearned is a crowned ass." Fulk
+was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing,
+enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every
+corner of the wasted land. To him alone of his
+race men gave the title of "the Good."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Fulk the Black</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hampered by revolt, himself in character little
+more than a bold, dashing soldier, Fulk's son,
+Geoffry Greygown, sank almost into a vassal of
+his powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and
+Champagne. But this vassalage was roughly
+shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, Fulk the
+Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in
+whom we can trace that marked type of character
+which their house was to preserve through two
+hundred years. He was without natural affection.
+In his youth he burnt a wife at the stake, and
+legend told how he led her to her doom decked out
+in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his
+bitterest war against his son, and exacted from him
+when vanquished a humiliation which men reserved
+for the deadliest of their foes. "You are conquered,
+you are conquered!" shouted the old man
+in fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled
+like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his
+father's feet. In Fulk first appeared that low type
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-211"></a>1-211]</span>
+
+of superstition which startled even superstitious
+ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he was
+of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical
+censures, the fear of the end of the world drove
+Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot and with
+the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his
+shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a
+halter through the streets of Jerusalem, and courted
+the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of
+penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert
+of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin,
+by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him
+of his lands. He secured the terrified friendship
+of the French king by despatching twelve assassins
+to cut down before his eyes the minister who had
+troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason
+and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool
+cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of
+Heaven to have been revealed against the union of
+the worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But
+neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men
+broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his
+success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least
+important of the greater provinces of France. At
+his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at least
+in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed,
+clear-sighted, quick to resolve, quicker to strike,
+Fulk's career was one long series of victories over
+all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-212"></a>1-212]</span>
+
+he had the gift of personal bravery, which was
+denied to some of his greatest descendants. There
+was a moment in the first of his battles when the
+day seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of
+the Bretons drew the Angevin horsemen into a
+line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was
+flung heavily to the ground. Dragged from the
+medley of men and horses, he swept down almost
+singly on the foe "as a storm-wind" (so rang the
+pæan of the Angevins) "sweeps down on the thick
+corn-rows," and the field was won. But to these
+qualities of the warrior he added a power of
+political organization, a capacity for far-reaching
+combinations, a faculty of statesmanship, which
+became the heritage of his race, and lifted them
+as high above the intellectual level of the rulers
+of their time as their shameless wickedness degraded
+them below the level of man. His overthrow
+of Britanny on the field of Conquereux was
+followed by the gradual absorption of Southern
+Touraine; a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival
+house of Blois; the seizure of Saumur completed
+his conquests in the south, while Northern Touraine
+was won bit by bit till only Tours resisted the
+Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its Count,
+Herbert Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Death of Henry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His work of conquest was completed by his
+son. Geoffry Martel wrested Tours from the
+Count of Blois, and by the seizure of Le Mans
+brought his border to the Norman frontier. Here
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-213"></a>1-213]</span>
+
+however his advance was checked by the genius
+of William the Conqueror, and with his death the
+greatness of Anjou came for a while to an end.
+Stripped of Maine by the Normans and broken
+by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule
+of Fulk Rechin left Anjou powerless. But in 1109
+it woke to fresh energy with the accession of his
+son, Fulk of Jerusalem. Now urging the turbulent
+Norman nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert's
+son, William, in his strife with his uncle, offering
+himself throughout as the loyal supporter of the
+French kingdom which was now hemmed in on
+almost every side by the forces of the English
+king and of his allies the Counts of Blois and
+Champagne, Fulk was the one enemy whom
+Henry the First really feared. It was to disarm
+his restless hostility that the king gave the hand
+of Matilda to Geoffry the Handsome. But the
+hatred between Norman and Angevin had been
+too bitter to make such a marriage popular, and
+the secrecy with which it was brought about
+was held by the barons to free them from the
+oath they had previously sworn. As no baron
+if he was sonless could give a husband to his
+daughter save with his lord's consent, the nobles
+held by a strained analogy that their own assent
+was needful to the marriage of Maud. Henry
+found a more pressing danger in the greed of her
+husband Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the
+common broom of Anjou, the planta genista, in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-214"></a>1-214]</span>
+
+his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet.
+His claims ended at last in intrigues with the
+Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border
+to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke
+down at his presence, the Angevins retired, and at
+the close of 1135 the old king withdrew to the
+Forest of Lions to die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Stephen</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"God give him," wrote the Archbishop of
+Rouen from Henry's death-bed, "the peace he
+loved." With him indeed closed the long peace
+of the Norman rule. An outburst of anarchy
+followed on the news of his departure, and in the
+midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew,
+appeared at the gates of London. Stephen was a
+son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela, who had
+married a Count of Blois; he had been brought
+up at the English court, had been made Count of
+Mortain by Henry, had become Count of Boulogne
+by his marriage, and as head of the Norman
+baronage had been the first to pledge himself to
+support Matilda's succession. But his own claim
+as nearest male heir of the Conqueror's blood (for
+his cousin, the son of Robert, had fallen some years
+before in Flanders) was supported by his personal
+popularity; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humour,
+his generosity, his very prodigality made
+Stephen a favourite with all. No noble however
+had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town
+opened its gates when London poured out to meet
+him with uproarious welcome. Neither baron nor
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-215"></a>1-215]</span>
+
+prelate was present to constitute a National Council,
+but the great city did not hesitate to take their place.
+The voice of her citizens had long been accepted
+as representative of the popular assent in the
+election of a king; but it marks the progress of
+English independence under Henry that London
+now claimed of itself the right of election.
+Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary
+counsellors of the crown its "Aldermen and wise
+folk gathered together the folk-moot, and these
+providing at their own will for the good of the
+realm unanimously resolved to choose a king."
+The solemn deliberation ended in the choice of
+Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king
+with money and blood, Stephen swore to apply
+his whole strength to the pacification and good
+government of the realm. It was in fact the
+new union of conquered and conquerors into a
+single England that did Stephen's work. The
+succession of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of
+Anjou, and to Norman as to Englishman the rule
+of the Angevin was a foreign rule. The welcome
+Stephen won at London and Winchester, his seizure
+of the royal treasure, the adhesion of the Justiciar
+Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant consent
+of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from
+Anjou where Geoffry was at this moment pressed
+by revolt, the need above all of some king to meet
+the outbreak of anarchy which followed Henry's
+death, secured Stephen the voice of the baronage.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-216"></a>1-216]</span>
+
+He was crowned at Christmas-tide; and soon
+joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester, a bastard
+son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; while
+the issue of a charter from Oxford in 1136, a
+charter which renewed the dead king's pledge of
+good government, promised another Henry to the
+realm. The charter surrendered all forests made
+in the last reign as a sop to the nobles, and conciliated
+the Church by granting freedom of election
+and renouncing all right to the profits of vacant
+churches; while the king won the people by a
+promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Battle of the Standard</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king's first two years were years of success
+and prosperity. Two risings of barons in the east
+and west were easily put down, and in 1137
+Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the
+Duchy against an attack from Anjou. But already
+the elements of trouble were gathering round him.
+Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly
+qualities save that of a soldier's bravery; and
+the realm soon began to slip from his grasp.
+He turned against himself the jealous dread of
+foreigners to which he owed his accession by
+surrounding himself with hired knights from
+Flanders; he drained the treasury by creating
+new earls endowed with pensions from it, and
+recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness
+of the gathering storm only drove
+Stephen to bind his friends to him by suffering
+them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-217"></a>1-217]</span>
+
+tyranny which Henry had struck down. But the
+long reign of the dead king had left the Crown so
+strong that even yet Stephen could hold his
+own. A plot which Robert of Gloucester had
+been weaving from the outset of his reign came
+indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl's revolt
+stripped Stephen of Caen and half Normandy.
+But when his partizans in England rose in the
+south and the west and the King of Scots, whose
+friendship Stephen had bought in the opening of
+his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the
+northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king.
+Stephen himself marched on the western rebels
+and soon left them few strongholds save Bristol.
+His people fought for him in the north. The
+pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway
+and the Highlands roused the spirit of the Yorkshiremen.
+Baron and freeman gathered at York
+round Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the
+field of Northallerton to await the foe. The
+sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St.
+Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St.
+Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in
+a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre
+of the host. The first onset of David's host
+was a terrible one. "I who wear no armour,"
+shouted the chief of the Galwegians, "will go as
+far this day as any one with breastplate of mail";
+his men charged with wild shouts of "Albin,
+Albin," and were followed by the Norman knighthood
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-218"></a>1-218]</span>
+
+of the Lowlands. But their repulse was complete;
+the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the
+close English ranks around the Standard, and the
+whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Seizure of the Bishops</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative
+organization of Henry still did its work.
+Roger remained justiciar, his son was chancellor,
+his nephew Nigel, the Bishop of Ely, was treasurer.
+Finance and justice were thus concentrated in the
+hands of a single family which preserved amidst
+the deepening misrule something of the old order
+and rule, and which stood at the head of the "new
+men," whom Henry had raised into importance
+and made the instruments of his will. These new
+men were still weak by the side of the older
+nobles; and conscious of the jealousy and ill-will
+with which they were regarded they followed in
+self-defence the example which the barons were
+setting in building and fortifying castles on their
+domains. Roger and his house, the objects from
+their official position of a deeper grudge than any,
+were carried away by the panic. The justiciar
+and his son fortified their castles, and it was only
+with a strong force at their back that the prelates
+appeared at court. Their attitude was one to
+rouse Stephen's jealousy, and the news of Matilda's
+purpose of invasion lent strength to the doubts
+which the nobles cast on their fidelity. All the
+weak violence of the king's temper suddenly broke
+out.  He seized Roger the Chancellor and the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-219"></a>1-219]</span>
+
+Bishop of Lincoln when they appeared at Oxford
+in June 1139, and forced them to surrender their
+strongholds. Shame broke the justiciar's heart;
+he died at the close of the year, and his nephew
+Nigel of Ely was driven from the realm. But the
+fall of this house shattered the whole system of
+government. The King's Court and the Exchequer
+ceased to work at a moment when the landing of
+Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda set Stephen
+face to face with a danger greater than he had yet
+encountered, while the clergy, alienated by the
+arrest of the Bishops and the disregard of their
+protests, stood angrily aloof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Civil War</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three bases of Henry's system of government,
+the subjection of the baronage to the law,
+the good-will of the Church, and the organization
+of justice and finance, were now utterly ruined;
+and for the fourteen years which passed from
+this hour to the Treaty of Wallingford England
+was given up to the miseries of civil war. The
+country was divided between the adherents of the
+two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London
+and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in
+1141 left the latter a captive in the hands of his
+enemies, while Matilda was received throughout
+the land as its "Lady." But the disdain with
+which she repulsed the claim of London to the
+enjoyment of its older privileges called its
+burghers to arms; her resolve to hold Stephen a
+prisoner roused his party again to life, and she
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-220"></a>1-220]</span>
+
+was driven to Oxford to be besieged there in 1142
+by Stephen himself, who had obtained his release
+in exchange for Earl Robert after the capture of
+the Earl in a battle at Winchester. She escaped
+from the castle, but with the death of Robert her
+struggle became a hopeless one, and in 1148 she
+withdrew to Normandy. The war was now a
+mere chaos of pillage and bloodshed. The royal
+power came to an end. The royal courts were
+suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come
+at the king's call. The bishops met in council to
+protest, but their protests and excommunications
+fell on deafened ears. For the first and last time
+in her history England was in the hands of the
+baronage, and their outrages showed from what
+horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had
+saved her. Castles sprang up everywhere. "They
+filled the land with castles," say the terrible
+annals of the time. "They greatly oppressed
+the wretched people by making them work at
+these castles, and when they were finished they
+filled them with devils and armed men." In each
+of these robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a
+king. The strife for the Crown had broken into
+a medley of feuds between baron and baron, for
+none could brook an equal or a superior in his
+fellow. "They fought among themselves with
+deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with
+fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile
+of counties they destroyed almost all the provision
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-221"></a>1-221]</span>
+
+of bread." For fight as they might with one
+another, all were at one in the plunder of the
+land. Towns were put to ransom. Villages were
+sacked and burned. All who were deemed to
+have goods, whether men or women, were carried
+off and flung into dungeons and tortured till they
+yielded up their wealth. No ghastlier picture of
+a nation's misery has ever been painted than that
+which closes the English Chronicle whose last
+accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.
+"They hanged up men by their feet and smoked
+them with foul smoke. Some were hanged up by
+their thumbs, others by the head, and burning
+things were hung on to their feet. They put
+knotted strings about men's heads, and writhed
+them till they went to the brain. They put men
+into prisons where adders and snakes and toads
+were crawling, and so they tormented them.
+Some they put into a chest short and narrow and
+not deep and that had sharp stones within, and
+forced men therein so that they broke all their
+limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and
+grim things called rachenteges, which two or three
+men had enough to do to carry. It was thus
+made: it was fastened to a beam and had a sharp
+iron to go about a man's neck and throat, so that
+he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but he bore
+all the iron. Many thousands they starved with
+hunger."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Religious Revival</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was only after years of this feudal anarchy
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-222"></a>1-222]</span>
+
+that England was rescued from it by the efforts of
+the Church. The political influence of the Church
+had been greatly lessened by the Conquest: for
+pious, learned, and energetic as the bulk of the
+Conqueror's bishops were, they were not Englishmen.
+Till the reign of Henry the First no Englishman
+occupied an English see. This severance of
+the higher clergy from the lower priesthood and
+from the people went far to paralyze the constitutional
+influence of the Church. Anselm stood
+alone against Rufus, and when Anselm was gone
+no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the silence
+of the reign of Henry the First. But at the close
+of Henry's reign and throughout the reign of
+Stephen England was stirred by the first of those
+great religious movements which it was to experience
+afterwards in the preaching of the Friars, the
+Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the Puritan
+enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys.
+Everywhere in town and country men banded
+themselves together for prayer: hermits flocked
+to the woods: noble and churl welcomed the
+austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the
+Benedictine order, as they spread over the moors
+and forests of the North. A new spirit of devotion
+woke the slumbers of the religious houses, and
+penetrated alike to the home of the noble and the
+trader. London took its full share in the revival.
+The city was proud of its religion, its thirteen
+conventual and more than a hundred parochial
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-223"></a>1-223]</span>
+
+churches. The new impulse changed its very
+aspect. In the midst of the city Bishop Richard
+busied himself with the vast cathedral church of
+St. Paul which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges
+came up the river with stone from Caen for the
+great arches that moved the popular wonder,
+while street and lane were being levelled to make
+room for its famous churchyard. Rahere, a
+minstrel at Henry's court, raised the Priory of St.
+Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built St.
+Giles's at Cripplegate. The old English Cnichtenagild
+surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site
+for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale
+of this house paints admirably the temper of the
+citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior Norman,
+built church and cloister and bought books and
+vestments in so liberal a fashion that no money
+remained to buy bread. The canons were at their
+last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the
+refectory as they passed round the cloister in their
+usual Sunday procession, saw the tables laid but
+not a single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set
+out," said the citizens; "but where is the bread to
+come from?" The women who were present
+vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday, and
+there was soon bread enough and to spare for the
+priory and its priests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Thomas of London</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We see the strength of the new movement in
+the new class of ecclesiastics whom it forced on to
+the stage. Men like Archbishop Theobald drew
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-224"></a>1-224]</span>
+
+whatever influence they wielded from a belief in
+their holiness of life and unselfishness of aim.
+The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new
+impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at
+the moment we have reached its power was found
+strong enough to wrest England out of the chaos
+of feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen's
+reign his brother Henry, the Bishop of Winchester,
+who had been appointed in 1139 Papal Legate for
+the realm, had striven to supply the absence of any
+royal or national authority by convening synods of
+bishops, and by asserting the moral right of the
+Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the
+throne. The compact between king and people
+which became a part of constitutional law in the
+Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the
+Charter of Stephen, but its legitimate consequence
+in the responsibility of the crown for the execution
+of the compact was first drawn out by these
+ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions
+of Stephen and Matilda flowed the after
+depositions of Edward and Richard, and the
+solemn act by which the succession was changed
+in the case of James. Extravagant and unauthorized
+as their expression of it may appear, they
+expressed the right of a nation to good government.
+Henry of Winchester however, "half monk, half
+soldier," as he was called, possessed too little
+religious influence to wield a really spiritual power,
+and it was only at the close of Stephen's reign that
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-225"></a>1-225]</span>
+
+the nation really found a moral leader in Theobald,
+the Archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald's ablest
+agent and adviser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert
+Beket, a leading citizen and, it is said, Portreeve
+of London, the site of whose house is still marked
+by the Mercers' chapel in Cheapside. His mother
+Rohese was a type of the devout woman of her
+day; she weighed her boy every year on his birthday
+against money, clothes, and provisions which
+she gave to the poor. Thomas grew up amidst the
+Norman barons and clerks who frequented his
+father's house with a genial freedom of character
+tempered by the Norman refinement; he passed
+from the school of Merton to the University of
+Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of
+the young nobles of the time. Tall, handsome,
+bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his firmness
+of temper showed itself in his very sports; to
+rescue his hawk which had fallen into the water
+he once plunged into a millrace and was all but
+crushed by the wheel. The loss of his father's
+wealth drove him to the court of Archbishop
+Theobald, and he soon became the Primate's confidant
+in his plans for the rescue of England.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v1-map-4.jpg"><img src="images/v1-map-4t.jpg" alt="The Dominions of the Angevins"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Treaty of Wallingford</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The natural influence which the Primate would
+have exerted was long held in suspense by the
+superior position of Bishop Henry of Winchester
+as Papal Legate; but this office ceased with the
+Pope who granted it, and when in 1150 it was
+transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-226"></a>1-226]</span>
+
+soon made his weight felt. The long disorder of
+the realm was producing its natural reaction in
+exhaustion and disgust, as well as in a general
+craving for return to the line of hereditary succession
+whose breaking seemed the cause of the
+nation's woes. But the growth of their son Henry
+to manhood set naturally aside the pretensions
+both of Count Geoffry and Matilda. Young as he
+was Henry already showed the cool long-sighted
+temper which was to be his characteristic on the
+throne. Foiled in an early attempt to grasp the
+crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder which
+was doing his work till the death of his father at
+the close of 1151 left him master of Normandy and
+Anjou. In the spring of the following year his
+marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou,
+added Aquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw
+the gathering storm, and strove to meet it. He
+called on the bishops and baronage to secure the
+succession of his son Eustace by consenting to
+his association with him in the kingdom. But
+the moment was now come for Theobald to play
+his part. He was already negotiating through
+Thomas of London with Henry and the Pope; he
+met Stephen's plans by a refusal to swear fealty to
+his son, and the bishops, in spite of Stephen's
+threats, went with their head. The blow was
+soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as
+Theobald's agent, invited Henry to appear in
+England, and though the Duke disappointed his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-227"></a>1-227]</span>
+
+supporters' hopes by the scanty number of men he
+brought with him in 1153, his weakness proved in
+the end a source of strength. It was not to
+foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success
+but to the arms of Englishmen. An English army
+gathered round him, and as the hosts of Stephen
+and the Duke drew together a battle seemed near
+which would decide the fate of the realm. But
+Theobald who was now firmly supported by the
+greater barons again interfered and forced the
+rivals to an agreement. To the excited partizans
+of the house of Anjou it seemed as if the nobles
+were simply playing their own game in the proposed
+settlement and striving to preserve their power
+by a balance of masters. The suspicion was
+probably groundless, but all fear vanished with
+the death of Eustace, who rode off from his father's
+camp, maddened with the ruin of his hopes, to die
+in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand
+of God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground
+was now clear, and in November the Treaty of
+Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy.
+The castles were to be razed, the crown lands
+resumed, the foreign mercenaries banished from
+the country, and sheriffs appointed to restore order.
+Stephen was recognized as king, and in turn
+recognized Henry as his heir. The duke received
+at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and passed into
+Normandy in the spring of 1154. The work of
+reformation had already begun.  Stephen resented
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-228"></a>1-228]</span>
+
+indeed the pressure which Henry put on him to
+enforce the destruction of the castles built during
+the anarchy; but Stephen's resistance was but the
+pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He was in fact
+fast drawing to the grave; and on his death in
+October 1154 Henry returned to take the crown
+without a blow.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-229"></a>1-229]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2-Ch3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4547319"></a>CHAPTER III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4547325"></a>HENRY THE SECOND</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4547331"></a>1154-1189</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry Fitz-Empress</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young as he was, and he had reached but his
+twenty-first year when he returned to England as
+its king, Henry mounted the throne with a
+purpose of government which his reign carried
+steadily out. His practical, serviceable frame
+suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
+something in his build and look, in the square stout
+form, the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the
+prominent eyes, the bull neck, the coarse strong
+hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen,
+stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. "He never
+sits down," said one who observed him closely;
+"he is always on his legs from morning till night."
+Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing
+in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest,
+chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm
+of address and strength of memory, obstinate in
+love or hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-230"></a>1-230]</span>
+
+general air that of a rough, passionate, busy man,
+Henry's personal character told directly on the
+character of his reign. His accession marks the
+period of amalgamation when neighbourhood and
+traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
+Normans into a single people. A national feeling
+was thus springing up before which the barriers of
+the older feudalism were to be swept away. Henry
+had even less reverence for the feudal past than
+the men of his day: he was indeed utterly without
+the imagination and reverence which enable men
+to sympathize with any past at all. He had a
+practical man's impatience of the obstacles thrown
+in the way of his reforms by the older constitution
+of the realm, nor could he understand other men's
+reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements
+by the sacrifice of customs and traditions of bygone
+days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
+co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a
+perfectly reasonable and natural course to trample
+either baronage or Church under foot to gain his
+end of good government. He saw clearly that the
+remedy for such anarchy as England had endured
+under Stephen lay in the establishment of a kingly
+rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or
+class, administered by royal servants, and in whose
+public administration the nobles acted simply as
+delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie
+in the organization of judicial and administrative
+reforms which realized this idea.  But of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-231"></a>1-231]</span>
+
+currents of thought and feeling which were tending
+in the same direction he knew nothing. What he
+did for the moral and social impulses which were
+telling on men about him was simply to let them
+alone. Religion grew more and more identified
+with patriotism under the eyes of a king who
+whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books
+during mass, who never confessed, and cursed
+God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples
+formed themselves on both sides of the sea round
+a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind
+to hold together an Empire which the growth of
+nationality must inevitably destroy. There is
+throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of
+Henry's position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth
+century set in the midst of the twelfth, building up
+by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien
+to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to
+be swept away in the end by popular forces to
+whose existence his very cleverness and activity
+blinded him. But whether by the anti-national
+temper of his general system or by the administrative
+reforms of his English rule his policy did
+more than that of all his predecessors to prepare
+England for the unity and freedom which the fall
+of his house was to reveal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Great Scutage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been placed on the throne, as we have
+seen, by the Church. His first work was to repair
+the evils which England had endured till his
+accession by the restoration of the system of Henry
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-232"></a>1-232]</span>
+
+the First; and it was with the aid and counsel of
+Theobald that the foreign marauders were driven
+from the realm, the new castles demolished in
+spite of the opposition of the baronage, the King's
+Court and Exchequer restored. Age and infirmity
+however warned the Primate to retire from the
+post of minister, and his power fell into the
+younger and more vigorous hands of Thomas
+Beket, who had long acted as his confidential
+adviser and was now made Chancellor. Thomas
+won the personal favour of the king. The two
+young men had, in Theobald's words, "but one
+heart and mind"; Henry jested in the Chancellor's
+hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in rough
+horse-play as they rode through the streets. He
+loaded his favourite with riches and honours, but
+there is no ground for thinking that Thomas in
+any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's
+policy seems for good or evil to have been throughout
+his own. His work of reorganization went
+steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad.
+Welsh outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an
+army over the border; and a crushing repulse
+showed that he was less skilful as a general than
+as a statesman. The next year saw him drawn
+across the Channel, where he was already master
+of a third of the present France. Anjou, Maine,
+and Touraine he had inherited from his father,
+Normandy from his mother, he governed Britanny
+through his brother, while the seven provinces
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-233"></a>1-233]</span>
+
+of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche,
+Périgord, the Limousin, the Angoumois, and
+Gascony, belonged to his wife. As Duchess of
+Aquitaine Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and
+these Henry prepared in 1159 to enforce by arms.
+But the campaign was turned to the profit of his
+reforms. He had already begun the work of
+bringing the baronage within the grasp of the law
+by sending judges from the Exchequer year after
+year to exact the royal dues and administer the
+king's justice even in castle and manor. He now
+attacked its military influence. Each man who
+held lands of a certain value was bound to furnish
+a knight for his lord's service; and the barons
+thus held a body of trained soldiers at their
+disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to
+serve in the war of Toulouse, he allowed the lower
+tenants to commute their service for sums payable
+to the royal treasury under the name of "scutage,"
+or shield-money. The "Great Scutage" did much
+to disarm the baronage, while it enabled the king
+to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.
+Again however he was luckless in war. King
+Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse.
+Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide
+dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest
+with his suzerain; he withdrew his forces, and the
+quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance and the
+betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of
+Lewis.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-234"></a>1-234]</span>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Archbishop Thomas</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry returned to his English realm to regulate
+the relations of the State with the Church. These
+rested in the main on the system established by
+the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had
+no wish to meddle. But he was resolute that,
+baron or priest, all should be equal before the law;
+and he had no more mercy for clerical than for
+feudal immunities. The immunities of the clergy
+indeed were becoming a hindrance to public justice.
+The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended
+far beyond the priesthood; it included in Henry's
+day the whole of the professional and educated
+classes. It was subject to the jurisdiction of the
+Church courts alone; but bodily punishment
+could only be inflicted by officers of the lay courts,
+and so great had the jealousy between clergy and
+laity become that the bishops no longer sought
+civil aid but restricted themselves to the purely
+spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation
+of orders. Such penalties formed no effectual
+check upon crime, and while preserving the Church
+courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted
+offenders to secular punishment. For the carrying
+out of these designs he sought an agent in Thomas
+the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister
+for eight years, and had fought bravely in the war
+against Toulouse at the head of the seven hundred
+knights who formed his household. But the king
+had other work for him than war. On Theobald's
+death he forced on the monks of Canterbury his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-235"></a>1-235]</span>
+
+election as Archbishop. But from the moment of
+his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the
+new Primate flung its whole energy into the part
+he set himself to play. At the first intimation
+of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to his
+gay court attire: "You are choosing a fine dress,"
+he said, "to figure at the head of your Canterbury
+monks"; once monk and Archbishop he passed with
+a fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism;
+and a visit to the Council of Tours in 1163, where
+the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority
+were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third,
+strengthened his purpose of struggling for the
+privileges of the Church. His change of attitude
+encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with
+petty lawsuits, but no breach had come with the
+king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts
+should be punished by the civil power. Thomas
+refused; he would only consent that a clerk, once
+degraded, should for after offences suffer like a
+layman. Both parties appealed to the "customs"
+of the realm; and it was to state these "customs"
+that a court was held in 1164 at Clarendon near
+Salisbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Legal Reforms</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The report presented by bishops and barons
+formed the Constitutions of Clarendon, a code
+which in the bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted
+the system of the Conqueror. Every
+election of bishop or abbot was to take place before
+royal officers, in the king's chapel, and with the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-236"></a>1-236]</span>
+
+king's assent. The prelate-elect was bound to do
+homage to the king for his lands before consecration,
+and to hold his lands as a barony from the
+king, subject to all feudal burthens of taxation
+and attendance in the King's Court. No bishop
+might leave the realm without the royal permission.
+No tenant in chief or royal servant might be
+excommunicated, or their land placed under interdict,
+but by the king's assent. What was new
+was the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
+The King's Court was to decide whether
+a suit between clerk and layman, whose nature
+was disputed, belonged to the Church courts or
+the King's. A royal officer was to be present at
+all ecclesiastical proceedings in order to confine
+the Bishop's court within its own due limits, and
+a clerk convicted there passed at once under the
+civil jurisdiction. An appeal was left from the
+Archbishop's court to the King's Court for defect
+of justice, but none might appeal to the Papal
+court save with the king's leave. The privilege
+of sanctuary in churches and churchyards was
+repealed, so far as property and not persons was
+concerned. After a passionate refusal the Primate
+was at last brought to give his assent to these Constitutions,
+but the assent was soon retracted, and
+Henry's savage resentment threw the moral
+advantage of the position into his opponent's
+hands. Vexatious charges were brought against
+Thomas, and he was summoned to answer at a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-237"></a>1-237]</span>
+
+Council held in the autumn at Northampton. All
+urged him to submit; his very life was said to be
+in peril from the king's wrath. But in the
+presence of danger the courage of the man rose to
+its full height. Grasping his archiepiscopal cross
+he entered the royal court, forbade the nobles to
+condemn him, and appealed in the teeth of the
+Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of
+"Traitor!" followed him as he withdrew. The
+Primate turned fiercely at the word: "Were I a
+knight," he shouted back, "my sword should
+answer that foul taunt!" Once alone however,
+dread pressed more heavily; he fled in disguise at
+nightfall and reached France through Flanders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great as were the dangers it was to bring with
+it, the flight of Thomas left Henry free to carry
+on the reforms he had planned. In spite of
+denunciations from Primate and Pope, the Constitutions
+regulated from this time the relations of
+the Church with the State. Henry now turned to
+the actual organization of the realm. His reign,
+it has been truly said, "initiated the rule of law"
+as distinct from the despotism, whether personal
+or tempered by routine, of the Norman sovereigns.
+It was by successive "assizes" or codes issued
+with the sanction of the great councils of barons
+and prelates which he summoned year by year,
+that he perfected in a system of gradual reforms
+the administrative measures which Henry the
+First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legislation
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-238"></a>1-238]</span>
+
+commences in 1166 with the Assize of
+Clarendon, the first object of which was to provide
+for the order of the realm by reviving the old
+English system of mutual security or frankpledge.
+No stranger might abide in any place save a
+borough and only there for a single night unless
+sureties were given for his good behaviour; and
+the list of such strangers was to be submitted to
+the itinerant justices. In the provisions of this
+assize for the repression of crime we find the
+origin of trial by jury, so often attributed to
+earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred,
+with four from each township, were sworn
+to present those who were known or reputed as
+criminals within their district for trial by ordeal.
+The jurors were thus not merely witnesses, but
+sworn to act as judges also in determining the
+value of the charge, and it is this double character
+of Henry's jurors that has descended to our
+"grand jury," who still remain charged with the
+duty of presenting criminals for trial after examination
+of the witnesses against them. Two later
+steps brought the jury to its modern condition.
+Under Edward the First witnesses acquainted
+with the particular fact in question were added in
+each case to the general jury, and by the separation
+of these two classes of jurors at a later time
+the last became simply "witnesses" without any
+judicial power, while the first ceased to be witnesses
+at all and became our modern jurors, who
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-239"></a>1-239]</span>
+
+are only judges of the testimony given. With
+this assize too a practice which had prevailed from
+the earliest English times, the practice of "compurgation,"
+passed away. Under this system the
+accused could be acquitted of the charge by the
+voluntary oath of his neighbours and kinsmen;
+but this was abolished by the Assize of Clarendon,
+and for the fifty years which followed it his trial,
+after the investigation of the grand jury, was
+found solely in the ordeal or "judgement of God,"
+where innocence was proved by the power of
+holding hot iron in the hand or by sinking when
+flung into the water, for swimming was a proof of
+guilt. It was the abolition of the whole system of
+ordeal by the Council of Lateran in 1216 which
+led the way to the establishment of what is called
+a "petty jury" for the final trial of prisoners.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Murder of Thomas</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Henry's work of reorganization had hardly
+begun when it was broken by the pressure of the
+strife with the Primate. For six years the contest
+raged bitterly; at Rome, at Paris, the agents
+of the two powers intrigued against each other.
+Henry stooped to acts of the meanest persecution
+in driving the Primate's kinsmen from England,
+and in confiscating the lands of their order till the
+monks of Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home;
+while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his
+friends by his violence and excommunications,
+as well as by the stubbornness with which he
+clung to the offensive clause "Saving the honour
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-240"></a>1-240]</span>
+
+of my order," the addition of which to his consent
+would have practically neutralised the king's
+reforms. The Pope counselled mildness, the
+French king for a time withdrew his support, his
+own clerks gave way at last. "Come up," said
+one of them bitterly when his horse stumbled on
+the road, "saving the honour of the Church and
+my order." But neither warning nor desertion
+moved the resolution of the Primate. Henry, in
+dread of Papal excommunication, resolved in 1170
+on the coronation of his son: and this office,
+which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he transferred
+to the Archbishop of York. But the Pope's
+hands were now freed by his successes in Italy,
+and the threat of an interdict forced the king
+to a show of submission. The Archbishop was
+allowed to return after a reconciliation with the
+king at Fréteval, and the Kentishmen flocked
+around him with uproarious welcome as he entered
+Canterbury. "This is England," said his clerks,
+as they saw the white headlands of the coast.
+"You will wish yourself elsewhere before fifty
+days are gone," said Thomas sadly, and his foreboding
+showed his appreciation of Henry's character.
+He was now in the royal power, and
+orders had already been issued in the younger
+Henry's name for his arrest when four knights
+from the King's Court, spurred to outrage by a
+passionate outburst of their master's wrath, crossed
+the sea, and on the 29th of December forced their
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-241"></a>1-241]</span>
+
+way into the Archbishop's palace. After a stormy
+parley with him in his chamber they withdrew to
+arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the
+cathedral, but as he reached the steps leading
+from the transept to the choir his pursuers burst
+in from the cloisters. "Where," cried Reginald
+Fitzurse in the dusk of the dimly-lighted minster,
+"where is the traitor, Thomas Beket?" The
+Primate turned resolutely back: "Here am I, no
+traitor, but a priest of God," he replied, and again
+descending the steps he placed himself with his
+back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All
+the bravery and violence of his old knightly life
+seemed to revive in Thomas as he tossed back the
+threats and demands of his assailants. "You are
+our prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four
+knights seized him to drag him from the church.
+"Do not touch me, Reginald," cried the Primate,
+"pander that you are, you owe me fealty"; and
+availing himself of his personal strength he shook
+him roughly off. "Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse,
+and blow after blow struck Thomas to the
+ground. A retainer of Ranulf de Broc with the
+point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains
+on the ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly,
+"this traitor will never rise again."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Church and Literature</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The brutal murder was received with a thrill
+of horror throughout Christendom; miracles were
+wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was canonized,
+and became the most popular of English saints.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-242"></a>1-242]</span>
+
+The stately "martyrdom" which rose over his
+relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the triumph
+which his blood had won. But the contest
+had in fact revealed a new current of educated
+opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church
+than the reforms of the king. Throughout it
+Henry had been aided by a silent revolution which
+now began to part the purely literary class from
+the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of
+our history we have seen literature springing up
+in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself
+against the ignorance and violence of the time
+under ecclesiastical privileges. Almost all our
+writers from Bæda to the days of the Angevins
+are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which
+followed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical
+revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee had
+given to Normandy travelled across the Channel
+with the new Norman abbots who were established
+in the greater English monasteries; and writing-rooms
+or scriptoria, where the chief works of
+Latin literature, patristic or classical, were copied
+and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and
+entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed
+from this time a part of every religious house of
+any importance. But the literature which found
+this religious shelter was not so much ecclesiastical
+as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional
+impulse given by Anselm produced no English
+work of theology or metaphysics. The literary
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-243"></a>1-243]</span>
+
+revival which followed the Conquest took mainly
+the old historical form. At Durham Turgot and
+Simeon threw into Latin shape the national annals
+to the time of Henry the First with an especial
+regard to northern affairs, while the earlier events
+of Stephen's reign were noted down by two Priors
+of Hexham in the wild border-land between England
+and the Scots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These however were the colourless jottings of
+mere annalists; it was in the Scriptorium of
+Canterbury, in Osbern's lives of the English saints
+or in Eadmer's record of the struggle of Anselm
+against the Red King and his successor, that we
+see the first indications of a distinctively English
+feeling telling on the new literature. The national
+impulse is yet more conspicuous in the two
+historians that followed. The war-songs of the
+English conquerors of Britain were preserved by
+Henry, an Archdeacon of Huntingdon, who wove
+them into annals compiled from Bæda, and the
+Chronicle; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury,
+as industriously collected the lighter ballads
+which embodied the popular traditions of the
+English kings. It is in William above all others
+that we see the new tendency of English literature.
+In himself, as in his work, he marks the fusion of
+the conquerors and the conquered, for he was of
+both English and Norman parentage and his sympathies
+were as divided as his blood. The form
+and style of his writings show the influence of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-244"></a>1-244]</span>
+
+those classical studies which were now reviving
+throughout Christendom. Monk as he is, William
+discards the older ecclesiastical models and the
+annalistic form. Events are grouped together with
+no strict reference to time, while the lively narrative
+flows rapidly and loosely along with constant
+breaks of digression over the general history of
+Europe and the Church. It is in this change of
+historic spirit that William takes his place as first
+of the more statesmanlike and philosophic school
+of historians who began to arise in direct connexion
+with the Court, and among whom the author of
+the chronicle which commonly bears the name of
+"Benedict of Peterborough" with his continuator
+Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous. Both
+held judicial offices under Henry the Second, and
+it is to their position at Court that they owe the
+fulness and accuracy of their information as to
+affairs at home and abroad, as well as their copious
+supply of official documents. What is noteworthy
+in these writers is the purely political temper with
+which they regard the conflict of Church and State
+in their time. But the English court had now
+become the centre of a distinctly secular literature.
+The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of
+Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English
+law, as that of the royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal,
+on the Exchequer is the earliest on English
+government.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Gerald of Wales</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still more distinctly secular than these, though
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-245"></a>1-245]</span>
+
+the work of a priest who claimed to be a bishop,
+are the writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is the
+father of our popular literature as he is the originator
+of the political and ecclesiastical pamphlet.
+Welsh blood (as his usual name of Giraldus
+Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his
+veins, and something of the restless Celtic fire runs
+alike through his writings and his life. A busy
+scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales,
+the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome
+of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and
+most amusing of all the authors of his time. In
+his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity
+and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared
+as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry
+contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb
+than not to be understood," is his characteristic
+apology for the novelty of his style: "new times
+require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly
+aside the old and dry method of some authors and
+aimed at adopting the fashion of speech which is
+actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest
+of Ireland and his account of Wales, which
+are in fact reports of two journeys undertaken in
+those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin,
+illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation,
+his audacity, and his good sense. They are just
+the sort of lively, dashing letters that we find in
+the correspondence of a modern journal. There
+is the same modern tone in his political pamphlets;
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-246"></a>1-246]</span>
+
+his profusion of jests, his fund of anecdote, the
+aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness
+and critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of
+his style, are backed by a fearlessness and impetuosity
+that made him a dangerous assailant even to
+such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives
+in which Gerald poured out his resentment against
+the Angevins are the cause of half the scandal
+about Henry and his sons which has found its way
+into history. His life was wasted in an ineffectual
+attempt to secure the see of St. David's, but his
+pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation
+to its later struggle with the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Romance</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>A tone of distinct hostility to the Church
+developed itself almost from the first among the
+singers of romance. Romance had long before
+taken root in the court of Henry the First, where
+under the patronage of Queen Maud the dreams of
+Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Britanny,
+and which had travelled to Wales in the train of
+the exile Rhys ap Tewdor, took shape in the
+History of the Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth.
+Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of
+the day, Welsh hopes of future triumph over the
+Saxon, the memories of the Crusades and of the
+world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, were
+mingled together by this daring fabulist in a work
+whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred
+of Beverley transferred Geoffry's inventions into
+the region of sober history, while two Norman
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-247"></a>1-247]</span>
+
+<i>trouveurs</i>, Gaimar and Wace, translated them into
+French verse. So complete was the credence they
+obtained that Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury was
+visited by Henry the Second, while the child of
+his son Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny
+received the name of the Celtic hero. Out of
+Geoffry's creation grew little by little the poem of
+the Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled
+with the story of Arthur the older and more
+mysterious legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent
+that of Lancelot to the wandering minstrels of the
+day, who moulded it as they wandered from hall
+to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood wrested
+from its loyalty by the love of woman. The
+stories of Tristram and Gawayne, at first as independent
+as that of Lancelot, were drawn with it
+into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance; and
+when the Church, jealous of the popularity of the
+legends of chivalry, invented as a counteracting
+influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the San
+Graal which held the blood of the Cross invisible
+to all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the
+genius of a Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the
+rival legends together, sent Arthur and his knights
+wandering over sea and land in quest of the San
+Graal, and crowned the work by the figure of Sir
+Galahad, the type of ideal knighthood, without
+fear and without reproach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Walter de Map</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Walter stands before us as the representative
+of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-248"></a>1-248]</span>
+
+criticism which followed this growth of romance
+and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the
+court of the two Henries. Born on the Welsh
+border, a student at Paris, a favourite with the
+king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador,
+his genius was as various as it was prolific. He is
+as much at his ease in sweeping together the chitchat
+of the time in his "Courtly Trifles" as in
+creating the character of Sir Galahad. But he
+only rose to his fullest strength when he turned
+from the fields of romance to that of Church reform
+and embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day
+in the figure of his "Bishop Goliath." The whole
+spirit of Henry and his Court in their struggle
+with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the
+apocalypse and confession of this imaginary prelate.
+Picture after picture strips the veil from the corruption
+of the mediæval Church, its indolence, its
+thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole
+body of the clergy from Pope to hedge-priest is
+painted as busy in the chase for gain; what escapes
+the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what
+escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down
+by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl
+hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of
+the crowd of figures which fills the canvas of the
+satirist, pluralist vicars, abbots "purple as their
+wines," monks feeding and chattering together like
+parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop,
+light of purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-249"></a>1-249]</span>
+
+drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who sums up
+the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
+this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.
+</p>
+
+<center><a href="images/v1-map-5.jpg"><img src="images/v1-map-5t.jpg" alt="Ireland just before the English Invasion"></a></center>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Invasion of Ireland</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be in the highest degree unjust to
+treat such invectives as sober history, or to judge
+the Church of the twelfth century by the taunts
+of Walter de Map. What writings such as his
+bring home to us is the upgrowth of a new literary
+class, not only standing apart from the Church
+but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will,
+and breaking down the unquestioning reverence
+with which men had till now regarded it by their
+sarcasm and abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt
+which begins with Walter de Map goes
+deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer and
+passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. But
+even in these early days we can hardly doubt
+that it gave Henry strength in his contest with
+the Church. So little indeed did he suffer from
+the murder of Archbishop Thomas that the years
+which follow it form the grandest portion of his
+reign. While Rome was threatening excommunication
+he added a new realm to his dominions.
+Ireland had long since fallen from the civilization
+and learning which its missionaries brought in
+the seventh century to the shores of Northumbria.
+Every element of improvement or progress which
+had been introduced into the island disappeared
+in the long and desperate struggle with the Danes.
+The coast-towns which the invaders founded, such
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-250"></a>1-250]</span>
+
+as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish, in blood
+and manners and at feud with the Celtic tribes
+around them, though sometimes forced by the
+fortunes of war to pay tribute and to accept the
+overlordship of the Irish kings. It was through
+these towns however that the intercourse with
+England which had ceased since the eighth century
+was to some extent renewed in the eleventh.
+Cut off from the Church of the island by national
+antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the
+See of Canterbury for the ordination of their
+bishops, and acknowledged a right of spiritual
+supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The relations
+thus formed were drawn closer by a slave-trade
+between the two countries which the Conqueror
+and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time
+in suppressing at Bristol but which appears to
+have quickly revived. In the twelfth century
+Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been
+kidnapped and sold into slavery in spite of
+royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces
+of the English Church. The slave-trade afforded
+a legitimate pretext for war, had a pretext
+been needed by the ambition of Henry the
+Second; and within a few months of that king's
+coronation John of Salisbury was despatched to
+obtain the Papal sanction for an invasion of the
+island. The enterprise, as it was laid before
+Pope Hadrian IV., took the colour of a crusade.
+The isolation of Ireland from the general body of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-251"></a>1-251]</span>
+
+Christendom, the absence of learning and civilization,
+the scandalous vices of its people, were
+alleged as the grounds of Henry's action. It was
+the general belief of the time that all islands fell
+under the jurisdiction of the Papal See, and it
+was as a possession of the Roman Church that
+Henry sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland.
+His aim was "to enlarge the bounds of the
+Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct
+the manners of its people and to plant virtue
+among them, and to increase the Christian religion."
+He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to extirpate
+vicious customs, to respect the rights of the
+native Churches, and to enforce the payment of
+Peter's pence" as a recognition of the overlordship
+of the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved
+the enterprise, as one prompted by "the ardour
+of faith and love of religion," and declared his will
+that the people of Ireland should receive Henry
+with all honour, and revere him as their lord.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Papal bull was produced in a great council
+of the English baronage, but the opposition was
+strong enough to force on Henry a temporary
+abandonment of his designs, and twelve years
+passed before the scheme was brought to life
+again by the flight of Dermod, King of Leinster,
+to Henry's court. Dermod had been driven from
+his dominions in one of the endless civil wars
+which devastated the island; he now did homage
+for his kingdom to Henry, and returned to Ireland
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-252"></a>1-252]</span>
+
+with promises of aid from the English knighthood.
+He was followed in 1168 by Robert FitzStephen,
+a son of the Constable of Cardigan, with a little
+band of a hundred and forty knights, sixty men-at-arms,
+and three or four hundred Welsh archers.
+Small as was the number of the adventurers,
+their horses and arms proved irresistible by the
+Irish kernes; a sally of the men of Wexford was
+avenged by the storm of their town; the Ossory
+clans were defeated with a terrible slaughter, and
+Dermod, seizing a head from the heap of trophies
+which his men piled at his feet, tore off in savage
+triumph its nose and lips with his teeth. The
+arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of
+Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil,
+a ruined baron later known by the nickname of
+Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's prohibition
+landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen
+hundred men as Dermod's mercenary. The city
+was at once stormed, and the united forces of the
+earl and king marched to the siege of Dublin.
+In spite of a relief attempted by the King of
+Connaught, who was recognized as overking of
+the island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was
+taken by surprise; and the marriage of Richard
+with Eva, Dermod's daughter, left the Earl on the
+death of his father-in-law, which followed quickly
+on these successes, master of his kingdom of
+Leinster. The new lord had soon however to
+hurry back to England and appease the jealousy
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-253"></a>1-253]</span>
+
+of Henry by the surrender of Dublin to the
+Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an
+English lordship, and by accompanying the king
+in 1171 on a voyage to the new dominion which
+the adventurers had won.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Revolt of the younger Henry</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his
+purpose, the conquest of Ireland would now have
+been accomplished. The King of Connaught
+indeed and the chiefs of Ulster refused him
+homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes owned
+his suzerainty; the bishops in synod at Cashel
+recognized him as their lord; and he was preparing
+to penetrate to the north and west, and to
+secure his conquest by a systematic erection of
+castles throughout the country, when the need
+of making terms with Rome, whose interdict
+threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop
+Thomas, recalled him in the spring of 1172 to
+Normandy. Henry averted the threatened sentence
+by a show of submission. The judicial provisions
+in the Constitutions of Clarendon were in
+form annulled, and liberty of election was restored
+in the case of bishopricks and abbacies. In
+reality however the victory rested with the king.
+Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments
+remained practically in his hands, and the King's
+Court asserted its power over the spiritual jurisdiction
+of the bishops. But the strife with
+Thomas had roused into active life every element
+of danger which surrounded Henry, the envious
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-254"></a>1-254]</span>
+
+dread of his neighbours, the disaffection of his
+own house, the disgust of the barons at the repeated
+blows which he levelled at their military
+and judicial power. The king's withdrawal of
+the office of sheriff from the great nobles of the
+shire to entrust it to the lawyers and courtiers
+who already furnished the staff of the royal
+judges quickened the resentment of the baronage
+into revolt. His wife Eleanor, now parted from
+Henry by a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son,
+whose coronation had given him the title of king,
+to demand possession of the English realm. On
+his father's refusal the boy sought refuge with
+Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal for
+a vast rising. France, Flanders, and Scotland
+joined in league against Henry; his younger sons,
+Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine,
+while the Earl of Leicester sailed from Flanders
+with an army of mercenaries to stir up England
+to revolt. The Earl's descent ended in a crushing
+defeat near St. Edmundsbury at the hands of the
+king's justiciars; but no sooner had the French
+king entered Normandy and invested Rouen than
+the revolt of the baronage burst into flame. The
+Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray rose in
+Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the midland
+shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern counties, while
+a Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection
+by a descent upon the coast. The murder of
+Archbishop Thomas still hung round Henry's
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-255"></a>1-255]</span>
+
+neck, and his first act in hurrying to England to
+meet these perils in 1174 was to prostrate himself
+before the shrine of the new martyr and to submit
+to a public scourging in expiation of his sin. But
+the penance was hardly wrought when all danger
+was dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King
+of Scotland, William the Lion, surprised by the
+English under cover of a mist, fell into the hands
+of Henry's minister, Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the
+retreat of the Scots the English rebels hastened to
+lay down their arms. With the army of mercenaries
+which he had brought over sea Henry was
+able to return to Normandy, to raise the siege of
+Rouen, and to reduce his sons to submission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Later reforms</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the next ten years Henry's power
+was at its height. The French king was cowed.
+The Scotch king bought his release in 1175 by
+owning Henry's suzerainty. The Scotch barons
+did homage, and English garrisons manned the
+strongest of the Scotch castles. In England itself
+church and baronage were alike at the king's
+mercy. Eleanor was imprisoned; and the younger
+Henry, though always troublesome, remained
+powerless to do harm. The king availed himself
+of this rest from outer foes to push forward his
+judicial and administrative organization. At the
+outset of his reign he had restored the King's
+Court and the occasional circuits of its justices;
+but the revolt was hardly over when in 1176 the
+Assize of Northampton rendered this institution
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-256"></a>1-256]</span>
+
+permanent and regular by dividing the kingdom
+into six districts, to each of which three itinerant
+judges were assigned. The circuits thus marked
+out correspond roughly with those that still exist.
+The primary object of these circuits was financial;
+but the rendering of the king's justice went on
+side by side with the exaction of the king's dues,
+and this carrying of justice to every corner of the
+realm was made still more effective by the abolition
+of all feudal exemptions from the royal
+jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new system
+lay in the opportunities it afforded to judicial
+corruption; and so great were its abuses, that in
+1178 Henry was forced to restrict for a while the
+number of justices to five, and to reserve appeals
+from their court to himself in council. The Court
+of Appeal which was thus created, that of the
+King in Council, gave birth as time went on to
+tribunal after tribunal. It is from it that the
+judicial powers now exercised by the Privy
+Council are derived, as well as the equitable
+jurisdiction of the Chancellor. In the next
+century it became the Great Council of the realm,
+and it is from this Great Council, in its two distinct
+capacities, that the Privy Council drew its
+legislative, and the House of Lords its judicial
+character. The Court of Star Chamber and the
+Judicial Committee of the Privy Council are later
+offshoots of Henry's Court of Appeal. From the
+judicial organization of the realm, he turned to its
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-257"></a>1-257]</span>
+
+military organization, and in 1181 an Assize of
+Arms restored the national fyrd or militia to the
+place which it had lost at the Conquest. The
+substitution of scutage for military service had
+freed the crown from its dependence on the
+baronage and its feudal retainers; the Assize of
+Arms replaced this feudal organization by the
+older obligation of every freeman to serve in
+defence of the realm. Every knight was now
+bound to appear in coat of mail and with shield
+and lance, every freeholder with lance and hauberk,
+every burgess and poorer freeman with
+lance and helmet, at the king's call. The levy
+of an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the
+disposal of the Crown for purposes of defence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Henry's death</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his
+brother Geoffry in 1183 hardly broke the current
+of Henry's success. The revolt ended with the
+young king's death, and in 1186 this was followed
+by the death of Geoffry. Richard, now his
+father's heir, remained busy in Aquitaine; and
+Henry was himself occupied with plans for the
+recovery of Jerusalem, which had been taken by
+Saladin in 1187. The "Saladin tithe," a tax
+levied on all goods and chattels, and memorable
+as the first English instance of taxation on personal
+property, was granted to the king at the
+opening of 1188 to support his intended Crusade.
+But the Crusade was hindered by strife which
+broke out between Richard and the new French
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-258"></a>1-258]</span>
+
+king, Philip; and while Henry strove in vain to
+bring about peace, a suspicion that he purposed
+to make his youngest son, John, his heir drove
+Richard to Philip's side. His father, broken in
+health and spirits, negotiated fruitlessly through
+the winter, but with the spring of 1189 Richard
+and the French king suddenly appeared before
+Le Mans. Henry was driven in headlong flight
+from the town. Tradition tells how from a height
+where he halted to look back on the burning city,
+so dear to him as his birthplace, the king hurled
+his curse against God: "Since Thou hast taken
+from me the town I loved best, where I was born
+and bred, and where my father lies buried, I will
+have my revenge on Thee too--I will rob Thee of
+that thing Thou lovest most in me." If the words
+were uttered, they were the frenzied words of a
+dying man. Death drew Henry to the home of
+his race, but Tours fell as he lay at Saumur, and
+the hunted king was driven to beg mercy from
+his foes. They gave him the list of the conspirators
+against him: at its head was the name of
+one, his love for whom had brought with it the
+ruin that was crushing him, his youngest son,
+John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to
+the wall, "let things go as they will--I care no
+more for myself or for the world." The end was
+come at last. Henry was borne to Chinon by the
+silvery waters of Vienne, and muttering, "Shame,
+shame on a conquered king," passed sullenly away.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-259"></a>1-259]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk2-Ch4"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4549427"></a>CHAPTER IV</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4549433"></a>THE ANGEVIN KINGS</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4549438"></a>1189-1204</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John and Longchamp</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fall of Henry the Second only showed the
+strength of the system he had built up on this
+side the sea. In the hands of the Justiciar,
+Ranulf de Glanvill, England remained peaceful
+through the last stormy months of his reign, and
+his successor Richard found it undisturbed when
+he came for his crowning in the autumn of 1189.
+Though born at Oxford, Richard had been bred
+in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his
+realm, and his visit was simply for the purpose
+of gathering money for a Crusade. Sheriffdoms,
+bishopricks, were sold; even the supremacy over
+Scotland was bought back again by William the
+Lion; and it was with the wealth which these
+measures won that Richard made his way in 1190
+to Marseilles and sailed thence to Messina. Here
+he found his army and a host under King Philip
+of France; and the winter was spent in quarrels
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-260"></a>1-260]</span>
+
+between the two kings and a strife between
+Richard and Tancred of Sicily. In the spring of
+1191 his mother Eleanor arrived with ill news
+from England. Richard had left the realm under
+the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of
+Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but
+before quitting France he had entrusted it wholly
+to the latter, who stood at the head of Church
+and State as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate.
+Longchamp was loyal to the king, but his exactions
+and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce
+hatred among the baronage, and this hatred found
+a head in John. While richly gifting his brother
+with earldoms and lands, Richard had taken oath
+from him that he would quit England for three
+years. But tidings that the Justiciar was striving
+to secure the succession of Arthur, the child of
+his elder brother Geoffry and of Constance of
+Britanny, to the English crown at once recalled
+John to the realm, and peace between him and
+Longchamp was only preserved by the influence
+of the queen-mother Eleanor. Richard met this
+news by sending Walter of Coutances, the Archbishop
+of Rouen, with full but secret powers to
+England. On his landing in the summer of 1191
+Walter found the country already in arms. No
+battle had been fought, but John had seized many
+of the royal castles, and the indignation stirred
+by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop Geoffry of
+York, a bastard son of Henry the Second, called
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-261"></a>1-261]</span>
+
+the whole baronage to the field. The nobles swore
+fealty to John as Richard's successor, and Walter
+of Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission
+as Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's
+exile from the realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tidings of this revolution reached Richard
+in the Holy Land. He had landed at Acre in the
+summer and joined with the French king in its
+siege. But on the surrender of the town Philip
+at once sailed home, while Richard, marching
+from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem.
+The city however was saved by false news of its
+strength, and through the following winter and
+the spring of 1192 the king limited his activity
+to securing the fortresses of southern Palestine.
+In June he again advanced on Jerusalem, but the
+revolt of his army forced him a second time to
+fall back, and news of Philip's intrigues with
+John drove him to abandon further efforts. There
+was need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's
+sake in a merchant vessel, he was driven by a
+storm on the Adriatic coast, and while journeying
+in disguise overland arrested in December at
+Vienna by his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of
+Austria. Through the whole year John, in disgust
+at his displacement by Walter of Coutances, had
+been plotting fruitlessly with Philip. But the
+news of this capture at once roused both to
+activity. John secured his castles and seized
+Windsor, giving out that the king would never
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-262"></a>1-262]</span>
+
+return; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor,
+Henry the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria
+had given Richard up, to retain his captive. But
+a new influence now appeared on the scene. The
+see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from
+his prison bestowed it on Hubert Walter, the
+Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de
+Glanvill, and who had acted as secretary to Bishop
+Longchamp. Hubert's ability was seen in the
+skill with which he held John at bay and raised
+the enormous ransom which Henry demanded,
+the whole people, clergy as well as lay, paying a
+fourth of their moveable goods. To gain his
+release however Richard was forced besides this
+payment of ransom to do homage to the Emperor,
+not only for the kingdom of Arles with which
+Henry invested him but for England itself, whose
+crown he resigned into the Emperor's hands and
+received back as a fief. But John's open revolt
+made even these terms welcome, and Richard
+hurried to England in the spring of 1194. He
+found the rising already quelled by the decision
+with which the Primate led an army against
+John's castles, and his landing was followed by
+his brother's complete submission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard and Philip</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured
+order in England, but oversea Richard found
+himself face to face with dangers which he was
+too clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his
+father's administrative genius, less ingenious in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-263"></a>1-263]</span>
+
+his political conceptions than John, Richard was
+far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure,
+a pride in sheer physical strength, here and there
+a romantic generosity, jostled roughly with the
+craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his
+race; but he was at heart a statesman, cool and
+patient in the execution of his plans as he was
+bold in their conception. "The devil is loose;
+take care of yourself," Philip had written to John
+at the news of Richard's release. In the French
+king's case a restless ambition was spurred to
+action by insults which he had borne during the
+Crusade. He had availed himself of Richard's
+imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the
+lords of Aquitaine rose in open revolt under the
+troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of the
+rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of
+the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of the
+greed and oppression of their financial administration,
+combined with an impatience of their firm
+government and vigorous justice to alienate the
+nobles of their provinces on the Continent.
+Loyalty among the people there was none; even
+Anjou, the home of their race, drifted towards
+Philip as steadily as Poitou. But in warlike
+ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He
+held him in check on the Norman frontier and
+surprised his treasure at Fréteval while he
+reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine.
+Hubert Walter gathered vast sums to support the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-264"></a>1-264]</span>
+
+army of mercenaries which Richard led against
+his foes. The country groaned under its burdens,
+but it owned the justice and firmness of the
+Primate's rule, and the measures which he took
+to procure money with as little oppression as
+might be proved steps in the education of the
+nation in its own self-government. The taxes
+were assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each
+circuit of the justices; the grand jury of the
+county was based on the election of knights in the
+hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the
+crown was taken from the sheriff and given to
+a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
+elections were found at a later time precedents
+for parliamentary representation; in Hubert's
+mind they were doubtless intended to do little
+more than reconcile the people to the crushing
+taxation. His work poured a million into the
+treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
+truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the
+French alliance, and to unite the Counts of
+Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the
+Bretons in a revolt against Philip. He won a yet
+more valuable aid in the election of his nephew
+Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the
+German throne, and his envoy William Longchamp
+knitted an alliance which would bring the German
+lances to bear on the King of Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Château Gaillard</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the security of Normandy was requisite to
+the success of these wider plans, and Richard saw
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-265"></a>1-265]</span>
+
+that its defence could no longer rest on the loyalty
+of the Norman people. His father might trace
+his descent through Matilda from the line of Hrolf,
+but the Angevin ruler was in fact a stranger to
+the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to
+recognize his Duke with any real sympathy in the
+Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the
+border at the head of Brabançon mercenaries, in
+whose camp the old names of the Norman
+baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provençal
+ruffian, held supreme command. The purely
+military site that Richard selected for a new
+fortress with which he guarded the border showed
+his realization of the fact that Normandy could
+now only be held by force of arms. As a
+monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle,"
+Château Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses
+of the Middle Ages. Richard fixed its site where
+the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great
+semicircle to the north, and where the valley of
+Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs
+along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown
+the distant hills; within the river curve lies a
+dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine,
+broken with green islets and dappled with the
+grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow
+on its way to Rouen. The castle formed part of
+an entrenched camp which Richard designed to
+cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river
+was blocked by a stockade and a bridge of boats,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-266"></a>1-266]</span>
+
+by a fort on the islet in mid stream, and by a
+fortified town which the king built in the valley of
+the Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the
+angle between this valley and the Seine, on a spur
+of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of
+land connects with the general plateau, rose at the
+height of three hundred feet above the river the
+crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
+the walls which connected it with the town and
+stockade have for the most part gone, but time
+and the hand of man have done little to destroy
+the fortifications themselves--the fosse, hewn deep
+into the solid rock, with casemates hollowed out
+along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel, the
+huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs
+and huddled gables of Les Andelys. Even now
+in its ruin we can understand the triumphant
+outburst of its royal builder as he saw it rising
+against the sky: "How pretty a child is mine,
+this child of but one year old!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Richard's death</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of
+Château Gaillard at a later time proved Richard's
+foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled
+in him with a brutal violence and a callous
+indifference to honour. "I would take it, were
+its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
+saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its
+walls of butter," was the defiant answer of his foe.
+It was Church land and the Archbishop of Rouen
+laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-267"></a>1-267]</span>
+
+the king met the interdict with mockery, and
+intrigued with Rome till the censure was withdrawn.
+He was just as defiant of a "rain of
+blood," whose fall scared his courtiers. "Had an
+angel from heaven bid him abandon his work,"
+says a cool observer, "he would have answered
+with a curse." The twelve months' hard work, in
+fact, by securing the Norman frontier set Richard
+free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip.
+Money only was wanting; for England had at
+last struck against the continued exactions. In
+1198 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and
+bishops to refuse a new demand for the maintenance
+of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter
+resigned in despair. A new justiciar, Geoffry
+Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted some money by
+a harsh assize of the forests; but the exchequer
+was soon drained, and Richard listened with more
+than the greed of his race to rumours that a
+treasure had been found in the fields of the
+Limousin. Twelve knights of gold seated round
+a golden table were the find, it was said, of the
+Lord of Châlus. Treasure-trove at any rate there
+was, and in the spring of 1199 Richard prowled
+around the walls. But the castle held stubbornly
+out till the king's greed passed into savage
+menace. He would hang all, he swore--man,
+woman, the very child at the breast. In the
+midst of his threats an arrow from the walls
+struck him down. He died as he had lived,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-268"></a>1-268]</span>
+
+owning the wild passion which for seven years
+past had kept him from confession lest he should
+be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving with kingly
+generosity the archer who had shot him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Loss of Normandy</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his
+death. John was acknowledged as king in
+England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured
+for him by its duchess, his mother Eleanor; but
+Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
+Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the
+late Duke of Britanny. The ambition of Philip,
+who protected his cause, turned the day against
+Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French
+garrisons with which the French king practically
+annexed the country, and in May 1200 a treaty
+between the two kings left John master of the
+whole dominion of his house. But fresh troubles
+broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John's refusal to
+answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his
+Court, declared in 1202 his fiefs forfeited; and
+Arthur, now a boy of fifteen, strove to seize
+Eleanor in the castle of Mirebeau. Surprised at
+its siege by a rapid march of the king, the boy
+was taken prisoner to Rouen, and murdered there
+in the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his
+uncle's hand. This brutal outrage at once roused
+the French provinces in revolt, while Philip
+sentenced John to forfeiture as a murderer, and
+marched straight on Normandy. The ease with
+which the conquest of the Duchy was effected
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-269"></a>1-269]</span>
+
+can only be explained by the utter absence of
+any popular resistance on the part of the Normans
+themselves. Half a century before the sight of
+a Frenchman in the land would have roused
+every peasant to arms from Avranches to Dieppe.
+But town after town surrendered at the mere
+summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly
+over before Normandy settled down into the most
+loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this
+was due to the wise liberality with which Philip
+met the claims of the towns to independence and
+self-government, as well as to the overpowering
+force and military ability with which the conquest
+was effected. But the utter absence of opposition
+sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his
+transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing
+from one foreign master to another, and foreigner
+for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the two.
+Between France and Normandy there had been
+as many years of friendship as of strife; between
+Norman and Angevin lay a century of bitterest
+hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was
+the realization in fact of a dependence which had
+always existed in theory; Philip entered Rouen
+as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission
+to the house of Anjou had been the most humiliating
+of all submissions, the submission to an equal.
+In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as
+startling a success. Maine, Anjou, and Touraine
+passed with little resistance into his hands, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-270"></a>1-270]</span>
+
+the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission
+of the bulk of Aquitaine. Little was
+left save the country south of the Garonne; and
+from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched
+from the Tyne to the Pyrenees John saw himself
+reduced at a blow to the realm of England.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-271"></a>1-271]</span>
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4550228"></a>BOOK III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550234"></a>THE CHARTER</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550239"></a>1204-1307</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-273"></a>1-273]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3-Auth"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4550306"></a> </li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550311"></a>AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550317"></a>1204-1307</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+A Chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell
+near Cambridge, and which has been embodied in the
+"Memoriale" of Walter of Coventry, gives us a contemporary
+account of the period from 1201 to 1225. We
+possess another contemporary annalist for the same period in
+Roger of Wendover, the first of the published chroniclers
+of St. Albans, whose work extends to 1235. Though full
+of detail Roger is inaccurate, and he has strong royal and
+ecclesiastical sympathies; but his chronicle was subsequently
+revised in a more patriotic sense by another monk
+of the same abbey, Matthew Paris, and continued in the
+"Greater Chronicle" of the latter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of the
+time in his "Historia Anglorum" (from the Conquest to
+1253). He is the last of the great chroniclers of his house;
+for the chronicles of Rishanger, his successor at St. Albans,
+and of the obscurer annalists who worked on at that Abbey
+till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and lifeless
+jottings of events which become more and more local as
+time goes on. The annals of the abbeys of Waverley,
+Dunstable, and Burton, which have been published in the
+"Annales Monastici" of the Rolls series, add important
+details for the reigns of John and Henry III. Those of
+Melrose, Osney, and Lanercost help us in the close of the
+latter reign, where help is especially welcome. For the
+Barons' war we have besides these the royalist chronicle of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-274"></a>1-274]</span>
+
+Wykes, Rishanger's fragment published by the Camden
+Society, and a chronicle of Bartholomew de Cotton, which
+is contemporary from 1264 to 1298. Where the chronicles
+fail however the public documents of the realm become of
+high importance. The "Royal Letters" (1216-1272) which
+have been printed from the Patent Rolls by Professor
+Shirley (Rolls Series) throw great light on Henry's politics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our municipal history during this period is fully represented
+by that of London. For the general history of the
+capital the Rolls series has given us its "Liber Albus"
+and "Liber Custumarum," while a vivid account of its
+communal revolution is to be found in the "Liber de
+Antiquis Legibus" published by the Camden Society. A
+store of documents will be found in the Charter Rolls
+published by the Record Commission, in Brady's work on
+"English Boroughs," and in the "Ordinances of English
+Gilds," published with a remarkable preface from the pen
+of Dr. Brentano by the Early English Text Society. For
+our religious and intellectual history materials now become
+abundant. Grosseteste's Letters throw light on the state
+of the Church and its relations with Rome; those of Adam
+Marsh give us interesting details of Earl Simon's relation to
+the religious movement of his day; and Eceleston's tract
+on the arrival of the Friars is embodied in the "Monumenta
+Franciscana." For the Universities we have the collection
+of materials edited by Mr. Anstey under the name of
+"Munimenta Academica."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the close of Henry's reign our directly historic
+materials become scantier and scantier. The monastic
+annals we have before mentioned are supplemented by the
+jejune entries of Trivet and Murimuth, by the "Annales
+Anglic et Scotias," by Rishanger's Chronicle, his "Gesta
+Edwardi Primi," and three fragments of his annals (all
+published in the Rolls Series). The portion of the so-called
+"Walsingham's History" which relates to this period is
+now attributed by Mr. Riley to Rishanger's hand. For the
+wars in the north and in the west we have no records from
+the side of the conquered. The social and physical state of
+Wales indeed is illustrated by the "Itinerarium" which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-275"></a>1-275]</span>
+
+Gerald de Barri drew up in the twelfth century, but
+Scotland has no contemporary chronicles for this period;
+the jingling rimes of Blind Harry are two hundred years
+later than his hero, Wallace. We possess however a
+copious collection of State papers in the "Rotuli Scotiæ,"
+the "Documents and Records illustrative of the History of
+Scotland" which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well as
+in Rymer's Foedera. For the history of our Parliament the
+most noteworthy materials have been collected by Professor
+Stubbs in his Select Charters, and he has added to them a
+short treatise called "Modus Tenendi Parliamentum," which
+may be taken as a fair account of its actual state and
+powers in the fourteenth century.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-277"></a>1-277]</span>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="Bk3-Ch1"></a><ul>
+
+<li>
+<a name="id4550547"></a>CHAPTER I</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550553"></a>JOHN</li>
+<li>
+<a name="id4550558"></a>1204-1216</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England and the Conquest</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The loss of Normandy did more than drive John
+from the foreign dominions of his race; it set him
+face to face with England itself. England was no
+longer a distant treasure-house from which gold
+could be drawn for wars along the Epte or the
+Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in order
+by wise ministers and by flying visits from its
+foreign king. Henceforth it was his home. It
+was to be ruled by his personal and continuous
+rule. People and sovereign were to know each
+other, to be brought into contact with each other
+as they had never been brought since the conquest
+of the Norman. The change in the attitude of
+the king was the more momentous that it took
+place at a time when the attitude of the country
+itself was rapidly changing. The Norman
+Conquest had given a new aspect to the land. A
+foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-278"></a>1-278]</span>
+
+Foreign nobles were quartered in every manor.
+A military organization of the country changed
+while it simplified the holding of every estate.
+Huge castles of white stone bridled town and
+country; huge stone minsters told how the
+Norman had bridled even the Church. But the
+change was in great measure an external one.
+The real life of the nation was little affected by
+the shock of the Conquest. English institutions,
+the local, judicial, and administrative forms of the
+country were the same as of old. Like the English
+tongue they remained practically unaltered. For
+a century after the Conquest only a few new
+words crept in from the language of the conquerors,
+and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the
+nation at large remain unchanged that William
+himself tried to learn it that he might administer
+justice to his subjects. Even English literature,
+banished as it was from the court of the stranger
+and exposed to the fashionable rivalry of Latin
+scholars, survived not only in religious works, in
+poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in
+the great monument of our prose, the English
+Chronicle. It was not till the miserable reign of
+Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey
+of Peterborough. But the "Sayings of Ælfred"
+show a native literature going on through the reign
+of Henry the Second, and the appearance of a great
+work of English verse coincides in point of time
+with the return of John to his island realm.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-279"></a>1-279]</span>
+
+"There was a priest in the land whose name was
+Layamon; he was the son of Leovenath; may the
+Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Earnley,
+a noble church on the bank of Severn (good it
+seemed to him!) near Radstone, where he read
+books. It came to mind to him and in his chiefest
+thought that he would tell the noble deeds of
+England, what the men were named and whence
+they came who first had English land." Journeying
+far and wide over the country, the priest of Earnley
+found Bæda and Wace, the books too of St. Albin
+and St. Austin. "Layamon laid down these books
+and turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly;
+may the Lord be gracious to him! Pen he took
+with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true
+words set together, and compressed the three
+books into one." Layamon's church is now that of
+Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem
+was in fact an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with
+insertions from Bæda. Historically it is worthless;
+but as a monument of our language it is beyond
+all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not
+more than fifty Norman words are to be found.
+Even the old poetic tradition remains the same.
+The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still
+only slightly affected by riming terminations; the
+similes are the few natural similes of Cædmon;
+the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough,
+simple joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">English Patriotism</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of crushing England, indeed, the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-280"></a>1-280]</span>
+
+Conquest did more than any event that had gone
+before to build up an English people. All local
+distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian,
+of both from Northumbrian, died away beneath
+the common pressure of the stranger. The
+Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of
+a new national feeling, of a new patriotism. In
+his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence
+strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the
+weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by
+the Danes. Ælfred, the great name of the
+English past, gathers round him a legendary
+worship, and the "Sayings of Ælfred" embody the
+ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour
+drawn from this deeper consciousness of national
+unity in a national action which began as soon as
+the Conquest had given place to strife among the
+conquerors. A common hostility to the conquering
+baronage gave the nation leaders in its foreign
+sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed
+at Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged
+it. It was under William the Red that English
+soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons who
+surrendered at Rochester. It was under Henry
+the First that an English army faced Duke Robert
+and his foreign knighthood when they landed for
+a fresh invasion, "not fearing the Normans." It
+was under the same great king that Englishmen
+conquered Normandy in turn on the field of
+Tenchebray. This overthrow of the conquering
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-281"></a>1-281]</span>
+
+baronage, this union of the conquered with the
+king, brought about the fusion of the conquerors
+in the general body of the English people. As
+early as the days of Henry the Second the
+descendants of Norman and Englishman had
+become indistinguishable. Both found a bond in
+a common English feeling and English patriotism,
+in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin
+"foreigners" who streamed into England in the
+wake of Henry and his sons. Both had profited
+by the stern discipline of the Norman rule. The
+wretched reign of Stephen alone broke the long
+peace, a peace without parallel elsewhere, which in
+England stretched from the settlement of the
+Conquest to the return of John. Of her kings'
+forays along Norman or Aquitanian borders
+England heard little; she cared less. Even
+Eichard's crusade woke little interest in his island
+realm. What England saw in her kings was
+"the good peace they made in the land." And
+with peace came a stern but equitable rule, judicial
+and administrative reforms that carried order and
+justice to every corner of the land, a wealth that
+grew steadily in spite of heavy taxation, an
+immense outburst of material and intellectual
+activity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Universities</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was with a new English people therefore
+that John found himself face to face. The nation
+which he fronted was a nation quickened with a
+new life and throbbing with a new energy. Not
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-282"></a>1-282]</span>
+
+least among the signs of this energy was the
+upgrowth of our Universities. The establishment
+of the great schools which bore this name was
+everywhere throughout Europe a special mark of
+the impulse which Christendom gained from the
+crusades. A new fervour of study sprang up in
+the West from its contact with the more cultured
+East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought
+back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical
+science from the schools of Cordova or
+Bagdad. In the twelfth century a classical revival
+restored Cæsar and Virgil to the list of monastic
+studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic style,
+the profuse classical quotations of writers like
+William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.
+The scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools
+of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the
+imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental
+inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before
+a summer's sun. Wandering teachers such as
+Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to spread
+the new power of knowledge. The same spirit of
+restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience with the
+older traditions of mankind either local or
+intellectual that drove half Christendom to the
+tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands
+of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats
+where teachers were gathered together. A new
+power sprang up in the midst of a world which
+had till now recognized no power but that of sheer
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-283"></a>1-283]</span>
+
+brute force. Poor as they were, sometimes even of
+servile race, the wandering scholars who lectured
+in every cloister were hailed as "masters" by the
+crowds at their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy
+of the threats of councils, of the thunders of the
+Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was
+of note enough in England to draw down the
+prohibition of a king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oxford</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of
+Archbishop Theobald where Thomas of London
+and John of Salisbury were already busy with the
+study of the Civil Law. But when he opened
+lectures on it at Oxford he was at once silenced by
+Stephen, who was at that moment at war with the
+Church and jealous of the power which the wreck
+of the royal authority was throwing into Theobald's
+hands. At this time Oxford stood in the
+first rank among English towns. Its town church
+of St. Martin rose from the midst of a huddled
+group of houses, girded in with massive walls, that
+lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula
+between the streams of Cherwell and the Thames.
+The ground fell gently on either side, eastward and
+westward, to these rivers; while on the south a
+sharper descent led down across swampy meadows
+to the ford from which the town drew its name
+and to the bridge that succeeded it. Around lay
+a wild forest country, moors such as Cowley and
+Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, great
+woods of which Shotover and Bagley are the relics
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-284"></a>1-284]</span>
+
+closing the horizon to the south and east. Though
+the two huge towers of its Norman castle marked
+the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding
+the river valley along which the commerce of
+Southern England mainly flowed, its walls formed
+the least element in the town's military strength,
+for on every side but the north it was guarded by
+the swampy meadows along Cherwell or by an
+intricate network of streams into which the Thames
+breaks among the meadows of Osney. From the
+midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of
+Austin Canons, which with the older priory of St.
+Frideswide gave Oxford some ecclesiastical dignity.
+The residence of the Norman house of the D'Oillis
+within its castle, the frequent visits of English
+kings to a palace without its walls, the presence
+again and again of important Parliaments, marked
+its political weight within the realm. The settlement
+of one of the wealthiest among the English
+Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated,
+while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No
+place better illustrates the transformation of the
+land in the hands of its Norman masters, the
+sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden
+expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth
+which followed the Conquest. To the west of the
+town rose one of the stateliest of English castles,
+and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately
+abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the
+last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-285"></a>1-285]</span>
+
+In the southern quarter of the city the
+canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which
+still exists as the diocesan cathedral, while the
+piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost
+all its parish churches and founded within their
+new castle walls the church of the Canons of St.
+George.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oxford Scholars</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know nothing of the causes which drew
+students and teachers within the walls of Oxford.
+It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher
+quickened older educational foundations, and that
+the cloisters of Osney and St. Frideswide already
+possessed schools which burst into a larger life
+under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet however
+the fortunes of the University were obscured by
+the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in
+thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux
+or Abelard. The English took their place
+as one of the "nations" of the French University.
+John of Salisbury became famous as one of the
+Parisian teachers. Thomas of London wandered
+to Paris from his school at Merton. But through
+the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford
+quietly grew in numbers and repute, and forty
+years after the visit of Vacarius its educational
+position was fully established. When Gerald of
+Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to
+its students the most learned and famous of the
+English clergy were to be found within its walls.
+At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-286"></a>1-286]</span>
+
+stood without a rival in its own country, while in
+European celebrity it took rank with the greatest
+schools of the Western world. But to realize this
+Oxford of the past we must dismiss from our
+minds all recollections of the Oxford of the present.
+In the outer look of the new University there was
+nothing of the pomp that overawes the freshman
+as he first paces the "High" or looks down from
+the gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long
+fronts of venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath
+immemorial elms, history plunges us into the mean
+and filthy lanes of a mediæval town. Thousands
+of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering
+round teachers as poor as themselves in church
+porch and house porch, drinking, quarrelling,
+dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take
+the place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors
+and Heads. Mayor and Chancellor struggled in
+vain to enforce order or peace on this seething
+mass of turbulent life. The retainers who followed
+their young lords to the University fought out the
+feuds of their houses in the streets. Scholars
+from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the
+bitter struggle of North and South. At nightfall
+roysterer and reveller roamed with torches through
+the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting
+down burghers at their doors. Now a mob of
+clerks plunged into the Jewry and wiped off the
+memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew
+house or two. Now a tavern squabble between
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-287"></a>1-287]</span>
+
+scholar and townsman widened into a general
+broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary's vied
+with the town bell of St. Martin's in clanging to
+arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical controversy
+or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak
+in this turbulent, surging mob. When
+England growled at the exactions of the Papacy
+in the years that were to follow the students
+besieged a legate in the abbot's house at Osney.
+A murderous town and gown row preceded the
+opening of the Barons' war. "When Oxford
+draws knife," ran an old rime, "England's soon
+at strife."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Edmund Rich</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the turbulence and stir was a stir and
+turbulence of life. A keen thirst for knowledge,
+a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands
+round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot
+friar. Edmund Rich--Archbishop of Canterbury
+and saint in later days--came about the time
+we have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years
+old, from a little lane at Abingdon that still bears
+his name. He found his school in an inn that
+belonged to the abbey of Eynsham where his
+father had taken refuge from the world. His
+mother was a pious woman of the day, too poor to
+give her boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that
+he promised to wear every Wednesday; but
+Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He
+plunged at once into the nobler life of the place,
+its ardour for knowledge, its mystical piety.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-288"></a>1-288]</span>
+
+"Secretly," perhaps at eventide when the shadows
+were gathering in the church of St. Mary and the
+crowd of teachers and students had left its aisles,
+the boy stood before an image of the Virgin, and
+placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary
+for his bride. Years of study, broken by a fever
+that raged among the crowded, noisome streets,
+brought the time for completing his education at
+Paris; and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother
+Robert of his, begged his way as poor scholars
+were wont to the great school of Western Christendom.
+Here a damsel, heedless of his tonsure,
+wooed him so pertinaciously that Edmund consented
+at last to an assignation; but when he
+appeared it was in company of grave academical
+officials who, as the maiden declared in the hour
+of penitence which followed, "straightway whipped
+the offending Eve out of her." Still true to his
+Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return from Paris
+became the most popular of Oxford teachers. It
+is to him that Oxford owes her first introduction
+to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him in the
+little room which he hired, with the Virgin's
+chapel hard by, his grey gown reaching to his feet,
+ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture
+time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted
+with a grace and cheerfulness of manner which
+told of his French training and a chivalrous love
+of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they
+would. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-289"></a>1-289]</span>
+
+tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride perhaps
+mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as
+he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge
+whence a thievish student would sometimes run
+off with it. But even knowledge brought its
+troubles; the Old Testament, which with a copy
+of the Decretals long formed his sole library,
+frowned down upon a love of secular learning from
+which Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At
+last, in some hour of dream, the form of his dead
+mother floated into the room where the teacher
+stood among his mathematical diagrams. "What
+are these?" she seemed to say; and seizing
+Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three
+circles interlaced, each of which bore the name of
+a Person of the Christian Trinity. "Be these,"
+she cried, as the figure faded away, "thy diagrams
+henceforth, my son."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The University and Feudalism</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story admirably illustrates the real character
+of the new training, and the latent opposition
+between the spirit of the Universities and the
+spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical
+order of the old mediæval world were both alike
+threatened by this power that had so strangely
+sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism
+rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom
+from kingdom and barony from barony, on
+the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy
+of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined
+by accidents of place and social position.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-290"></a>1-290]</span>
+
+The University on the other hand was a protest
+against this isolation of man from man. The
+smallest school was European and not local. Not
+merely every province of France, but every people
+of Christendom had its place among the "nations"
+of Paris or Padua. A common language, the Latin
+tongue, superseded within academical bounds the
+warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual
+kinship and rivalry took the place of the
+petty strifes which parted province from province
+or realm from realm. What Church and Empire
+had both aimed at and both failed in, the knitting
+of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth,
+the Universities for a time actually did.
+Dante felt himself as little a stranger in the
+"Latin" quarter round Mont St. Genevieve as
+under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford
+scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the
+libraries of Prague. In England the work of
+provincial fusion was less difficult or important
+than elsewhere, but even in England work had to
+be done. The feuds of Northerner and Southerner
+which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford
+witnessed at any rate to the fact that Northerner
+and Southerner had at last been brought face to
+face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the
+spirit of national isolation was held in check by
+the larger comprehensiveness of the University.
+After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity
+of Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-291"></a>1-291]</span>
+
+and Gascon mingled with Englishmen in Oxford
+lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the
+fray with the legate. At a later time the rising
+of Owen Glyndwr found hundreds of Welshmen
+gathered round its teachers. And within this
+strangely mingled mass society and government
+rested on a purely democratic basis. Among
+Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on precisely
+the same footing with the poorest mendicant.
+Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, pride of
+ancestry and blood, the very grounds on which
+feudal society rested, went for nothing in the
+lecture-room. The University was a state absolutely
+self-governed, and whose citizens were
+admitted by a purely intellectual franchise.
+Knowledge made the "master." To know more
+than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a
+regent or "ruler" in the schools. And within
+this intellectual aristocracy all were equal. When
+the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in
+the aisles of St. Mary's all had an equal right to
+counsel, all had an equal vote in the final decision.
+Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.
+It was their voice that named every officer,
+that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even
+the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been
+an officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer
+of their own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Universities and the Church</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the democratic spirit of the Universities'
+threatened feudalism, their spirit of intellectual
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-292"></a>1-292]</span>
+
+enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer
+seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies.
+The wide extension which mediæval usage gave
+to the word "orders" gathered the whole educated
+world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever
+might be their age or proficiency, scholar and
+teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay
+responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals,
+and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and
+the sentence of his spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical
+character of the University appeared in
+that of its head. The Chancellor, as we have seen,
+was at first no officer of the University itself, but
+of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it
+had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply
+the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, within
+whose immense diocese the University was then
+situated. But this identification in outer form
+with the Church only rendered more conspicuous
+the difference of spirit between them. The sudden
+expansion of the field of education diminished the
+importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological
+studies which had hitherto absorbed the
+whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival
+of classical literature, the rediscovery as it
+were of an older and a greater world, the contact
+with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
+society, or in politics introduced a spirit of
+scepticism, of doubt, of denial into the realms of
+unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for reason
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-293"></a>1-293]</span>
+
+a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed
+with a smile the immortality of the soul. Even
+to Dante, while he censures these, Virgil is as
+sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom
+the new culture took its most notable form,
+Frederick the Second, the "World's Wonder" of
+his time, was regarded by half Europe as no
+better than an infidel. A faint revival of physical
+science, so long crushed as magic by the dominant
+ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous
+contact with the Moslem and the Jew. The books
+of the Rabbis were no longer an accursed thing to
+Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no
+mere Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How
+slowly indeed and against what obstacles science
+won its way we know from the witness of Roger
+Bacon. "Slowly," he tells us, "has any portion
+of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use
+among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and
+his Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of
+Averroes and others, were translated in my time,
+and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace
+1237 because of their assertion of the eternity of
+the world and of time and because of the book of
+the divinations by dreams (which is the third
+book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many
+passages erroneously translated. Even his logic
+was slowly received and lectured on. For St.
+Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the
+first in my time who read the Elements at Oxford.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-294"></a>1-294]</span>
+
+And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the
+book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his
+writing. So there were but few, considering the
+multitude of the Latins, who were of any account
+in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few
+indeed, and scarcely any up to this year of grace
+1292."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Town</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If we pass from the English University to the
+English Town we see a progress as important
+and hardly less interesting. In their origin our
+boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of
+the western world. The cities of Italy and Provence
+had preserved the municipal institutions of
+their Roman past; the German towns had been
+founded by Henry the Fowler with the purpose of
+sheltering industry from the feudal oppression
+around them; the communes of Northern France
+sprang into existence in revolt against feudal outrage
+within their walls. But in England the
+tradition of Rome passed utterly away, while
+feudal oppression was held fairly in check by
+the Crown. The English town therefore was in
+its beginning simply a piece of the general country,
+organized and governed precisely in the same
+manner as the townships around it. Its existence
+witnessed indeed to the need which men felt in
+those earlier times of mutual help and protection.
+The burh or borough was probably a more defensible
+place than the common village; it may have
+had a ditch or mound about it instead of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-295"></a>1-295]</span>
+
+quickset-hedge or "tun" from which the township
+took its name. But in itself it was simply a
+township or group of townships where men
+clustered whether for trade or defence more
+thickly than elsewhere. The towns were different
+in the circumstances and date of their rise. Some
+grew up in the fortified camps of the English
+invaders. Some dated from a later occupation of
+the sacked and desolate Roman towns. Some
+clustered round the country houses of king and
+ealdorman or the walls of church and monastery.
+Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.
+There was the same variety in the mode in which
+the various town communities were formed. While
+the bulk of them grew by simple increase of population
+from township to town, larger boroughs
+such as York with its "six shires" or London
+with its wards and sokes and franchises show how
+families and groups of settlers settled down side
+by side, and claimed as they coalesced, each for
+itself, its shire or share of the town-ground while
+jealously preserving its individual life within the
+town-community. But strange as these aggregations
+might be, the constitution of the borough
+which resulted from them was simply that of the
+people at large. Whether we regard it as a township,
+or rather from its size as a hundred or
+collection of townships, the obligations of the
+dwellers within its bounds were those of the
+townships round, to keep fence and trench in
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-296"></a>1-296]</span>
+
+good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd,
+and a reeve and four men to the hundred court
+and shire court. As in other townships, land was
+a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The
+landless man who dwelled in a borough had no
+share in its corporate life; for purposes of government
+or property the town consisted simply of the
+landed proprietors within its bounds. The common
+lands which are still attached to many of our
+boroughs take us back to a time when each township
+lay within a ring or mark of open ground
+which served at once as boundary and pasture
+land. Each of the four wards of York had its
+common pasture; Oxford has still its own "Port-meadow."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Towns and their lords</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inner rule of the borough lay as in the
+townships about it in the hands of its own freemen,
+gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote."
+But the social change brought about by
+the Danish wars, the legal requirement that each
+man should have a lord, affected the towns as it
+affected the rest of the country. Some passed
+into the hands of great thegns near to them; the
+bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.
+A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a
+sign of this revolution. It was the reeve who
+now summoned the borough-moot and administered
+justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's
+dues or annual rent of the town, and who exacted
+the services it owed to its lord. To modern eyes
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-297"></a>1-297]</span>
+
+these services would imply almost complete subjection.
+When Leicester, for instance, passed
+from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its
+Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their
+lord's corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem
+their strayed cattle from his pound. The great
+forest around was the Earl's, and it was only out
+of his grace that the little borough could drive
+its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in
+the glades. The justice and government of a
+town lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed
+its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures
+of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of
+their markets and fairs. But in fact when once
+these dues were paid and these services rendered
+the English townsman was practically free. His
+rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those
+of his lord. Property and person alike were
+secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand
+a fair trial on any charge, and even if justice
+was administered by his master's reeve it was
+administered in the presence and with the assent
+of his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung
+out from the town tower gathered the burgesses
+to a common meeting, where they could exercise
+rights of free speech and free deliberation on
+their own affairs. Their merchant-gild over its
+ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums due
+from the town among the different burgesses,
+looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-298"></a>1-298]</span>
+
+acted in fact pretty much the same part as a town-council
+of to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Merchant Gild</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency
+to closer association which found support in those
+principles of mutual aid and mutual restraint that
+lay at the base of our old institutions. Gilds or
+clubs for religious, charitable, or social purposes
+were common throughout the country, and especially
+common in boroughs, where men clustered more
+thickly together. Each formed a sort of artificial
+family. An oath of mutual fidelity among its
+members was substituted for the tie of blood,
+while the gild-feast, held once a month in the
+common hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk
+round their family hearth. But within this
+new family the aim of the gild was to establish a
+mutual responsibility as close as that of the old.
+"Let all share the same lot," ran its law; "if any
+misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for
+aid from his gild-brothers in atoning for guilt
+incurred by mishap. He could call on them for
+assistance in case of violence or wrong. If falsely
+accused they appeared in court as his compurgators,
+if poor they supported, and when dead they buried
+him. On the other hand he was responsible to
+them, as they were to the State, for order and
+obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against
+brother was also a wrong against the general body
+of the gild and was punished by fine or in the last
+resort by an expulsion which left the offender a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-299"></a>1-299]</span>
+
+"lawless" man and an outcast. The one difference
+between these gilds in country and town was
+this, that in the latter case from their close local
+neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.
+Under Æthelstan the London gilds united into
+one for the purpose of carrying out more effectually
+their common aims, and at a later time we find the
+gilds of Berwick enacting "that where many
+bodies are found side by side in one place they
+may become one, and have one will, and in the
+dealings of one with another have a strong and
+hearty love." The process was probably a long
+and difficult one, for the brotherhoods naturally
+differed much in social rank, and even after the
+union was effected we see traces of the separate
+existence to a certain extent of some one or more
+of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In
+London for instance the Cnighten-gild which seems
+to have stood at the head of its fellows retained
+for a long time its separate property, while its
+Alderman--as the chief officer of each gild was
+called--became the Alderman of the united gild of
+the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar
+gild of Thanes from which the chief officers of the
+town seem commonly to have been selected.
+Imperfect however as the union might be, when
+once it was effected the town passed from a mere
+collection of brotherhoods into a powerful community,
+far more effectually organized than in the
+loose organization of the township, and whose
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-300"></a>1-300]</span>
+
+character was inevitably determined by the circumstances
+of its origin. In their beginnings our
+boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings of
+persons engaged in agricultural pursuits; the first
+Dooms of London provide especially for the
+recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens. But
+as the increasing security of the country invited
+the farmer or the landowner to settle apart in his
+own fields, and the growth of estate and trade told
+on the towns themselves, the difference between
+town and country became more sharply defined.
+London of course took the lead in this new developement
+of civic life. Even in Æthelstan's day
+every London merchant who had made three long
+voyages on his own account ranked as a Thegn.
+Its "lithsmen," or shipmen's-gild, were of sufficient
+importance under Harthacnut to figure in the
+election of a king, and its principal street still tells
+of the rapid growth of trade in its name of
+"Cheap-side" or the bargaining place. But at the
+Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had
+become universal. The name given to the united
+brotherhood in a borough is in almost every case
+no longer that of the "town-gild," but of the
+"merchant-gild."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Emancipation of Towns</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This social change in the character of the
+townsmen produced important results in the
+character of their municipal institutions. In becoming
+a merchant-gild the body of citizens who
+formed the "town" enlarged their powers of civic
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-301"></a>1-301]</span>
+
+legislation by applying them to the control of their
+internal trade. It became their special business
+to obtain from the crown or from their lords wider
+commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of
+fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the
+town itself they framed regulations as to the sale
+and quality of goods, the control of markets, and
+the recovery of debts. It was only by slow and
+difficult advances that each step in this securing
+of privilege was won. Still it went steadily on.
+Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of
+an English town we find the same peaceful revolution
+in progress, services disappearing through
+disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities
+are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the
+town, whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was
+commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture of a
+noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the
+building of some new minster by a prior, brought
+about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were
+ready to fill again their master's treasury at the
+price of the strip of parchment which gave them
+freedom of trade, of justice, and of government.
+In the silent growth and elevation of the English
+people the boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed
+and despised by prelate and noble they preserved
+or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic
+liberty. The right of self-government, the right
+of free speech in free meeting, the right to equal
+justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-302"></a>1-302]</span>
+
+safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and
+shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named
+streets, in town-mead and market-place, in
+the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that
+swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote,
+in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild,
+lay the life of Englishmen who were doing
+more than knight and baron to make England
+what she is, the life of their home and their trade,
+of their sturdy battle with oppression, their steady,
+ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">London</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+London stood first among English towns, and
+the privileges which its citizens won became
+precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs.
+Even at the Conquest its power and wealth secured
+it a full recognition of all its ancient privileges
+from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited
+by the revolution which laid England at the
+feet of the stranger. One immediate result of
+William's success was an immigration into England
+from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the
+Norman traders followed quick on the invasion of
+the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he
+quartered himself upon English lands, every
+Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister,
+gathered French artists, French shopkeepers,
+French domestics about him. Round the Abbey
+of Battle which William founded on the site of his
+great victory "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the
+Weaver, Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-303"></a>1-303]</span>
+
+Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed with the English
+tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants
+play so notable a part as in London. The Normans
+had had mercantile establishments in London as
+early as the reign of Æthelred, if not of Eadgar.
+Such settlements however naturally formed nothing
+more than a trading colony like the colony
+of the "Emperor's Men," or Easterlings. But with
+the Conquest their number greatly increased.
+"Many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen passed
+over thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city,
+inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and
+better stored with the merchandise in which they
+were wont to traffic." The status of these traders
+indeed had wholly changed. They could no
+longer be looked upon as strangers in cities which
+had passed under the Norman rule. In some
+cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated
+itself in a separate French town, side by side with
+the English borough. But in London it seems to
+have taken at once the position of a governing class.
+Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop,
+was believed in later days to have been
+one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors
+of its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large
+property in houses within the walls, and a proof
+of his civic importance was preserved in the annual
+visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his
+tomb in a little chapel which he had founded in
+the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet Gilbert was
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-304"></a>1-304]</span>
+
+one of the Norman strangers who followed in the
+wake of the Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher
+of Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher family from
+Caen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Freedom of London</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood,
+partly no doubt to the long internal peace and
+order secured by the Norman rule, that London
+owed the wealth and importance to which it
+attained during the reign of Henry the First. The
+charter which Henry granted it became a model
+for lesser boroughs. The king yielded its citizens
+the right of justice; each townsman could claim
+to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court
+or hustings whose sessions took place every
+week. They were subject only to the old English
+trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle
+which the Normans introduced. Their trade was
+protected from toll or exaction over the length
+and breadth of the land. The king however
+still nominated in London as elsewhere the
+portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were the
+citizens as yet united together in a commune or
+corporation. But an imperfect civic organization
+existed in the "wards" or quarters of the town,
+each governed by its own alderman, and in the
+"gilds" or voluntary associations of merchants
+or traders which ensured order and mutual protection
+for their members. Loose too as these
+bonds may seem, they were drawn firmly together
+by the older English traditions of freedom which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-305"></a>1-305]</span>
+
+the towns preserved. The London burgesses
+gathered in their town-mote when the bell swung
+out from the bell-tower of St. Paul's to deliberate
+freely on their own affairs under the presidency of
+their alderman. Here, too, they mustered in
+arms if danger threatened the city, and delivered
+the town-banner to their captain, the Norman
+baron Fitz-Walter, to lead them against the enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Early Oxford</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Few boroughs had as yet attained to such
+power as this, but the instance of Oxford shows
+how the freedom of London told on the general
+advance of English towns. In spite of antiquarian
+fancies it is certain that no town had arisen on the
+site of Oxford for centuries after the withdrawal
+of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain.
+Though the monastery of St. Frideswide rose in
+the turmoil of the eighth century on the slope
+which led down to a ford across the Thames, it is
+long before we get a glimpse of the borough that
+must have grown up under its walls. The first
+definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief
+entry of the English Chronicle which recalls its
+seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of
+this entry shows that the town was already a
+considerable one, and in the last wrestle of England
+with the Dane its position on the borders of
+Mercia and Wessex combined with its command
+of the upper valley of the Thames to give it
+military and political importance. Of the life of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-306"></a>1-306]</span>
+
+its burgesses however we still know little or
+nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate,
+St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how
+early church after church gathered round the
+earlier town-church of St. Martin. But the men
+of the little town remain dim to us. Their
+town-mote, or the "Portmannimote" as it was called,
+which was held in the churchyard of St. Martin,
+still lives in a shadow of its older self as the
+Freeman's Common Hall--their town-mead is still
+the Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters
+or the record of Domesday that we see them
+going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester,
+or chaffering in their market-place, or judging and
+law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild
+regulating trade, their reeve gathering his king's
+dues of tax or money or marshalling his troop of
+burghers for the king's wars, their boats paying
+toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the
+Abbot of Abingdon, as they floated down the
+Thames towards London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oxford and the Normans</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The number of houses marked waste in the
+survey marks the terrible suffering of Oxford in
+the Norman Conquest: but the ruin was soon
+repaired, and the erection of its castle, the
+rebuilding of its churches, the planting of a Jewry
+in the heart of the town, showed in what various
+ways the energy of its new masters was giving an
+impulse to its life. It is a proof of the superiority
+of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-307"></a>1-307]</span>
+
+about them that each of the later town-halls of the
+borough had, before their expulsion, been houses
+of Jews. Nearly all the larger dwelling houses in
+fact which were subsequently converted into
+academic halls bore traces of the same origin in
+names such as Moysey's Hall, Lombard's Hall, or
+Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant,
+for besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it,
+there was a lesser Jewry scattered over its
+southern quarter, and we can hardly doubt that
+this abundance of substantial buildings in the
+town was at least one of the causes which drew
+teachers and scholars within its walls. The Jewry,
+a town within a town, lay here as elsewhere
+isolated and exempt from the common justice,
+the common life and self-government of the
+borough. On all but its eastern side too the
+town was hemmed in by jurisdictions independent
+of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney,
+the wide "bailey" of the Castle, bounded it
+narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching
+away beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay
+the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
+Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and
+Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his
+leet-court in the hamlet of Grampound beyond the
+bridge. Nor was the whole space within the walls
+subject to the self-government of the citizens.
+The Jewry had a rule and law of its own. Scores
+of householders, dotted over street and lane, were
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-308"></a>1-308]</span>
+
+tenants of castle or abbey and paid no suit or
+service at the borough court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Oxford and London</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But within these narrow bounds and amidst
+these various obstacles the spirit of municipal
+liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so
+closely cabined and confined. Nowhere indeed
+was the impulse which London was giving likely
+to tell with greater force. The "bargemen" of
+Oxford were connected even before the Conquest
+with the "boatmen," or shippers, of the capital.
+In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing
+these names represented what is known as the
+merchant-gild of the town. Royal recognition
+enables us to trace the merchant-gild of Oxford
+from the time of Henry the First. Even then
+lands, islands, pastures belonged to it, and amongst
+them the same Port-meadow which is familiar to
+Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to
+Godstow. The connexion between the two gilds
+was primarily one of trade. "In the time of King
+Eadward and Abbot Ordric" the channel of the
+Thames beneath the walls of the Abbey of
+Abingdon became so blocked up that boats could
+scarce pass as far as Oxford, and it was at the
+joint prayer of the burgesses of London and
+Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through
+the meadow to the south of his church. But by
+the time of Henry the Second closer bonds than
+this linked the two cities together. In case of any
+doubt or contest about judgements in their own
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-309"></a>1-309]</span>
+
+court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to
+refer the matter to the decision of London, "and
+whatsoever the citizens of London shall adjudge
+in such cases shall be deemed right." The judicial
+usages, the municipal rights of each city were
+assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatsoever
+matter the men of Oxford be put in plea, they
+shall deraign themselves according to the law and
+custom of the city of London and not otherwise,
+because they and the citizens of London are of one
+and the same custom, law, and liberty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Life of the Town</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A legal connexion such as this could hardly
+fail to bring with it an identity of municipal
+rights. Oxford had already passed through the
+earlier steps of her advance towards municipal
+freedom before the conquest of the Norman. Her
+burghers assembled in their own Portmannimote,
+and their dues to the crown were assessed at a fixed
+sum of honey or coin. But the formal definition
+of their rights dates, as in the case of London,
+from the time of Henry the First. The customs
+and exemptions of its townsmen were confirmed
+by Henry the Second "as ever they enjoyed them
+in the time of Henry my grandfather, and in like
+manner as my citizens of London hold them."
+By this date the town had attained entire judicial
+and commercial freedom, and liberty of external
+commerce was secured by the exemption of its
+citizens from toll on the king's lands. Complete
+independence was reached when a charter of John
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-310"></a>1-310]</span>
+
+substituted a mayor of the town's own choosing
+for the reeve or bailiff of the crown. But dry
+details such as these tell little of the quick pulse
+of popular life that beat in the thirteenth century
+through such a community as that of Oxford.
+The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it,
+at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four
+streets met, was the centre of the city life. The
+town-mote was held in its churchyard. Justice
+was administered ere yet a townhall housed the
+infant magistracy by mayor or bailiff sitting
+beneath a low pent-house, the "penniless bench"
+of later days, outside its eastern wall. Its bell
+summoned the burghers to council or arms.
+Around the church the trade-gilds were ranged as
+in some vast encampment. To the south of it
+lay Spicery and Vintnery, the quarter of the
+richer burgesses. Fish-street fell noisily down to
+the bridge and the ford. The Corn-market
+occupied then as now the street which led to
+Northgate. The stalls of the butchers stretched
+along the "Butcher-row," which formed the road
+to the bailey and the castle. Close beneath the
+church lay a nest of huddled lanes, broken by a
+stately synagogue, and traversed from time to
+time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. Soldiers
+from the castle rode clashing through the narrow
+streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the
+swampy meadows; processions of pilgrims wound
+through gates and lane to the shrine of St. Frideswide.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-311"></a>1-311]</span>
+
+Frays were common enough; now the
+sack of a Jew's house; now burgher drawing
+knife on burgher; now an outbreak of the young
+student lads who were growing every day in
+numbers and audacity. But as yet the town was
+well in hand. The clang of the city bell called
+every citizen to his door; the call of the mayor
+brought trade after trade with bow in hand and
+banners flying to enforce the king's peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">St. Edmundsbury</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The advance of towns which had grown up not
+on the royal domain but around abbey or castle
+was slower and more difficult. The story of St.
+Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition
+from pure serfage to an imperfect freedom.
+Much that had been plough-land here in the Confessor's
+time was covered with houses by the time
+of Henry the Second. The building of the great
+abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to
+mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the
+Abbot's domain. The troubles of the time helped
+here as elsewhere the progress of the town; serfs,
+fugitives from justice or their lord, the trader, the
+Jew, naturally sought shelter under the strong
+hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were
+wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not a settler but
+was bound to pay his pence to the Abbot's treasury,
+to plough a rood of his land, to reap in his
+harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the Abbey folds,
+to help bring the annual catch of eels from the
+Abbey waters.  Within the four crosses that
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-312"></a>1-312]</span>
+
+bounded the Abbot's domain land and water were
+his; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their
+pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the
+loan of their cloth the cellarer would refuse the
+use of the stream and seize their cloths wherever
+he found them. No toll might be levied from
+tenants of the Abbey farms, and customers had to
+wait before shop and stall till the buyers of the
+Abbot had had the pick of the market. There
+was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained
+in folk-mote it was before the Abbot's
+officers that its meeting was held; if they appealed
+to the alderman he was the Abbot's nominee and
+received the horn, the symbol of his office, at the
+Abbot's hands. Like all the greater revolutions
+of society, the advance from this mere serfage
+was a silent one; indeed its more galling instances
+of oppression seem to have slipped unconsciously
+away. Some, like the eel-fishing, were commuted
+for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the
+fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared.
+By usage, by omission, by downright forgetfulness,
+here by a little struggle, there by a present to a
+needy abbot, the town won freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Towns and Justice</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But progress was not always unconscious, and
+one incident in the history of St. Edmundsbury
+is remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance
+of law, but yet more as marking the part
+which a new moral sense of man's right to equal
+justice was to play in the general advance of the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-313"></a>1-313]</span>
+
+realm. Rude as the borough was, it possessed
+the right of meeting in full assembly of the
+townsmen for government and law. Justice was
+administered in presence of the burgesses, and
+the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath
+of his neighbours. Without the borough bounds
+however the system of Norman judicature prevailed;
+and the rural tenants who did suit and
+service at the Cellarer's court were subjected to
+the trial by battle. The execution of a farmer
+named Ketel who came under this feudal jurisdiction
+brought the two systems into vivid contrast.
+Ketel seems to have been guiltless of the
+crime laid to his charge; but the duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the
+gates. The taunts of the townsmen woke his
+fellow farmers to a sense of wrong. "Had Ketel
+been a dweller within the borough," said the
+burgesses, "he would have got his acquittal from
+the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is";
+and even the monks were moved to a decision
+that their tenants should enjoy equal freedom and
+justice with the townsmen. The franchise of
+the town was extended to the rural possessions of
+the Abbey without it; the farmers "came to the
+toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll,
+and paid the town-penny." A chance story preserved
+in a charter of later date shows the same
+struggle for justice going on in a greater town.
+At Leicester the trial by compurgation, the rough
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-314"></a>1-314]</span>
+
+predecessor of trial by jury, had been abolished
+by the Earls in favour of trial by battle. The
+aim of the burgesses was to regain their old
+justice, and in this a touching incident at last
+made them successful. "It chanced that two
+kinsmen, Nicholas the son of Acon and Geoffrey
+the son of Nicholas, waged a duel about a certain
+piece of land concerning which a dispute had
+arisen between them; and they fought from the
+first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns.
+Then one of them fleeing from the other till he
+came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the
+brink of the pit and was about to fall therein, his
+kinsman said to him 'Take care of the pit, turn
+back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so
+much clamour and noise was made by the bystanders
+and those who were sitting around that
+the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the
+castle, and he enquired of some how it was there
+was such a clamour, and answer was made to him
+that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain
+piece of ground, and that one had fled till he
+reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood
+over the pit and was about to fall into it the other
+warned him. Then the townsmen being moved
+with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that
+they should give him threepence yearly for each
+house in the High Street that had a gable, on
+condition that he should grant to them that the
+twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-315"></a>1-315]</span>
+
+ancient times should from that time forward
+discuss and decide all pleas they might have
+among themselves."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Division of Labour</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the time we have reached this struggle
+for emancipation was nearly over. The larger
+towns had secured the privilege of self-government,
+the administration of justice, and the control
+of their own trade. The reigns of Richard and
+John mark the date in our municipal history at
+which towns began to acquire the right of electing
+their own chief magistrate, the Portreeve or
+Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the
+crown. But with the close of this outer struggle
+opened an inner struggle between the various
+classes of the townsmen themselves. The growth
+of wealth and industry was bringing with it a
+vast increase of population. The mass of the new
+settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs,
+of traders without landed holdings, of families
+who had lost their original lot in the borough,
+and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no
+part in the actual life of the town. The right of
+trade and of the regulation of trade in common
+with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in
+the hands of the landed burghers whom we have
+described. By a natural process too their superiority
+in wealth produced a fresh division between
+the "burghers" of the merchant-gild and the
+unenfranchised mass around them. The same
+change which severed at Florence the seven
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-316"></a>1-316]</span>
+
+Greater Arts or trades from the fourteen Lesser
+Arts, and which raised the three occupations of
+banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth,
+to a position of superiority even within the
+privileged circle of the seven, told though with
+less force on the English boroughs. The burghers
+of the merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves
+on the greater operations of commerce, on
+trades which required a larger capital, while the
+meaner employments of general traffic were abandoned
+to their poorer neighbours. This advance
+in the division of labour is marked by such severances
+as we note in the thirteenth century of the
+cloth merchant from the tailor or the leather
+merchant from the butcher.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Trade-Gilds</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the result of this severance was all-important
+in its influence on the constitution of our
+towns. The members of the trades thus abandoned
+by the wealthier burghers formed themselves into
+Craft-gilds which soon rose into dangerous rivalry
+with the original Merchant-gild of the town. A
+seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary
+prelude to full membership of these trade-gilds.
+Their regulations were of the minutest character;
+the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed,
+the hours of toil fixed "from day-break to
+curfew," and strict provision made against competition
+in labour. At each meeting of these gilds
+their members gathered round the Craft-box which
+contained the rules of their Society, and stood with
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-317"></a>1-317]</span>
+
+bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a
+quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which
+enforced the ordinances of the gild, inspected all
+work done by its members, confiscated unlawful
+tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to
+their orders was punished by fines or in the last
+resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of a
+right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions
+among the members, which not only
+provided for the trade objects of the gild but
+sufficed to found chantries and masses and set up
+painted windows in the church of their patron
+saint. Even at the present day the arms of a craft-gild
+may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side
+by side with those of prelates and of kings. But it
+was only by slow degrees that they rose to such a
+height as this. The first steps in their existence
+were the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild
+to carry out its objects with any success it was first
+necessary that the whole body of craftsmen
+belonging to the trade should be compelled to join
+the gild, and secondly that a legal control over the
+trade itself should be secured to it. A royal
+charter was indispensable for these purposes, and
+over the grant of these charters took place the
+first struggle with the merchant-gilds which had
+till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade
+within the boroughs. The weavers, who were the
+first trade-gild to secure royal sanction in the reign
+of Henry the First, were still engaged in a contest
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-318"></a>1-318]</span>
+
+for existence as late as the reign of John when
+the citizens of London bought for a time the
+suppression of their gild. Even under the House
+of Lancaster Exeter was engaged in resisting the
+establishment of a tailors' gild. From the eleventh
+century however the spread of these societies went
+steadily on, and the control of trade passed more
+and more from the merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Greater and Lesser Folk</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of
+the time, of the "greater folk" against the "lesser
+folk," or of the "commune," the general mass of
+the inhabitants, against the "prudhommes," or
+"wiser" few, which brought about, as it passed
+from the regulation of trade to the general government
+of the town, the great civic revolution of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the
+Continent, and especially along the Rhine, the
+struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the
+older burghers had been complete. In Köln the
+craftsmen had been reduced to all but serfage, and
+the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the
+ears of "the man without heart or honour who
+lives by his toil." Such social tyranny of class
+over class brought a century of bloodshed to the
+cities of Germany; but in England the tyranny of
+class over class was restrained by the general tenor
+of the law, and the revolution took for the most
+part a milder form. The longest and bitterest
+strife of all was naturally at London. Nowhere
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-319"></a>1-319]</span>
+
+had the territorial constitution struck root so
+deeply, and nowhere had the landed oligarchy
+risen to such a height of wealth and influence.
+The city was divided into wards, each of which
+was governed by an alderman drawn from the
+ruling class. In some indeed the office seems to
+have become hereditary. The "magnates," or
+"barons," of the merchant-gild advised alone on
+all matters of civic government or trade regulation,
+and distributed or assessed at their will the
+revenues or burthens of the town. Such a position
+afforded an opening for corruption and oppression
+of the most galling kind; and it seems to have
+been a general impression of the unfair assessment
+of the dues levied on the poor and the undue
+burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised
+classes which provoked the first serious discontent.
+In the reign of Richard the First William of the
+Long Beard, though one of the governing body,
+placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in
+the panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered
+fifty thousand of the craftsmen. His eloquence,
+his bold defiance of the aldermen in the town-mote,
+gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the
+crowds who surrounded him hailed him as "the
+saviour of the poor." One of his addresses is
+luckily preserved to us by a hearer of the time.
+In mediæval fashion he began with a text from the
+Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with joy from the
+fountain of the Saviour." "I," he began, "am the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-320"></a>1-320]</span>
+
+saviour of the poor. Ye poor men who have felt
+the weight of rich men's hands, draw from my
+fountain waters of wholesome instruction and that
+with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand.
+For I will divide the waters from the waters. It
+is the people who are the waters, and I will divide
+the lowly and faithful folk from the proud and
+faithless folk; I will part the chosen from the
+reprobate as light from darkness." But it was in
+vain that he strove to win royal favour for the
+popular cause. The support of the moneyed
+classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars
+with Philip of France; and the Justiciar, Archbishop
+Hubert, after a moment of hesitation issued
+orders for William Longbeard's arrest. William
+felled with an axe the first soldier who advanced
+to seize him, and taking refuge with a few
+adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow
+summoned his adherents to rise. Hubert however,
+who had already flooded the city with troops,
+with bold contempt of the right of sanctuary set
+fire to the tower. William was forced to surrender,
+and a burgher's son, whose father he had
+slain, stabbed him as he came forth. With his
+death the quarrel slumbered for more than fifty
+years. But the movement towards equality went
+steadily on. Under pretext of preserving the
+peace the unenfranchised townsmen united in
+secret frith-gilds of their own, and mobs rose from
+time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-321"></a>1-321]</span>
+
+the wealthier burgesses. Nor did London
+stand alone in this movement. In all the larger
+towns the same discontent prevailed, the same
+social growth called for new institutions, and in
+their silent revolt against the oppression of the
+Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training themselves
+to stand forward as champions of a wider
+liberty in the Barons' War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Villein</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without the towns progress was far slower and
+more fitful. It would seem indeed that the conquest
+of the Norman bore harder on the rural
+population than on any other class of Englishmen.
+Under the later kings of the house of Ælfred the
+number of absolute slaves and the number of freemen
+had alike diminished. The pure slave class
+had never been numerous, and it had been reduced
+by the efforts of the Church, perhaps by the
+general convulsion of the Danish wars. But these
+wars had often driven the ceorl or freeman of the
+township to "commend" himself to a thegn who
+pledged him his protection in consideration of payment
+in a rendering of labour. It is probable that
+these dependent ceorls are the "villeins" of
+the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the
+Domesday Survey, men sunk indeed from pure
+freedom and bound both to soil and lord, but as
+yet preserving much of their older rights, retaining
+their land, free as against all men but their lord,
+and still sending representatives to hundred-moot
+and shire-moot. They stood therefore far above
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-322"></a>1-322]</span>
+
+the "landless man," the man who had never
+possessed even under the old constitution political
+rights, whom the legislation of the English kings
+had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of
+outlawry, and who served as household servant or
+as hired labourer or at the best as rent-paying
+tenant of land which was not his own. The
+Norman knight or lawyer however saw little distinction
+between these classes; and the tendency of
+legislation under the Angevins was to blend all in
+a single class of serfs. While the pure "theow" or
+absolute slave disappeared therefore the ceorl or
+villein sank lower in the social scale. But though
+the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more
+together and fused into a more homogeneous class,
+its actual position corresponded very imperfectly
+with the view of the lawyers. All indeed were
+dependents on a lord. The manor-house became
+the centre of every English village. The manor-court
+was held in its hall; it was here that the
+lord or his steward received homage, recovered
+fines, held the view of frank-pledge, or enrolled the
+villagers in their tithing. Here too, if the lord
+possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice
+court, and without its doors stood his gallows.
+Around it lay the lord's demesne or home-farm,
+and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the
+"villeins" of the manor. It was by them that the
+great barn was filled with sheaves, the sheep shorn,
+the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-323"></a>1-323]</span>
+
+fire. These services were the labour-rent by
+which they held their lands, and it was the nature
+and extent of this labour-rent which parted one
+class of the population from another. The
+"villein," in the strict sense of the word, was bound
+only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in
+the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent.
+The cottar, the bordar, and the labourer were
+bound to help in the work of the home-farm
+throughout the year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these services and the time of rendering
+them were strictly limited by custom, not only in
+the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of the
+originally meaner "landless man." The possession
+of his little homestead with the ground around it,
+the privilege of turning out his cattle on the waste
+of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from
+mere indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn
+at a lord's caprice into rights that could be
+pleaded at law. The number of teams, the fines,
+the reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at
+first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be
+entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy of
+which became the title-deed of the villein. It was
+to this that he owed the name of "copy-holder"
+which at a later time superseded his older title.
+Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or
+on oral evidence of the custom at issue, but a social
+arrangement which was eminently characteristic of
+the English spirit of compromise generally secured
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-324"></a>1-324]</span>
+
+a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord.
+It was the duty of the lord's bailiff to exact their
+due services from the villeins, but his coadjutor in
+this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was
+chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative
+of their interests and rights. A fresh
+step towards freedom was made by the growing
+tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments.
+The population was slowly increasing,
+and as the law of gavel-kind which was applicable
+to all landed estates not held by military tenure
+divided the inheritance of the tenantry equally
+among their sons, the holding of each tenant and
+the services due from it became divided in a corresponding
+degree. A labour-rent thus became more
+difficult to enforce, while the increase of wealth
+among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of
+independence made it more burthensome to those
+who rendered it. It was probably from this cause
+that the commutation of the arrears of labour for
+a money payment, which had long prevailed on
+every estate, gradually developed into a general
+commutation of services. We have already witnessed
+the silent progress of this remarkable change
+in the case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice
+soon became universal, and "malt-silver," "wood-silver,"
+and "larder-silver" gradually took the
+place of the older personal services on the court-rolls.
+The process of commutation was hastened
+by the necessities of the lords themselves. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-325"></a>1-325]</span>
+
+luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp
+of chivalry, the cost of campaigns drained the
+purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom
+to a serf or exemption from services to a villein
+afforded an easy and tempting mode of refilling
+them. In this process even kings took part. At
+a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners
+were sent to royal estates for the especial
+purpose of selling manumissions to the king's serfs;
+and we still possess the names of those who were
+enfranchised with their families by a payment of
+hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">England</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the people which had been growing
+into a national unity and a national vigour while
+English king and English baronage battled for
+rule. But king and baronage themselves had
+changed like townsman and ceorl. The loss of
+Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their
+Norman lands, was the last of many influences
+which had been giving through a century and a
+half a national temper to the baronage. Not only
+the "new men," the ministers out of whom the two
+Henries had raised a nobility, were bound to the
+Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned
+themselves as Englishmen and set aside their aims
+after personal independence for a love of the general
+freedom of the land. They stood out as the natural
+leaders of a people bound together by the stern
+government which had crushed all local division,
+which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of a
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-326"></a>1-326]</span>
+
+peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to
+modern eyes was almost unexampled elsewhere
+in Europe, and which had trained them to something
+of their old free government again by the
+very machinery of election it used to facilitate its
+heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of
+Normandy brought home the king. The growth
+which had been going on had easily escaped the
+eyes of rulers who were commonly absent from
+the realm and busy with the affairs of countries
+beyond the sea. Henry the Second had been
+absent for years from England: Richard had only
+visited it twice for a few months: John had as yet
+been almost wholly occupied with his foreign dominions.
+To him as to his brother England had
+as yet been nothing but a land whose gold paid the
+mercenaries that followed him, and whose people
+bowed obediently to his will. It was easy to see
+that between such a ruler and such a nation once
+brought together strife must come: but that the
+strife came as it did and ended as it did was due
+above all to the character of the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler
+presence of John." The terrible verdict of his
+contemporaries has passed into the sober judgement
+of history. Externally John possessed all the
+quickness, the vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour,
+the social charm which distinguished his
+house. His worst enemies owned that he toiled
+steadily and closely at the work of administration.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-327"></a>1-327]</span>
+
+He was fond of learned men like Gerald of Wales.
+He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of
+winning the love of women. But in his inner soul
+John was the worst outcome of the Angevins. He
+united into one mass of wickedness their insolence,
+their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty
+and tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition,
+their cynical indifference to honour or truth. In
+mere boyhood he tore with brutal levity the beards
+of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as
+their lord. His ingratitude and perfidy brought
+his father with sorrow to the grave. To his brother
+he was the worst of traitors. All Christendom
+believed him to be the murderer of his nephew,
+Arthur of Britanny. He abandoned one wife and
+was faithless to another. His punishments were
+refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children,
+the crushing old men under copes of lead. His
+court was a brothel where no woman was safe from
+the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to
+publish the news of his victims' shame. He was
+as craven in his superstition as he was daring in
+his impiety. Though he scoffed at priests and
+turned his back on the mass even amidst the
+solemnities of his coronation, he never stirred on a
+journey without hanging relics round his neck.
+But with the wickedness of his race he inherited
+its profound ability. His plan for the relief of
+Château Gaillard, the rapid march by which he
+shattered Arthur's hopes at Mirebeau, showed an
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-328"></a>1-328]</span>
+
+inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth
+of his political combinations he far surpassed the
+statesmen of his time. Throughout his reign we
+see him quick to discern the difficulties of his
+position, and inexhaustible in the resources with
+which he met them. The overthrow of his continental
+power only spurred him to the formation
+of a league which all but brought Philip to the
+ground; and the sudden revolt of England was
+parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy.
+The closer study of John's history clears away the
+charges of sloth and incapacity with which men
+tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The
+awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the
+king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the
+Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against
+English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary
+but the ablest and most ruthless of the
+Angevins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Innocent the Third</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the moment of his return to England in
+1204 John's whole energies were bent to the recovery
+of his dominions on the Continent. He
+impatiently collected money and men for the
+support of those adherents of the House of Anjou
+who were still struggling against the arms of France
+in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of 1205
+he gathered an army at Portsmouth and prepared
+to cross the Channel. But his project was suddenly
+thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate,
+Hubert Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-329"></a>1-329]</span>
+
+Marshal. So completely had both the baronage
+and the Church been humbled by his father that
+the attitude of their representatives revealed to
+the king a new spirit of national freedom which
+was rising around him, and John at once braced
+himself to a struggle with it. The death of Hubert
+Walter in July, only a few weeks after his protest,
+removed his most formidable opponent, and the
+king resolved to neutralize the opposition of the
+Church by placing a creature of his own at its
+head. John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was
+elected by the monks of Canterbury at his bidding,
+and enthroned as Primate. But in a previous
+though informal gathering the convent had already
+chosen its sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop.
+The rival claimants hastened to appeal to Rome,
+and their appeal reached the Papal Court before
+Christmas. The result of the contest was a startling
+one both for themselves and for the king.
+After a year's careful examination Innocent the
+Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, quashed
+at the close of 1206 both the contested elections.
+The decision was probably a just one, but Innocent
+was far from stopping there. The monks who
+appeared before him brought powers from the
+convent to choose a new Primate should their
+earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly
+assured of their choice of Grey, had promised to
+confirm their election. But the bribes which the
+king lavished at Rome failed to win the Pope
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-330"></a>1-330]</span>
+
+over to this plan; and whether from mere love of
+power, for he was pushing the Papal claims of
+supremacy over Christendom further than any of
+his predecessors, or as may fairly be supposed in
+despair of a free election within English bounds,
+Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his
+presence Stephen Langton to the archiepiscopal
+see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Interdict</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally a better choice could not have been
+made, for Stephen was a man who by sheer weight
+of learning and holiness of life had risen to the
+dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed
+him in the front rank of English patriots. But in
+itself the step was an usurpation of the rights
+both of the Church and of the Crown. The king
+at once met it with resistance. When Innocent
+consecrated the new Primate in June 1207, and
+threatened the realm with interdict if Langton
+were any longer excluded from his see, John
+replied by a counter-threat that the interdict
+should be followed by the banishment of the
+clergy and the mutilation of every Italian he
+could seize in the realm. How little he feared
+the priesthood he showed when the clergy refused
+his demand of a thirteenth of movables from the
+whole country and Archbishop Geoffry of York
+resisted the tax before the Council. John banished
+the Archbishop and extorted the money. Innocent
+however was not a man to draw back from his
+purpose, and in March 1208 the interdict he had
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-331"></a>1-331]</span>
+
+threatened fell upon the land. All worship save
+that of a few privileged orders, all administration
+of Sacraments save that of private baptism, ceased
+over the length and breadth of the country: the
+church-bells were silent, the dead lay unburied on
+the ground. Many of the bishops fled from the
+country. The Church in fact, so long the main
+support of the royal power against the baronage,
+was now driven into opposition. Its change of
+attitude was to be of vast moment in the struggle
+which was impending; but John recked little of
+the future; he replied to the interdict by confiscating
+the lands of the clergy who observed it,
+by subjecting them in spite of their privileges to
+the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them
+unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a
+Welshman was brought before him for the murder
+of a priest, "he has killed my enemy." In 1209
+the Pope proceeded to the further sentence of
+excommunication, and the king was formally cut
+off from the pale of the Church. But the new
+sentence was met with the same defiance as the
+old. Five of the bishops fled over sea, and secret
+disaffection was spreading widely, but there was
+no public avoidance of the excommunicated king.
+An Archdeacon of Norwich who withdrew from
+his service was crushed to death under a cope of
+lead, and the hint was sufficient to prevent either
+prelate or noble from following his example.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Deposition</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The attitude of John showed the power which
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-332"></a>1-332]</span>
+
+the administrative reforms of his father had given
+to the Crown. He stood alone, with nobles
+estranged from him and the Church against him,
+but his strength seemed utterly unbroken. From
+the first moment of his rule John had defied the
+baronage. The promise to satisfy their demand
+for redress of wrongs in the past reign, a promise
+made at his election, remained unfulfilled; when
+the demand was repeated he answered it by
+seizing their castles and taking their children as
+hostages for their loyalty. The cost of his fruitless
+threats of war had been met by heavy and
+repeated taxation, by increased land tax and increased
+scutage. The quarrel with the Church
+and fear of their revolt only deepened his oppression
+of the nobles. He drove De Braose, one of
+the most powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die
+in exile, while his wife and grandchildren were
+believed to have been starved to death in the
+royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung
+panic-stricken to the court of the excommunicate
+king John heaped outrages worse than death.
+Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, the
+preference shown to foreigners, were small provocations
+compared with his attacks on the honour
+of their wives and daughters. But the baronage
+still submitted. The financial exactions indeed
+became light as John filled his treasury with the
+goods of the Church; the king's vigour was seen
+in the rapidity with which he crushed a rising of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-333"></a>1-333]</span>
+
+the nobles in Ireland, and foiled an outbreak of
+the Welsh; while the triumphs of his father had
+taught the baronage its weakness in any single-handed
+struggle against the Crown. Hated
+therefore as he was the land remained still.
+Only one weapon was now left in Innocent's
+hands. Men held then that a king, once excommunicate,
+ceased to be a Christian or to
+have any claims on the obedience of Christian subjects.
+As spiritual heads of Christendom, the
+Popes had ere now asserted their right to remove
+such a ruler from his throne and to give
+it to a worthier than he; and it was this right
+which Innocent at last felt himself driven to exercise.
+After useless threats he issued in 1212 a
+bull of deposition against John, absolved his
+subjects from their allegiance, proclaimed a
+crusade against him as an enemy to Christianity
+and the Church, and committed the execution of
+the sentence to the king of the French. John
+met the announcement of this step with the same
+scorn as before. His insolent disdain suffered the
+Roman legate, Cardinal Pandulf, to proclaim his
+deposition to his face at Northampton. When
+Philip collected an army for an attack on England
+an enormous host gathered at the king's call on
+Barham Down; and the English fleet dispelled all
+danger of invasion by crossing the Channel, by capturing
+a number of French ships, and by burning
+Dieppe.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-334"></a>1-334]</span>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John's Submission</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not in England only that the king
+showed his strength and activity. Vile as he
+was, John possessed in a high degree the political
+ability of his race, and in the diplomatic efforts
+with which he met the danger from France he
+showed himself his father's equal. The barons of
+Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the
+south. John bought the aid of the Count of
+Flanders on his northern border. The German
+king, Otto, pledged himself to bring the knighthood
+of Germany to support an invasion of France.
+But at the moment of his success in diplomacy
+John suddenly gave way. It was in fact the
+revelation of a danger at home which shook him
+from his attitude of contemptuous defiance. The
+bull of deposition gave fresh energy to every
+enemy. The Scotch king was in correspondence
+with Innocent. The Welsh princes who had just
+been forced to submission broke out again in war.
+John hanged their hostages, and called his host
+to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales, but the
+army met only to become a fresh source of danger.
+Powerless to oppose the king openly, the baronage
+had plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies.
+The hostility of Philip had dispelled
+their dread of isolated action; many indeed had
+even promised aid to the French king on his
+landing. John found himself in the midst of
+hidden enemies; and nothing could have saved
+him but the haste--whether of panic or quick
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-335"></a>1-335]</span>
+
+decision--with which he disbanded his army and
+took refuge in Nottingham Castle. The arrest of
+some of the barons showed how true were his
+fears, for the heads of the French conspiracy,
+Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, at once
+fled over sea to Philip. His daring self-confidence,
+the skill of his diplomacy, could no longer hide
+from John the utter loneliness of his position. At
+war with Rome, with France, with Scotland, Ireland,
+and Wales, at war with the Church, he saw
+himself disarmed by this sudden revelation of
+treason in the one force left at his disposal. With
+characteristic suddenness he gave way. He endeavoured
+by remission of fines to win back his
+people. He negotiated eagerly with the Pope,
+consented to receive the Archbishop, and promised
+to repay the money he had extorted from
+the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John becomes vassal of Rome</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the shameless ingenuity of the king's
+temper was seen in his resolve to find in his
+very humiliation a new source of strength. If
+he yielded to the Church he had no mind to yield
+to the rest of his foes; it was indeed in the Pope
+who had defeated him that he saw the means of
+baffling their efforts. It was Rome that formed
+the link between the varied elements of hostility
+which combined against him. It was Rome that
+gave its sanction to Philip's ambition and roused
+the hopes of Scotch and Welsh, Rome that called
+the clergy to independence, and nerved the barons
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-336"></a>1-336]</span>
+
+to resistance. To detach Innocent by submission
+from the league which hemmed him in on every
+side was the least part of John's purpose. He
+resolved to make Rome his ally, to turn its
+spiritual thunders on his foes, to use it in
+breaking up the confederacy it had formed, in
+crushing the baronage, in oppressing the clergy,
+in paralyzing--as Rome only could paralyze--the
+energy of the Primate. That greater issues even
+than these were involved in John's rapid change
+of policy time was to show; but there is no need
+to credit the king with the foresight that would
+have discerned them. His quick versatile temper
+saw no doubt little save the momentary gain.
+But that gain was immense. Nor was the price
+as hard to pay as it seems to modern eyes. The
+Pope stood too high above earthly monarchs, his
+claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed
+them, were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate
+business and interests of the day, to make
+the owning of his suzerainty any very practical
+burthen. John could recall a time when his father
+was willing to own the same subjection as that
+which he was about to take on himself. He could
+recall the parallel allegiance which his brother
+had pledged to the Emperor. Shame indeed there
+must be in any loss of independence, but in this
+less than any, and with Rome the shame of submission
+had already been incurred. But whatever
+were the king's thoughts his act was decisive. On
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-337"></a>1-337]</span>
+
+the 15th of May 1213 he knelt before the legate
+Pandulf, surrendered his kingdom to the Roman
+See, took it back again as a tributary vassal, swore
+fealty and did liege homage to the Pope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Its Results</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In after times men believed that England
+thrilled at the news with a sense of national
+shame such as she had never felt before. "He
+has become the Pope's man" the whole country
+was said to have murmured; "he has forfeited
+the very name of king; from a free man he has
+degraded himself into a serf." But this was the
+belief of a time still to come when the rapid
+growth of national feeling which this step and its
+issues did more than anything to foster made men
+look back on the scene between John and Pandulf
+as a national dishonour. We see little trace of
+such a feeling in the contemporary accounts of
+the time. All seem rather to have regarded it
+as a complete settlement of the difficulties in
+which king and kingdom were involved. As a
+political measure its success was immediate and
+complete. The French army at once broke up in
+impotent rage, and when Philip turned on the
+enemy John had raised up for him in Flanders,
+five hundred English ships under the Earl of Salisbury
+fell upon the fleet which accompanied the
+French army along the coast and utterly destroyed
+it. The league which John had so long matured
+at once disclosed itself. Otto, reinforcing his
+German army by the knighthood of Flanders and
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-338"></a>1-338]</span>
+
+Boulogne as well as by a body of mercenaries in
+the pay of the English king, invaded France from
+the north. John called on his baronage to follow
+him over sea for an attack on Philip from the
+south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Geoffry Fitz-Peter</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their plea that he remained excommunicate
+was set aside by the arrival of Langton and his
+formal absolution of the king on a renewal of his
+coronation oath and a pledge to put away all evil
+customs. But the barons still stood aloof. They
+would serve at home, they said, but they refused
+to cross the sea. Those of the north took a more
+decided attitude of opposition. From this point
+indeed the northern barons begin to play their
+part in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies,
+Percies, Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those
+of de Ros or de Vaux, all had sprung to greatness
+on the ruins of the Mowbrays and the great
+houses of the Conquest, and had done service to
+the Crown in its strife with the older feudatories.
+But loyal as was their tradition they were English
+to the core; they had neither lands nor interest
+over sea, and they now declared themselves bound
+by no tenure to follow the king in foreign wars.
+Furious at this check to his plans John marched
+in arms northwards to bring these barons to submission.
+But he had now to reckon with a new
+antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter.
+Geoffry had hitherto bent to the king's will; but
+the political sagacity which he drew from the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-339"></a>1-339]</span>
+
+school of Henry the Second in which he had been
+trained showed him the need of concession, and
+his wealth, his wide kinship, and his experience
+of affairs gave his interposition a decisive weight.
+He seized on the political opportunity which was
+offered by the gathering of a Council at St. Albans
+at the opening of August with the purpose of
+assessing the damages done to the Church.
+Besides the bishops and barons, a reeve and his
+four men were summoned to this Council from
+each royal demesne, no doubt simply as witnesses
+of the sums due to the plundered clergy. Their
+presence however was of great import. It is the
+first instance which our history presents of the
+summons of such representatives to a national
+Council, and the instance took fresh weight from
+the great matters which came to be discussed.
+In the king's name the Justiciar promised good
+government for the time to come, and forbade all
+royal officers to practise extortion as they prized
+life and limb. The king's peace was pledged to
+those who had opposed him in the past; and
+observance of the laws of Henry the First was
+enjoined upon all within the realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Stephen Langton</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that
+English freedom was to find its champion and the
+baronage their leader. From the moment of his
+landing in England Stephen Langton had taken
+up the constitutional position of the Primate in
+upholding the old customs and rights of the realm
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-340"></a>1-340]</span>
+
+against the personal despotism of the kings. As
+Anselm had withstood William the Red, as Theobald
+had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared
+to withstand and rescue his country from the
+tyranny of John. He had already forced him
+to swear to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor,
+in other words the traditional liberties of
+the realm. When the baronage refused to sail for
+Poitou he compelled the king to deal with them
+not by arms but by process of law. But the work
+which he now undertook was far greater and
+weightier than this. The pledges of Henry the
+First had long been forgotten when the Justiciar
+brought them to light, but Langton saw the vast
+importance of such a precedent. At the close of
+the month he produced Henry's charter in a fresh
+gathering of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at
+once welcomed as a base for the needed reforms.
+From London Langton hastened to the king,
+whom he reached at Northampton on his way to
+attack the nobles of the north, and wrested from
+him a promise to bring his strife with them to
+legal judgement before assailing them in arms.
+With his allies gathering abroad John had doubtless
+no wish to be entangled in a long quarrel at
+home, and the Archbishop's mediation allowed him
+to withdraw with seeming dignity. After a demonstration
+therefore at Durham John marched
+hastily south again, and reached London in October.
+His Justiciar at once laid before him the claims of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-341"></a>1-341]</span>
+
+the Councils of St. Alban's and St. Paul's; but
+the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed him
+from the pressure which his minister was putting
+upon him. "Now, by God's feet," cried John,
+"I am for the first time King and Lord of
+England," and he entrusted the vacant justiciarship
+to a Poitevin, Peter des Roches, the Bishop
+of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony
+with his own. But the death of Geoffry only
+called the Archbishop to the front, and Langton
+at once demanded the king's assent to the charter
+of Henry the First. In seizing on this charter
+as a basis for national action Langton showed
+a political ability of the highest order. The
+enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed
+showed the sagacity with which the Archbishop
+had chosen his ground. From that moment the
+baronage was no longer drawn together in secret
+conspiracies by a sense of common wrong or a
+vague longing for common deliverance: they were
+openly united in a definite claim of national freedom
+and national law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Bouvines</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John could as yet only meet the claim by
+delay. His policy had still to wait for its fruits
+at Rome, his diplomacy to reap its harvest in
+Flanders, ere he could deal with England. From
+the hour of his submission to the Papacy his one
+thought had been that of vengeance on the barons
+who, as he held, had betrayed him; but vengeance
+was impossible till he should return a conqueror
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-342"></a>1-342]</span>
+
+from the fields of France. It was a sense of this
+danger which nerved the baronage to their obstinate
+refusal to follow him over sea: but furious
+as he was at their resistance, the Archbishop's
+interposition condemned John still to wait for the
+hour of his revenge. In the spring of 1214 he
+crossed with what forces he could gather to
+Poitou, rallied its nobles round him, passed the
+Loire in triumph, and won back again Angers,
+the home of his race. At the same time Otto
+and the Count of Flanders, their German and
+Flemish knighthood strengthened by reinforcements
+from Boulogne as well as by a body of
+English troops under the Earl of Salisbury,
+threatened France from the north. For the
+moment Philip seemed lost: and yet on the
+fortunes of Philip hung the fortunes of English
+freedom. But in this crisis of her fate, France
+was true to herself and her king. From every
+borough of Northern France the townsmen marched
+to his rescue, and the village priests led their
+flocks to battle with the Church-banners flying
+at their head. The two armies met at the close
+of July near the bridge of Bouvines, between
+Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day
+went against the allies. The Flemish knights
+were the first to fly; then the Germans in the
+centre of the host were crushed by the overwhelming
+numbers of the French; last of all the English
+on the right of it were broken by a fierce onset
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-343"></a>1-343]</span>
+
+of the Bishop of Beauvais who charged mace in
+hand and struck the Earl of Salisbury to the
+ground. The news of this complete overthrow
+reached John in the midst of his triumphs in the
+South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He
+was at once deserted by the Poitevin nobles; and
+a hasty retreat alone enabled him to return in
+October, baffled and humiliated, to his island
+kingdom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Rising of the Baronage</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His return forced on the crisis to which events
+had so long been drifting. The victory at Bouvines
+gave strength to his opponents. The open resistance
+of the northern barons nerved the rest of
+their order to action. The great houses who had
+cast away their older feudal traditions for a more
+national policy were drawn by the crisis into
+close union with the families which had sprung
+from the ministers and councillors of the two
+Henries. To the first group belonged such men
+as Saher de Quinci, the Earl of Winchester,
+Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the Earl
+of Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin, William Mallet, the
+houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant. Among the second
+group were Henry Bohun and Roger Bigod, the
+Earls of Hereford and Norfolk, the younger
+William Marshal, and Robert de Vere. Robert
+Fitz-Walter, who took the command of their
+united force, represented both parties equally,
+for he was sprung from the Norman house of
+Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second,
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-344"></a>1-344]</span>
+
+Richard de Lucy, had been his grandfather.
+Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these
+nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear
+no longer with John's delays. If he refused to
+restore their liberties they swore to make war on
+him till he confirmed them by Charter under the
+king's seal, and they parted to raise forces with
+the purpose of presenting their demands at
+Christmas. John, knowing nothing of the coming
+storm, pursued his policy of winning over
+the Church by granting it freedom of election,
+while he embittered still more the strife with his
+nobles by demanding scutage from the northern
+nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou.
+But the barons were now ready to act, and early
+in January in the memorable year 1215 they
+appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned,
+their demands before the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John deserted</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+John was taken by surprise. He asked for a
+truce till Easter-tide, and spent the interval in
+fevered efforts to avoid the blow. Again he
+offered freedom to the Church, and took vows as
+a Crusader against whom war was a sacrilege,
+while he called for a general oath of allegiance
+and fealty from the whole body of his subjects.
+But month after month only showed the king
+the uselessness of further resistance. Though
+Pandulf was with him, his vassalage had as yet
+brought little fruit in the way of aid from Rome;
+the commissioners whom he sent to plead his
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-345"></a>1-345]</span>
+
+cause at the shire-courts brought back news that
+no man would help him against the charter that
+the barons claimed: and his efforts to detach
+the clergy from the league of his opponents utterly
+failed. The nation was against the king. He
+was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His
+ministers still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey
+de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival, Thomas Basset,
+and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the
+administrative school of his father and who,
+dissent as they might from John's mere oppression,
+still looked on the power of the Crown as
+the one barrier against feudal anarchy: and beside
+them stood some of the great nobles of royal
+blood, his father's bastard Earl William of Salisbury,
+his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and
+Henry Earl of Cornwall, a grandson of Henry
+the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl
+of Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the
+barons, William Marshal the elder, Earl of
+Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the
+rising of the younger Henry against Henry the
+Second, and stood by him as he died; he had
+shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp
+and in the outlawry of John. He was now an
+old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course,
+to recall the government to the path of freedom
+and law, but shrinking from a strife which might
+bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and
+looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-346"></a>1-346]</span>
+
+pressure to bear upon the king than
+in forcing them from him by arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">John yields</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But cling as such men might to John, they
+clung to him rather as mediators than adherents.
+Their sympathies went with the demands of the
+barons when the delay which had been granted
+was over and the nobles again gathered in arms at
+Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their claims
+before the King. Nothing marks more strongly
+the absolutely despotic idea of his sovereignty
+which John had formed than the passionate
+surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why
+do they not ask for my kingdom?" he cried.
+"I will never grant such liberties as will make
+me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the
+lawyers of his father's court had done their work.
+Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry,
+they had told on the more headstrong nature of
+his sons. Richard and John both held with
+Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law
+of the land; and to fetter that will by the
+customs and franchises which were embodied in
+the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous
+usurpation of his rights. But no imperialist
+theories had touched the minds of his people.
+The country rose as one man at his refusal. At
+the close of May London threw open her gates
+to the forces of the barons, now arrayed under
+Robert Fitz-Walter as "Marshal of the Army of
+God and Holy Church."  Exeter and Lincoln
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-347"></a>1-347]</span>
+
+followed the example of the capital; promises of
+aid came from Scotland and Wales; the northern
+barons marched hastily under Eustace de Vesci
+to join their comrades in London. Even the
+nobles who had as yet clung to the king, but
+whose hopes of conciliation were blasted by his
+obstinacy, yielded at last to the summons of the
+"Army of God." Pandulf indeed and Archbishop
+Langton still remained with John, but
+they counselled, as Earl Ranulf and William
+Marshal counselled, his acceptance of the Charter.
+None in fact counselled its rejection save his new
+Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and
+other foreigners who knew the barons purposed
+driving them from the land. But even the
+number of these was small; there was a moment
+when John found himself with but seven knights
+at his back and before him a nation in arms.
+Quick as he was, he had been taken utterly by
+surprise. It was in vain that in the short respite
+he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had
+summoned mercenaries to his aid and appealed
+to his new suzerain, the Pope. Summons and
+appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in
+his heart, John bowed to necessity and called
+the barons to a conference on an island in the
+Thames, between Windsor and Staines, near a
+marshy meadow by the river side, the meadow
+of Runnymede. The king encamped on one
+bank of the river, the barons covered the flat of
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-348"></a>1-348]</span>
+
+Runnymede on the other. Their delegates met
+on the 15th of June in the island between
+them, but the negotiations were a mere cloak to
+cover John's purpose of unconditional submission.
+The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to
+in a single day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">The Great Charter</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Copies of it were made and sent for preservation
+to the cathedrals and churches, and one
+copy may still be seen in the British Museum,
+injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal
+still hanging from the brown, shrivelled parchment.
+It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the
+earliest monument of English freedom which we
+can see with our own eyes and touch with our
+own hands, the great Charter to which from age
+to age men have looked back as the groundwork
+of English liberty. But in itself the Charter was
+no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new
+constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry
+the First formed the basis of the whole, and the
+additions to it are for the most part formal
+recognitions of the judicial and administrative
+changes introduced by Henry the Second. What
+was new in it was its origin. In form, like the
+Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but
+a royal grant. In actual fact it was a treaty
+between the whole English people and its king.
+In it England found itself for the first time since
+the Conquest a nation bound together by common
+national interests, by a common national sympathy.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-349"></a>1-349]</span>
+
+In words which almost close the Charter, the
+"community of the whole land" is recognized
+as the great body from which the restraining
+power of the baronage takes its validity. There
+is no distinction of blood or class, of Norman
+or not Norman, of noble or not noble. All are
+recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are
+owned as English rights. Bishops and nobles
+claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not
+of baron and churchman only but those of freeholder
+and merchant, of townsman and villein.
+The provisions against wrong and extortion which
+the barons drew up as against the king for themselves
+they drew up as against themselves for
+their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on
+Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere
+copy of what had gone before. The vague expressions
+of the old Charter were now exchanged
+for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds
+of unwritten custom which the older grant did
+little more than recognize had proved too weak to
+hold the Angevins; and the baronage set them
+aside for the restraints of written and defined law.
+It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the
+transition from the age of traditional rights,
+preserved in the nation's memory and officially
+declared by the Primate, to the age of written
+legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which
+was to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its opening indeed is in general terms. The
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-350"></a>1-350]</span>
+
+Church had shown its power of self-defence in the
+struggle over the interdict, and the clause which
+recognized its rights alone retained the older and
+general form. But all vagueness ceases when the
+Charter passes on to deal with the rights of
+Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to
+security of person and property, to good government.
+"No freeman," ran a memorable article
+that lies at the base of our whole judicial system,
+"shall be seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or
+outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin: we will
+not go against any man nor send against him,
+save by legal judgement of his peers or by the law
+of the land." "To no man will we sell," runs
+another, "or deny, or delay, right or justice."
+The great reforms of the past reigns were now
+formally recognized; judges of assize were to hold
+their circuits four times in the year, and the
+King's Court was no longer to follow the king in
+his wanderings over the realm but to sit in a fixed
+place. But the denial of justice under John was
+a small danger compared with the lawless exactions
+both of himself and his predecessor.
+Richard had increased the amount of the scutage
+which Henry the Second had introduced, and
+applied it to raise funds for his ransom. He had
+restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often
+abolished, under the new name of "carucage," had
+seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of
+the churches, and rated movables as well as land.
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-351"></a>1-351]</span>
+
+John had again raised the rate of scutage, and
+imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his pleasure
+without counsel of the baronage. The Great
+Charter met this abuse by a provision on which
+our constitutional system rests. "No scutage or
+aid [other than the three customary feudal aids]
+shall be imposed in our realm save by the common
+council of the realm"; and to this Great Council
+it was provided that prelates and the greater
+barons should be summoned by special writ, and
+all tenants in chief through the sheriffs and
+bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision
+defined what had probably been the common
+usage of the realm; but the definition turned it
+into a national right, a right so momentous that
+on it rests our whole Parliamentary life. Even
+the baronage seem to have been startled when
+they realized the extent of their claim; and the
+provision was dropped from the later issue of the
+Charter at the outset of the next reign. But the
+clause brought home to the nation at large their
+possession of a right which became dearer as years
+went by. More and more clearly the nation
+discovered that in these simple words lay the
+secret of political power. It was the right of
+self-taxation that England fought for under Earl
+Simon as she fought for it under Hampden. It
+was the establishment of this right which established
+English freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rights which the barons claimed for themselves
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-352"></a>1-352]</span>
+
+they claimed for the nation at large. The
+boon of free and unbought justice was a boon for
+all, but a special provision protected the poor.
+The forfeiture of the freeman on conviction of
+felony was never to include his tenement, or that
+of the merchant his wares, or that of the countryman,
+as Henry the Second had long since ordered,
+his wain. The means of actual livelihood were to
+be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions,
+the exaction of forced labour, by royal
+officers was forbidden; and the abuses of the
+forest system were checked by a clause which
+disafforested all forests made in John's reign.
+The under-tenants were protected against all
+lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the
+same terms as these were protected against the
+lawless exactions of the Crown. The towns were
+secured in the enjoyment of their municipal
+privileges, their freedom from arbitrary taxation,
+their rights of justice, of common deliberation, of
+regulation of trade. "Let the city of London
+have all its old liberties and its free customs, as
+well by land as by water. Besides this, we will
+and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and
+towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free
+customs." The influence of the trading class is seen
+in two other enactments by which freedom of journeying
+and trade was secured to foreign merchants,
+and an uniformity of weights and measures was
+ordered to be enforced throughout the realm.
+</p>
+
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-353"></a>1-353]</span>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Innocent annuls the Charter</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There remained only one question, and that
+the most difficult of all; the question how to
+secure this order which the Charter established in
+the actual government of the realm. It was easy
+to sweep away the immediate abuses; the hostages
+were restored to their homes, the foreigners
+banished by a clause in the Charter from the
+country. But it was less easy to provide means
+for the control of a king whom no man could trust.
+By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council
+of twenty-five barons were to be chosen from the
+general body of their order to enforce on John
+the observance of the Charter, with the right of
+declaring war on the king should its provisions
+be infringed, and it was provided that the Charter
+should not only be published throughout the
+whole country but sworn to at every hundred-mote
+and town-mote by order from the king. "They
+have given me five-and-twenty over-kings," cried
+John in a burst of fury, flinging himself on the
+floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his impotent
+rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle
+policy of which he was a master. After a few
+days he left Windsor; and lingered for months
+along the southern shore, waiting for news of the
+aid he had solicited from Rome and from the
+Continent. It was not without definite purpose
+that he had become the vassal of the Papacy.
+While Innocent was dreaming of a vast Christian
+Empire with the Pope at its head to enforce
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-354"></a>1-354]</span>
+
+justice and religion on his under-kings, John
+believed that the Papal protection would enable
+him to rule as tyrannically as he would. The
+thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand
+for his protection, as the armies of England are at
+hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a
+Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. His
+envoys were already at Rome, pleading for a
+condemnation of the Charter. The after action
+of the Papacy shows that Innocent was moved by
+no hostility to English freedom. But he was indignant
+that a matter which might have been brought
+before his court of appeal as overlord should have
+been dealt with by armed revolt, and in this crisis
+both his imperious pride and the legal tendency
+of his mind swayed him to the side of the king
+who submitted to his justice. He annulled the
+Great Charter by a bull in August, and at the
+close of the year excommunicated the barons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="sidenote">Landing of Lewis</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His suspension of Stephen Langton from the
+exercise of his office as Primate was a more fatal
+blow. Langton hurried to Rome, and his absence
+left the barons without a head at a moment when
+the very success of their efforts was dividing them.
+Their forces were already disorganized when
+autumn brought a host of foreign soldiers from
+over sea to the king's standard. After starving
+Rochester into submission John found himself
+strong enough to march ravaging through the
+Midland and Northern counties, while his mercenaries
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-355"></a>1-355]</span>
+
+spread like locusts over the whole face of
+the land. From Berwick the king turned back
+triumphant to coop up his enemies in London
+while fresh Papal excommunications fell on the
+barons and the city. But the burghers set
+Innocent at defiance. "The ordering of secular
+matters appertaineth not to the Pope," they said,
+in words that seem like mutterings of the coming
+Lollardism; and at the advice of Simon Langton,
+the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out and
+mass was celebrated as before. Success however
+was impossible for the undisciplined militia of the
+country and the towns against the trained forces
+of the king, and despair drove the barons to listen
+to Fitz-Walter and the French party in their ranks,
+and to seek aid from over sea. Philip had long
+been waiting the opportunity for his revenge upon
+John. In the April of 1216 his son Lewis accepted
+the crown in spite of Innocent's excommunications,
+and landed soon after in Kent with a considerable
+force. As the barons had foreseen, the French
+mercenaries who constituted John's host refused
+to fight against the French sovereign and the whole
+aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. Deserted
+by the bulk of his troops, the king was forced to
+fall rapidly back on the Welsh Marches, while his
+rival entered London and received the submission
+of the larger part of England. Only Dover held
+out obstinately against Lewis. By a series of
+rapid marches John succeeded in distracting the
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Vol1-Page-1-356"></a>1-356]</span>
+
+plans of the barons and in relieving Lincoln; then
+after a short stay at Lynn he crossed the Wash
+in a fresh movement to the north. In crossing
+however his army was surprised by the tide, and
+his baggage with the royal treasures washed away.
+Fever seized the baffled tyrant as he reached the
+Abbey of Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed
+by a gluttonous debauch, and on the 19th of
+October John breathed his last at Newark.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="teidiv">
+<div class="head">
+<hr>
+<a name="index-div-id4555868"></a>
+END OF VOL. I.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+   </div>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="pg" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME I (OF 8)***</p>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8130 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume I (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume I (of 8)
+       Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2005  [eBook #17037]
+Most recently updated: May 20, 2008
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME I (OF 8)***
+
+
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+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
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+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME I
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+EARLY ENGLAND, 449-1071
+FOREIGN KINGS, 1071-1204
+THE CHARTER, 1204-1216
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;
+_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.
+_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.
+London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895
+
+
+
+
+I Dedicate this Book
+
+TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS
+MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
+AND
+WILLIAM STUBBS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    Volume I
+
+        Book I--Early England--449-1071
+
+            Authorities for Book I
+
+            Chapter I--The English Conquest of Britain--449-577
+
+            Chapter II--The English Kingdoms--577-796
+
+            Chapter III--Wessex and the Northmen--796-947
+
+            Chapter IV--Feudalism and the Monarchy--954-1071
+
+        Book II--England under Foreign Kings--1071-1204
+
+            Authorities for Book II
+
+            Chapter I--The Conqueror--1071-1085
+
+            Chapter II--The Norman Kings--1085-1154
+
+            Chapter III--Henry the Second--1154-1189
+
+            Chapter IV--The Angevin Kings--1189-1204
+
+        Book III--The Charter--1204-1307
+
+            Authorities for Book III
+
+            Chapter I--John--1204-1216
+
+LIST OF MAPS
+
+
+    Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1.png)
+
+    The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2.jpg)
+
+    England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3.jpg)
+
+    The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4.jpg)
+
+    Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5.jpg)
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+BOOK I
+EARLY ENGLAND
+449-1071
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I
+449-1071
+
+
+For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are scant and
+imperfect. The only extant British account is the "Epistola" of Gildas, a
+work written probably about A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and
+inflated, but his book is of great value in the light it throws on the
+state of the island at that time, and above all as the one record of the
+conquest which we have from the side of the conquered. The English
+conquerors, on the other hand, have left jottings of their conquest of
+Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of
+the compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,"
+annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical
+intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or
+the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a
+fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation
+("Historia Britonum") which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light
+on the conquest of the North.
+
+From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded by a
+wonderful combination of historical and archaeological knowledge in
+constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South-Western
+Britain which must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.
+
+This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of the account
+given in my text; and I can only trust that it may soon be embodied in
+some more accessible form than that of a series of papers in the
+Transactions of the Archaeological Institute. In a like way, though
+Kemble's "Saxons in England" and Sir F. Palgrave's "History of the
+English Commonwealth" (if read with caution) contain much that is worth
+notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution of the English people
+and the changes introduced into it since their settlement in Britain must
+be mainly drawn from the "Constitutional History" of Professor Stubbs.
+
+Baeda's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum," a work of which I have
+spoken in my text, is the primary authority for the history of the
+Northumbrian overlordship which followed the Conquest. It is by copious
+insertions from Baeda that the meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the
+West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which they at present
+appear in the part of the English Chronicle which concerns this period.
+The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, with those of Cuthbert by an anonymous
+contemporary and by Baeda himself, throws great light on the religious and
+intellectual condition of the North at the time of its supremacy. But
+with the fall of Northumbria we pass into a period of historical dearth.
+A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved among the meagre annals
+of Wessex in the English Chronicle: but for the most part we are thrown
+upon later writers, especially Henry of Huntingdon and William of
+Malmesbury, who, though authors of the twelfth century, had access to
+older materials which are now lost. A little may be gleaned from
+biographies such as that of Guthlac of Crowland; but the letters of
+Boniface and Alcwine, which have been edited by Jaffe in his series of
+"Monumenta Germanica," form the most valuable contemporary materials for
+this period.
+
+From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the English
+Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we have said, is a
+compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the Conquest of South Britain,
+and (2) Short Notices of the Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded by
+copious insertions from Baeda, and after the end of his work by brief
+additions from some northern sources. These materials may have been
+thrown together into their present form in AElfred's time as a preface to
+the far fuller annals which begin with the reign of AEthelwulf, and which
+widen into a great contemporary history when they reach that of AElfred
+himself. After AElfred's day the Chronicle varies much in value. Through
+the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a Mercian Chronicle is
+imbedded in it: it then dies down into a series of scant and jejune
+entries, broken however with grand battle-songs, till the reign of
+AEthelred when its fulness returns.
+
+Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass of
+historical material for the age of AElfred and his successors. The life of
+AElfred which bears the name of Asser, puzzling as it is in some ways, is
+probably really Asser's work, and certainly of contemporary authority.
+The Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears the name of
+AEthelweard adds a little to our acquaintance with this time. The Laws,
+which form the base of our constitutional knowledge of this period, fall,
+as has been well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
+Eadward, AEthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the earlier laws of
+AEthelberht and Ine, "mainly of the nature of amendments of custom." Those
+of AElfred, AEthelred, Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the
+Confessor, "aspire to the character of Codes." They are printed in Mr.
+Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes of England," but the extracts given
+by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly
+bears on our constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters and other
+documents belonging to this period has been collected by Kemble in his
+"Codex Diplomaticus AEvi Saxonici," and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in
+his "Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum." Dunstan's biographies have been
+collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series published by the
+Master of the Rolls.
+
+In the period which follows the accession of AEthelred we are still aided
+by these collections of royal Laws and Charters, and the English
+Chronicle becomes of great importance. Its various copies indeed differ
+so much in tone and information from one another that they may to some
+extent be looked upon as distinct works, and "Florence of Worcester" is
+probably the translation of a valuable copy of the "Chronicle" which has
+disappeared. The translation however was made in the twelfth century, and
+it is coloured by the revival of national feeling which was
+characteristic of the time. Of Eadward the Confessor himself we have a
+contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard for the Master of the Rolls)
+which throws great light on the personal history of the King and on his
+relations to the house of Godwine.
+
+The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of St. Quentin, a
+verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and continued by
+William of Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror. William's work in
+turn served as the basis of the "Roman de Rou" composed by Wace in the
+time of Henry the Second. The primary authority for the Conqueror himself
+is the "Gesta Willelmi" of his chaplain and violent partizan, William of
+Poitiers. For the period of the invasion, in which the English
+authorities are meagre, we have besides these the contemporary "Carmen de
+Bello Hastingensi," by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the pictures in the
+Bayeux Tapestry. Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and
+confused but honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious
+movement in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his
+account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary
+authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for
+northern matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his
+remarkable combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of
+course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief documents for the
+early history of Anjou have been collected in the "Chroniques d'Anjou"
+published by the Historical Society of France. Those which are authentic
+are little more than a few scant annals of religious houses; but light is
+thrown on them by the contemporary French chronicles. The "Gesta
+Consulum" is nothing but a compilation of the twelfth century, in which a
+mass of Angevin romance as to the early story of the Counts is dressed
+into historical shape by copious quotations from these French historians.
+
+It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our earlier history when
+historical criticism has done more than has yet been done for the
+materials given us by Ireland and Wales. For Welsh history the "Brut y
+Tywysogion" and the "Annales Cambriae" are now accessible in the series
+published by the Master of the Rolls; the "Chronicle of Caradoc of
+Lancarvan" is translated by Powel; the Mabinogion, or Romantic Tales,
+have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest; and the Welsh Laws collected
+by the Record Commission. The importance of these, as embodying a
+customary code of very early date, will probably be better appreciated
+when we possess the whole of the Brehon Laws, the customary laws of
+Ireland, which are now being issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to
+which attention has justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine ("Early History
+of Institutions") as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest antiquity.
+
+The enormous mass of materials which exists for the early history of
+Ireland, various as they are in critical value, may be seen in Mr.
+O'Curry's "Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History"; and they
+may be conveniently studied by the general reader in the "Annals of the
+Four Masters," edited by Dr. O'Donovan. But this is a mere compilation
+(though generally a faithful one) made about the middle of the
+seventeenth century from earlier sources, two of which have been
+published in the Rolls series. One, the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the
+Gaill," is an account of the Danish wars which may have been written in
+the eleventh century; the other, the "Annals of Loch Ce," is a chronicle
+of Irish affairs from the end of the Danish wars to 1590. The "Chronicon
+Scotorum" (in the same series) extends to the year 1150, and though
+composed in the seventeenth century is valuable from the learning of its
+author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The works of Colgan are to Irish church affairs
+what the "Annals of the Four Masters" are to Irish civil history. They
+contain a vast collection of translations and transcriptions of early
+saints' lives, from those of Patrick downwards. Adamnan's "Life of
+Columba" (admirably edited by Dr. Beeves) supplies some details to the
+story of the Northumbrian kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we find
+the "Book of Rights," a summary of the dues and rights of the several
+over-kings and under-kings, of much earlier date probably than the Norman
+invasion; and Cormac's "Glossary," attributed to the tenth century and
+certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned of legal and
+social details, and something of the pagan religion of Ireland.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN
+449-577
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Old England]
+
+For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England
+itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country
+which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay
+within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart
+of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its
+pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little
+townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
+waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
+broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
+sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
+outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
+of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
+side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
+Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
+North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
+kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
+of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
+branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
+them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
+speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
+indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
+people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
+common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
+conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
+them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The English Village]
+
+Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.
+But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them
+to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must
+have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their
+villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us
+in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
+fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the
+village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
+served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
+body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the
+townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social
+centre was the homestead where the aetheling or eorl, a descendant of the
+first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and
+traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or aethel, each in its
+little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men
+sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in
+various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead,
+or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled
+round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the
+community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his
+wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
+reverence; and it was from him and his fellow aethelings that
+host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of
+war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition
+of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was
+equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
+"free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never
+bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and
+sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war
+which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless
+outrage.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Justice]
+
+Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had
+originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time
+when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of
+English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was
+being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The
+"blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first
+effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's
+life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye
+for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair
+damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong
+as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another
+custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the
+wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the
+wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus
+made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
+knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by
+all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been
+done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From
+this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
+wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess
+sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his
+kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from
+wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done.
+So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged
+before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in
+fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or
+his guilt that he had to stand or fall.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Land]
+
+As the blood-bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave
+their first forms to English society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
+side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honour and
+discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty
+of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they
+fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the
+soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick"
+or "ham" or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
+together in it. In this way the home or "ham" of the Billings was
+Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But
+in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of
+land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become
+everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly
+the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of
+the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession
+of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of
+absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later
+time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and
+pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free
+villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The
+meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
+spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common
+meadow was fenced off into grass-fields, one for each household in the
+village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and division were at an end
+again. The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
+both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, though
+even the plough-land was; subject to fresh division as the number of
+claimants grew greater or less.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Laet and Slave]
+
+It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or
+ceorl from the unfree man or laet, the tiller of land which another owned.
+As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their
+earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the
+village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life,
+so the laet was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was
+denied, or in some cases perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
+had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom the laet
+was free enough. He had house and home of his own, his life and limb were
+as secure as the ceorl's--save as against his lord; it is probable from
+what we see in later laws that as time went on he was recognized as a
+member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at
+law, and called like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree
+as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in the common land
+of the village. The ground which he tilled he held of some freeman of the
+tribe to whom he paid rent in labour or in kind. And this man was his
+lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in the general
+social life of his fellow villagers, he had no rights as against his
+lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to
+render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as
+these services were done the land was his own. His lord could not take it
+from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for
+his services.
+
+Far different from the position of the laet was that of the slave, though
+there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a
+small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine
+drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
+unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and
+spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
+within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
+his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a
+father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case
+the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be
+willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as
+carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a
+freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
+is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
+clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
+shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
+sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
+such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
+if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
+master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
+slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
+guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
+damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
+master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and
+when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
+woman-slave she might be burned.
+
+[Sidenote: The Moot]
+
+With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
+last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
+villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
+while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
+tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
+body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
+tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
+justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
+freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
+chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
+in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
+to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
+with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
+elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
+ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
+stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
+looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
+that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
+tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
+learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
+the agreement, the "common sense," the general conviction to which
+discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
+expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
+laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
+by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
+persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such
+as those which have made England what she is. The "talk" of the village
+moot, the strife and judgement of men giving freely their own rede and
+setting it as freely aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of
+other men, is the groundwork of English history.
+
+[Sidenote: The Folk]
+
+Small therefore as it might be, the township or village was thus the
+primary and perfect type of English life, domestic, social, and
+political. All that England has been since lay there. But changes of
+which we know nothing had long before the time at which our history opens
+grouped these little commonwealths together in larger communities,
+whether we name them Tribe, People, or Folk. The ties of race and kindred
+were no doubt drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
+Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, from a common
+greed of conquest, a common need of defence. Its form at any rate was
+wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of
+every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head who
+existed only so long as war went on, was the leader whom the host chose
+to command it. Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's
+council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men
+of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the
+various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their
+name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to
+it. In historic times however the regularity of such a military
+organization, if it ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas varied
+with the varying customs of each district. But men, whether many or few,
+were still due from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
+called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers to the field.
+
+The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
+to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
+organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
+Germanic races and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future of
+mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
+villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
+of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
+whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
+pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
+gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
+bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
+separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
+and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
+its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
+for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
+village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
+hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
+arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
+the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
+representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
+of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
+proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
+freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
+clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
+of "Aye" or "Nay."
+
+[Sidenote: Social Life]
+
+Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England
+we know less than of their political life. But there is no ground for
+believing them to have been very different in these respects from the
+other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though
+their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from
+being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached
+the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and
+refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier
+Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been
+found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than the close of the
+third century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely modelled on
+Roman metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses
+afford a yet more conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
+But apart from these outer influences the men of the three tribes were
+far from being mere savages. They were fierce warriors, but they were
+also busy fishers and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in
+handling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which they
+hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling sword and spear.
+They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the
+"ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel
+might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose
+in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and
+dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or
+mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
+midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang
+the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of art
+and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings,
+amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved in their workmanship the
+deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden
+buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes with rough jewels
+and inlaid with enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
+the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like the honour in
+which the smith was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
+twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn
+by their form to be of English workmanship. It is only in the English
+pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find
+traces of utter rudeness.
+
+[Sidenote: Religion]
+
+The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German
+peoples. Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of
+the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of
+the north. The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god,
+the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
+the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first
+ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still
+recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German
+homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder,
+the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of
+peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
+maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday
+may commemorate an obscure god Saetere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet
+whom was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends
+her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these
+floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the death-goddess,
+whose memory lingered long in the "Weird" of northern superstition; or
+the Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us,
+"wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling
+javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or
+hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our
+nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and
+sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of
+Berkshire; AEgil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of
+Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the
+purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at
+no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his
+own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and
+English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father
+offered to the gods of his hearth.
+
+[Sidenote: The English Temper]
+
+It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of
+flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
+The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have
+it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
+missionary of the days of Baeda and Boniface who gathered in the very
+homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil
+of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the
+hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
+their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with
+them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
+of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these fifty winters," sings the
+hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. "Lives
+there no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of them--dare in the
+war-strife welcome my onset! Time's change and chances I have abided,
+held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never sware I falsely
+against right. So for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I
+sit here, wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such a temper, strong
+with the strength of manhood and full of the vigour and the love of life,
+the sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a
+pathetic poetry. "Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness
+or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the fire ring thee, or
+the flood whelm thee, or the sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age
+o'ertake thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in darkness." Strong
+as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that encompassed him,
+that girded his life with a thousand perils and broke it at so short a
+span. "To us," cries Beowulf in his last fight, "to us it shall be as our
+Weird betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!" But the sadness with
+which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries of life and death had
+nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids men eat and drink for
+to-morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of his fate. The
+thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the thought of doom.
+"Well shall a man do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome
+renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death is better than life of shame!"
+cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife with
+the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life is short, the more cause to
+work bravely till it is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end of his
+life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!"
+
+[Sidenote: English Piracy]
+
+The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them
+to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of
+Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at
+heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with
+tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds
+parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance
+were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of
+fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness
+and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by
+personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense
+of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
+a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's "shield-play" and
+"sword-game"; the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush
+of the host and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons,
+helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
+broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of
+the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
+Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to
+their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
+Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we
+catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
+sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he plunged into the sea to
+meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy
+waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love
+he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English
+verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird"
+as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan" as its curved prow breasted
+the "swan-road" of the sea.
+
+Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general
+movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
+advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed
+faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of
+fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of
+vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one
+of the war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed,
+seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards
+fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
+waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
+knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
+Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
+harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
+admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
+making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
+vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
+boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
+broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
+fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
+either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
+"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is
+their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that
+live on the pillage of the world!"
+
+[Sidenote: Britain]
+
+Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and
+they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of
+the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
+English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy
+of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear
+as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
+This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island
+was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year
+before Christ a descent of Julius Caesar revealed it to the Roman world;
+and a century after Caesar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its
+conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over
+the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the Roman
+frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work
+of civilization followed fast on the work of the sword. To the last
+indeed the distance of the island from the seat of empire left her less
+Romanized than any other province of the west. The bulk of the population
+scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung
+to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some
+traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilization
+rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was
+thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own
+municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a
+network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the island to
+the other, manners, language, political life, all were of Rome.
+
+For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
+Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
+prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports amongst which London held the
+first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
+corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
+province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
+Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But
+evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told at last on the
+province of Britain. Wealth and population alike declined under a
+crushing system of taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry,
+under a despotism which crushed out all local independence. And with
+decay within came danger from without. For centuries past the Roman
+frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the
+Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube
+or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled
+the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
+from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It was this mass
+of savage barbarism which broke upon the Empire as it sank into decay. In
+its western dominions the triumph of these assailants was complete. The
+Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered and
+colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians
+encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths
+ruled at last in Italy itself.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of Jute and Saxon]
+
+It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
+fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment the
+province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these
+its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants then
+bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon pirates, as
+we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
+thirty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but civil
+strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last
+on the fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom while striving
+to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. By the
+usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was drawn for this
+purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at
+their head. If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in
+the land which from that time they made their own, it is with this
+landing of Hengest's war-band that English history begins. They landed on
+the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No
+spot can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the
+tread of English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet
+itself, a mere lift of ground with a few grey cottages dotted over it,
+cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But
+taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
+white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay;
+far away to the left across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark
+the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly towards
+Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the national
+tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers; for the
+physical changes of the country since the fifth century have told little
+on its main features. At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of
+sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and through this inlet
+the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind to what
+was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.
+
+[Illustration: Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1t.png)]
+
+The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
+the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
+on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over
+when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
+have flocked from the Channel to their settlement in Thanet; the inlet
+between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won their
+first victory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at
+the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of the Cray
+drove the British forces in terror upon London; but the ground was soon
+won back again, and it was not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts
+which had gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive
+struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so terrible that
+from this moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems to have been
+abandoned, and it was only along its southern shore that the Britons held
+their ground. Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over, and
+with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which
+they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
+English conqueror was done.
+
+The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
+the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
+of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
+the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
+strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
+Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
+vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
+Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
+Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames and
+leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
+between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
+fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future
+landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of
+Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "AElle and
+Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and
+slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left."
+But Hengest and AElle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
+the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
+Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
+Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed to the great
+downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the
+strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory
+at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set the crown of the
+West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt around it checked
+any further advance; and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
+under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders as they pressed
+westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
+Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a long pause in the
+Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested a
+series of victories whose history is lost was giving to men of the same
+Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
+probable however that the strength of Camulodunum, the predecessor of our
+modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants a slow and
+doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled the East-Saxons to
+occupy the territory to which they have given their name of Essex a line
+of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Forests
+checked their further advance into the island.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of the Eagle]
+
+Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
+outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
+Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head, from
+the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
+unconquered: and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
+triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
+Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
+the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
+Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by the
+third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which was
+to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on the people which
+sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that they won. The
+Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of Northumbria
+and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by
+the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia. But it was not till the
+moment we have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto held
+the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the Humber and the
+Trent. This great river-line led like a highway into the heart of
+Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of British
+resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
+One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
+wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
+Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
+the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
+landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
+maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
+record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
+masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
+settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
+the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
+then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
+followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
+tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratae, the predecessor of our
+Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
+body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
+occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
+the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
+to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
+Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
+was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
+was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
+for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
+Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make
+a fresh and desperate stand.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of West-Saxons]
+
+It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the
+West-Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive
+within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort
+of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march
+of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in 571 made them masters of the districts
+which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing along the upper
+valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from
+their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester,
+Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings
+to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at
+Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of
+the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the borders of
+Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently
+brought again to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing
+defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses
+still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, "the white
+town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green
+woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins
+where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the
+halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without light, without song,"
+their stillness broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has
+swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS
+577-796
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Britain becomes England]
+
+With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
+complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
+moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
+Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
+island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
+England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
+the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
+complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
+Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
+their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
+English sword had drawn all was now purely English.
+
+It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other
+provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by
+the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or
+the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of
+ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank,
+but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all
+but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to the
+point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom
+the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
+times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other
+Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
+they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the
+Roman civilization. Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank
+mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
+Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have
+familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to be found in the
+Imperial provinces of the West. What really made the difference between
+the fate of Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
+stubborn courage of the British themselves. In all the world-wide
+struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
+fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or
+Visigoth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
+popular revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric in
+Italy. But in Britain the invader was met by a courage almost equal to
+his own. Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fellows
+abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
+the English had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard fighting.
+
+This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural obstacles of the
+gravest kind. Elsewhere in the Roman world the work of the conquerors was
+aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal and Frank marched along
+Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed river or
+ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so doubtless with the English
+conquerors of Britain. But though Britain had long been Roman, her
+distance from the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any other
+province of the West. Socially the Roman civilization had made little
+impression on any but the townsfolk, and the material civilization of the
+island was yet more backward than its social. Its natural defences threw
+obstacles in its invaders' way. In the forest belts which stretched over
+vast spaces of country they found barriers which in all cases checked
+their advance and in some cases finally stopped it. The Kentishmen and
+the South-Saxons were brought utterly to a standstill by the
+Andredsweald. The East-Saxons could never pierce the woods of their
+western border. The Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the
+Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long and terrible struggle
+that the West-Saxons could hew their way through the forests which
+sheltered the "Gwent" of the southern coast. Their attempt to break out
+of the circle of woodland which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless
+for thirty years; and in the height of their later power they were thrown
+back from the forests of Cheshire.
+
+[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Britons]
+
+It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well as the moral
+circumstances of Britain that we can understand the character of its
+earlier conquest. Field by field, town by town, forest by forest, the
+land was won. And as each bit of ground was torn away by the stranger,
+the Briton sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly and fight for
+the next. There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant
+so impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the men who held it.
+Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like
+Anderida whose long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the
+most part the Britons were not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew
+back. Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slowness of the
+conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of its defence which
+distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of
+the Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the resistance of the Britons
+was greater than that of the other provincials of Rome so the forces of
+their assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy than attack by
+land, and the numbers who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or
+Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric or Chlodewig
+across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing in small parties, and but gradually
+reinforced by after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and
+fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of any joint action among the
+assailants told in the same way. Though all spoke the same language and
+used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
+Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and
+each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any
+collective enterprise.
+
+[Sidenote: The English settlement]
+
+Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a
+very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
+countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
+from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
+sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest
+of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of
+bitter warfare. But it was just through the length of the struggle that
+of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
+So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain
+had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
+Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the
+homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words
+mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave
+the main facts untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
+When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the
+invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land
+which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his
+English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire
+and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
+
+[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]
+
+For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to
+the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
+England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon
+the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they
+were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life,
+administrative order, still remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
+province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the
+past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with
+the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities.
+Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land
+remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The
+Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of
+priest and lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the coins which we dig
+up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a world
+which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its
+manners, its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of the
+completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than the religious
+change which passed over the land. Alone among the German assailants of
+Rome the English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to
+overthrow. The new England was a heathen country. Homestead and boundary,
+the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced
+Christ.
+
+As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us
+the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a
+conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse
+to the land over which it passed. But if the new England which sprang
+from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the
+arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away,
+it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had
+been destroyed. The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout
+the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by
+tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
+society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting
+for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the
+material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was
+impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
+sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home
+of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked
+the site of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the English in the
+conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
+society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of
+their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent
+upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
+to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the laet
+and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of
+conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.
+It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own
+language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village
+life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of
+kinship, its principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates or
+stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common
+temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the
+days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land
+in which we live. Their social and political organization remained
+radically unchanged. In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the
+wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the
+divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough
+groundwork of local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred
+warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the
+local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise
+uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their
+settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army
+organization which the process of distribution reflected. From the large
+amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been
+conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
+small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
+unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common property of the tribe as
+at a later time of the nation. What ground was actually occupied may have
+been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl
+and Ceorl gathered round them their laet and slave as in their homeland by
+the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the shores
+of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For distant and
+dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole
+after-life of Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay our
+Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our
+Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
+our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization,
+letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner
+mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the
+fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the
+mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now,
+passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The King]
+
+But though English society passed thus in its completeness to the soil of
+Britain, its primitive organization was affected in more ways than one by
+the transfer. In the first place conquest begat the King. It seems
+probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their
+own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace time with the
+customary government of village-reeve and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan,
+while it gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom it chose for
+each campaign. But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged
+against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader whom the
+various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Wessex or Mercia
+might follow; and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
+intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher position
+than that of temporary chieftains. It was no doubt from this cause that
+we find Hengest and his son AEsc raised to the kingdom in Kent, or AElle in
+Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric among the West Saxons. The association of
+son with father in this new kingship marked the hereditary character
+which distinguished it from the temporary office of an ealdorman. The
+change was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than the modern
+conception of kingship would lead us to imagine. Hereditary as the
+succession was within a single house, each successive king was still the
+free choice of his people, and for centuries to come it was held within a
+people's right to pass over a claimant too weak or too wicked for the
+throne. In war indeed the king was supreme. But in peace his power was
+narrowly bounded by the customs of his people and the rede of his wise
+men. Justice was not as yet the king's justice, it was the justice of
+village and hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-moot.
+It was only with the assent of the wise men that the king could make laws
+and declare war and assign public lands and name public officers. Above
+all, should his will be to break through the free customs of his people,
+he was without the means of putting his will into action, for the one
+force he could call on was the host, and the host was the people itself
+in arms.
+
+[Sidenote: The Thegn]
+
+With the new English king rose a new order of English nobles. The social
+distinction of the eorl was founded on the peculiar purity of his blood,
+on his long descent from the original settler around whom township and
+thorpe grew up. A new distinction was now to be found in service done to
+the king. From the earliest times of German society it had been the wont
+of young men greedy of honour or seeking training in arms to bind
+themselves as "comrades" to king or chief. The leader whom they chose
+gave them horses, arms, a seat in his mead hall, and gifts from his
+hoard. The "comrade" on the other hand--the gesith or thegn, as he was
+called--bound himself to follow and fight for his lord. The principle of
+personal dependence as distinguished from the warrior's general duty to
+the folk at large was embodied in the thegn. "Chieftains fight for
+victory," says Tacitus; "comrades for their chieftain." When one of
+Beowulf's "comrades" saw his lord hard bested "he minded him of the
+homestead he had given him, of the folk right he gave him as his father
+had it; nor might he hold back then." Snatching up sword and shield he
+called on his fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. "I mind me of the
+day," he cried, "when we drank the mead, the day we gave pledge to our
+lord in the beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that we would
+pay him back our war-gear, our helms and our hard swords, if need befel
+him. Unmeet is it, methinks, that we should bear back our shields to our
+home unless we guard our lord's life." The larger the band of such
+"comrades," the more power and repute it gave their lord. It was from
+among the chiefs whose war-band was strongest that the leaders of the
+host were commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into kings, the
+number of their thegns naturally increased. The rank of the "comrades"
+too rose with the rise of their lord. The king's thegns were his
+body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his will. They were his
+nearest and most constant counsellors. As the gathering of petty tribes
+into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls in each realm, and in a
+corresponding degree diminished their social importance, it raised in
+equal measure the rank of the king's thegns. A post among them was soon
+coveted and won by the greatest and noblest in the land. Their service
+was rewarded by exemption from the general jurisdiction of hundred-court
+or shire-court, for it was part of a thegn's meed for his service that he
+should be judged only by the lord he served. Other meed was found in
+grants of public land which made them a local nobility, no longer bound
+to actual service in the king's household or the king's war-band, but
+still bound to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than those
+which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader of his tribe. In a word,
+thegnhood contained within itself the germ of that later feudalism which
+was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Bernicians]
+
+But the strife between the conquering tribes which at once followed on
+their conquest of Britain was to bring about changes even more momentous
+in the development of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle
+were making themselves masters of central and southern Britain, the
+English who had landed on its northernmost shores had been slowly winning
+for themselves the coast district between the Forth and the Tyne which
+bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress seems to have been small till
+they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the "Flame-bearer," who
+found a site for his King's town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough;
+nor was it till the reign of his fourth son AEthelric that they gained
+full mastery over the Britons along their western border. But once
+masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their
+English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, whose first King AElla
+was now sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the foreign markets
+with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history
+shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at
+Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay
+recalled the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their fair
+faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what
+country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked the trader who brought them.
+The slave-dealer answered "They are English," or as the word ran in the
+Latin form it would bear at Rome, "they are Angles." The deacon's pity
+veiled itself in poetic humour. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with
+faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the
+merchant, "from Deira." "_De ira!_" was the untranslatable wordplay of
+the vivacious Roman--"aye, plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's
+mercy! And what is the name of their king?" They told him "AElla," and
+Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in
+AElla's land," he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should
+be brought to sing it.
+
+While Gregory was thus playing with AElla's name the old king passed away,
+and with his death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems to have
+ceased. His children fled over the western border to find refuge among
+the Welsh, and AEthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph. A new age
+of our history opens in this submission of one English people to another.
+When the two kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of
+national formation began. If a new England sprang out of the mass of
+English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the
+gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common
+political head. The difference in power between state and state which
+inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which
+the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the
+kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main
+on a footing of equality. All had taken an independent share in the work
+of conquest. Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was
+recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.
+Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon
+kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of
+each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.
+It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were
+grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South
+and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In neither
+instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of
+one member of the group over the others; while north of the Humber the
+feeling between the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
+settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility rather than of
+friendship. But this age of isolation, of equality, of independence, had
+now come to an end. The progress of the conquest had drawn a sharp line
+between the kingdoms of the conquerors. The work of half of them was
+done. In the south of the island not only Kent but Sussex, Essex, and
+Middlesex were surrounded by English territory, and hindered by that
+single fact from all further growth. The same fate had befallen the East
+Engle, the South Engle, the Middle and the North Engle. The West Saxons,
+on the other hand, and the West Engle, or Mercians, still remained free
+to conquer and expand on the south of the Humber, as the Englishmen of
+Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north of that river. It was
+plain, therefore, that from this moment the growth of these powers would
+throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with an
+ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new arrangement of
+political forces. The greater kingdoms would in the end be drawn to
+subject and absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman and
+Briton would be added a struggle between Englishman and Englishman.
+
+[Sidenote: Kent]
+
+It was through this struggle and the establishment of a lordship on the
+part of the stronger and growing states over their weaker and stationary
+fellows that the English kingdoms were to make their first step towards
+union in a single England. Such an overlordship seemed destined but a few
+years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The victories of Ceawlin and
+Cuthwulf left it the most powerful of the English kingdoms. None of its
+fellow states seemed able to hold their own against a power which
+stretched from the Chilterns to the Severn and from the Channel to the
+Ouse. But after its defeat in the march upon Chester Wessex suddenly
+broke down into a chaos of warring tribes; and her place was taken by two
+powers whose rise to greatness was as sudden as her fall. The first of
+these was Kent. The Kentish king AEthelberht found himself hemmed in on
+every side by English territory; and since conquest over Britons was
+denied him he sought a new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at the
+head of the conquerors of the south. The break up of Wessex no doubt
+aided his attempt; but we know little of the causes or events which
+brought about his success. We know only that the supremacy of the Kentish
+king was owned at last by the English peoples of the east and centre of
+Britain. But it was not by her political action that Kent was in the end
+to further the creation of a single England; for the lordship which
+AEthelberht built up was doomed to fall for ever with his death, and yet
+his death left Kent the centre of a national union far wider as it was
+far more enduring than the petty lordship which stretched over Eastern
+Britain. Only three or four years after Gregory had pitied the English
+slaves in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as Bishop of the
+Imperial City in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to
+the faith; and an opening was given him by AEthelberht's marriage with
+Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris. Bertha like
+her Frankish kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop accompanied her
+from Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside
+the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for their worship. The king
+himself remained true to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no
+doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of
+a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the English people. The
+missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet, at the spot where
+Hengest had landed more than a century before; and AEthelberht received
+them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the
+eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of
+Canterbury. The king listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine
+as the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from Gaul rendered it
+in the English tongue. "Your words are fair," AEthelberht replied at last
+with English good sense, "but they are new and of doubtful meaning." For
+himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but with
+the usual religious tolerance of the German race he promised shelter and
+protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing
+before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in
+concert the strains of the litany of their Church. "Turn from this city,
+O Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy
+house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the
+jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had
+wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in
+the Roman market-place, "Alleluia!"
+
+
+[Sidenote: Christian England]
+
+It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest became
+yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
+landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
+the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
+missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as
+they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
+legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
+and the thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
+fathers had slaughtered or driven out that AEthelberht listened in the
+preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
+England, became a centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became
+again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its
+correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned
+with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed that union with the
+Western world which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new England
+was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
+art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors
+returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed
+never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the
+result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes
+of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their
+arrival.
+
+[Sidenote: AEthelfrith]
+
+A year passed before AEthelberht yielded to the preaching of Augustine.
+But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and
+the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their king. The new
+religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which
+AEthelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms. Saeberht, King of the
+East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to
+build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of
+London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Raedwald resolved to serve
+Christ and the older gods together. But while AEthelberht was thus
+furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to
+which Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing
+it out as the coming political centre of the new England. In 593, four
+years before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, AEthelric was
+succeeded by his son AEthelfrith, and the new king took up the work of
+conquest with a vigour greater than had yet been shown by any English
+leader. For ten years he waged war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a
+tract which stretched along his western border from Dumbarton to
+Carlisle. The contest ended in a great battle at Daegsastan, perhaps
+Dawston in Liddesdale; and AEthelfrith turned to deliver a yet more
+crushing blow on his southern border. British kingdoms still stretched
+from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn; and had their line remained
+unbroken the British resistance might yet have withstood the English
+advance. It was with a sound political instinct therefore that AEthelfrith
+marched in 613 upon Chester, the point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a
+kingdom which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked itself to the
+British states of what we now call Wales. Hard by the city two thousand
+monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settlements which were
+characteristic of Celtic Christianity, and after a three days' fast a
+crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to the field.
+AEthelfrith watched the wild gestures of the monks as they stood apart
+from the host with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay
+them in the coming fight. "Bear they arms or no," said the King, "they
+war against us when they cry against us to their God," and in the
+surprise and rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.
+
+With the battle of Chester Britain as a country ceased to exist. By their
+victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint,
+of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall, from the general body of
+their race. By AEthelfrith's victory at Chester and the reduction of
+southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of Britain was broken
+into two several parts. From this time therefore the character of the
+English conquest of Britain changes. The warfare of Briton and Englishman
+died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms against separate
+British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians and Strathclyde,
+of Mercia against the Welsh between Anglesea and the British Channel, of
+Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip to the Land's End. But
+great as was the importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of
+Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of England
+itself. The drift towards national unity had already begun, but from the
+moment of AEthelfrith's victory this drift became the main current of our
+history. Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its
+conquerors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of plunder;
+while the severance of the British kingdoms took from their enemies the
+pressure of a common danger. The conquests of AEthelfrith left him without
+a rival in military power, and he turned from victories over the Welsh,
+as their English foes called the Britons, to the building up of a
+lordship over his own countrymen.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Eadwine]
+
+The power of AEthelberht seems to have declined with old age, and though
+the Essex men still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of
+Mid-Britain shook it off. So strong however had the instinct of union now
+become, that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation.
+Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and South-English now owned
+the lordship of the East-English King Raedwald. The shelter given by
+Raedwald to AElla's son Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian
+attack. Fortune however deserted AEthelfrith, and a snatch of northern
+song still tells of the day when the river Idle by Retford saw his defeat
+and fall. But the greatness of Northumbria survived its king. In 617
+Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men of Deira; and his conquest of
+Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which the Bernician
+conquest of Deira had first brought about. The greatness of Northumbria
+now reached its height. Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a
+genius for civil government which shows how utterly the mere age of
+conquest had passed away. With him began the English proverb so often
+applied to after kings: "A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from
+sea to sea in Eadwine's day." Peaceful communication revived along the
+deserted highways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes,
+and a cup of brass set beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some
+faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round this
+new "Empire of the English"; a royal standard of purple and gold floated
+before Eadwine as he rode through the villages; a feather tuft attached
+to a spear, the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the
+streets. The Northumbrian king became in fact supreme over Britain as no
+king of English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached to
+the Firth of Forth, and here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded a
+city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's burgh. To the west his
+arms crushed the long resistance of Elmet, the district about Leeds; he
+was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles
+of Anglesea and Man. South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the
+five English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons remained awhile
+independent. But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power when
+Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by Baeda tells something of the
+fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection of the south to
+the overlordship of Northumbria. In an Easter-court which he held in his
+royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy
+of Wessex, who brought a message from its king. In the midst of the
+conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and
+rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's war-band,
+threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the
+stroke that even through Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim.
+The king however recovered from his wound to march on the West-Saxons; he
+slew or subdued all who had conspired against him, and returned
+victorious to his own country.
+
+[Sidenote: Conversion of Northumbria]
+
+Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King's daughter as a wife,
+a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the
+Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall
+stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
+worn face, were long remembered in the North. Moved by his queen's
+prayers Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful
+from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on
+the new faith to which he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as now
+in the light it threw on the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the
+darkness of the future as of the past. "So seems the life of man, O
+king," burst forth an aged ealdorman, "as a sparrow's flight through the
+hall when one is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
+lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm without. The sparrow flies
+in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
+hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the
+darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
+sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. If this new
+teaching tell us aught certainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser
+argument told on the crowd. "None of your people, Eadwine, have
+worshipped the gods more busily than I," said Coifi the priest, "yet
+there are many more favoured and more fortunate. Were these gods good for
+anything they would help their worshippers." Then leaping on horseback,
+he hurled his spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the
+rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: Penda]
+
+But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a struggle.
+Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with the death of
+AEthelberht. The young kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church
+where the Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist to the people,
+crying, "Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba," and on
+the bishop's refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of
+reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion; but Mercia, which had as
+yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as
+the champion of the heathen gods. Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of
+the old religion a chance of winning back his people's freedom and giving
+it the lead among the tribes about it. Originally mere settlers along the
+Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited
+them to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of their
+Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of expansion. Their
+fights along the frontier too kept their warlike energy at its height.
+Penda must have already asserted his superiority over the four other
+English tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured to attack
+Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and Magesaetas
+on the Severn. Even with this accession of strength however he was still
+no match for Northumbria. But the war of the English people with the
+Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a season, and the
+Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had parted the two
+races till now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a
+joint attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place called the
+Heathfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and
+slain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oswald]
+
+Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line of AEthelfrith
+to its throne; and after a year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
+its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the north, and
+Oswald's first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian force
+gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged itself at the new King's
+bidding to become Christian if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon fell
+fighting on the "Heaven's Field," as after times called the field of
+battle; the submission of Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of
+Northumbria; and for seven years the power of Oswald equalled that of
+Eadwine. It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this
+struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in Bernicia the work of
+conversion which his victory began. Paulinus fled from Northumbria at
+Eadwine's fall; and the Roman Church, though established in Kent, did
+little in contending elsewhere against the heathen reaction. Its place in
+the conversion of northern England was taken by missionaries from
+Ireland. To understand the true meaning of this change we must remember
+how greatly the Christian Church in the west had been affected by the
+German invasion. Before the landing of the English in Britain the
+Christian Church stretched in an unbroken line across Western Europe to
+the furthest coasts of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan
+English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of this great
+communion and broke it into two unequal parts. On one side lay Italy,
+Spain, and Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to and remained in direct
+contact with the See of Rome, on the other, practically cut off from the
+general body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland. But the condition
+of the two portions of Western Christendom was very different. While the
+vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a
+bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders,
+drew from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since.
+Christianity was received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and
+letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and Biblical
+knowledge which fled from the Continent took refuge in its schools. The
+new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook confinement within the
+bounds of Ireland itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island,
+had not been half a century dead when Irish Christianity flung itself
+with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which was
+rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among
+the Picts of the Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern seas.
+An Irish missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the
+Apennines. The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its name another
+Irish missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing
+over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed as if the
+course of the world's history was to be changed, as if the older Celtic
+race that Roman and German had swept before them had turned to the moral
+conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was
+to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West.
+
+[Sidenote: Aidan]
+
+On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of Scotland an
+Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mission-station of Iona. It
+was within its walls that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his
+accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from
+among its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to his call obtained
+little success. He declared on his return that among a people so stubborn
+and barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was impossible. "Was it
+their stubbornness or your severity?" asked Aidan, a brother sitting by;
+"did you forget God's word to give them the milk first and then the
+meat?" All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to undertake the
+abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his bishop's
+see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne. Thence, from a monastery
+which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers poured
+forth over the heathen realms. Aidan himself wandered on foot, preaching
+among the peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his own court the
+King acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their efforts to
+convert his thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed began to blend
+itself with that of the warlike glory of AEthelfrith or the wise
+administration of Eadwine, and the moral power which was to reach its
+height in AElfred first dawns in the story of Oswald. For after times the
+memory of Oswald's greatness was lost in the memory of his piety. "By
+reason of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the Lord he
+was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees." As he
+feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble of his
+war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor at his gate told him
+of a multitude that still waited fasting without. The king at once bade
+the untasted meat before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish
+be parted piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed
+it. "May this hand," he cried, "never grow old."
+
+Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his
+predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint
+likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the
+Picts calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain." His power was bent
+to carry forward the conversion of all England, but prisoned as it was to
+the central districts of the country heathendom fought desperately for
+life. Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was one
+continuous battle with the new religion; but it was a battle rather with
+the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than with the supremacy of the
+Cross. East-Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two
+powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from the Mercian rule.
+But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called the battle
+of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain. For a few years after his
+victory at the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathenism
+triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his overlordship as it had
+owned that of Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith which he had
+embraced but a few years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira
+seems to have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though distracted by
+civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused to yield. Year
+by year the Mercian king carried his ravages over the north; once he
+reached even the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bamborough.
+Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled down the cottages around,
+and piling their wood against its walls fired the mass in a fair wind
+that drove the flames on the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing,"
+cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Farne, as he saw the
+smoke drifting over the city, and a change of wind--so ran the legend of
+Northumbria's agony--drove back the flames on those who kindled them. But
+burned and harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the Cross. Oswiu, a
+third son of AEthelfrith, held his ground stoutly against Penda's inroads
+till their cessation enabled him to build up again the old Northumbrian
+kingdom by a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was never
+henceforth to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen in the
+renewal of Christianity throughout Britain. East-Anglia, conquered as it
+was, had clung to its faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again.
+Penda's own son, whom he had set over the Middle-English, received
+baptism and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the
+new belief appeared fearlessly among the Mercians themselves. Penda gave
+them no hindrance. In words that mark the temper of a man of whom we
+would willingly know more, Baeda tells us that the old king only "hated
+and scorned those whom he saw not doing the works of the faith they had
+received." His attitude shows that Penda looked with the tolerance of his
+race on all questions of creed, and that he was fighting less for
+heathenism than for political independence. And now the growing power of
+Oswiu called him to the old struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met
+Oswiu in the field of Winwaed by Leeds. It was in vain that the
+Northumbrian sought to avert Penda's attack by offers of ornaments and
+costly gifts. "If the pagans will not accept them," Oswiu cried at last,
+"let us offer them to One that will"; and he vowed that if successful he
+would dedicate his daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries in his
+realm. Victory at last declared for the faith of Christ. Penda himself
+fell on the field. The river over which the Mercians fled was swollen
+with a great rain; it swept away the fragments of the heathen host, and
+the cause of the older gods was lost for ever.
+
+[Sidenote: Oswiu]
+
+The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was followed by
+a long and profound peace. For three years after the battle of Winwaed
+Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu's name. The winning
+of central England was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for
+Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathendom was dead with Penda. "Being thus
+freed," Baeda tells us, "the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve
+the true King, Christ." Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the
+Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the
+missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated.
+Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he
+travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theodore
+with his own hands lifted him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry breaks
+out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of singers singing
+sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside St. Mary's Church
+where the bishop lay dying. Then "the same song ascended from the roof
+again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came." It was the soul
+of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to
+solace the last hours of Ceadda.
+
+[Sidenote: Cuthbert]
+
+In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost
+in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the new
+religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the
+Lowlands. Born on the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found
+shelter at eight years old in a widow's house in the little village of
+Wrangholm. Already in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
+which caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things,
+and a passing attack of lameness deepened the religious impression. A
+traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stopping his
+horse to tend Cuthbert's injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy's
+shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still famous as a
+sheepwalk, though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock. There
+meteors plunging into the night became to him a company of angelic
+spirits carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his longings
+slowly settled into a resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he
+made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an
+untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled
+in the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land of poetry
+and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
+Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.
+Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage
+and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to
+see the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and
+farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and
+there with clusters of wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
+which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about them.
+The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were for the most part
+Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their
+thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded
+to the king. But they retained their old superstitions side by side with
+the new worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on their
+heathen charms and amulets; and if trouble befell the Christian preachers
+who came settling among them, they took it as proof of the wrath of the
+older gods. When some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the
+construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at
+work on them out to sea, the rustic bystanders shouted, "Let nobody pray
+for them; let nobody pity these men; for they have taken away from us our
+old worship, and how their new-fangled customs are to be kept nobody
+knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wandered among listeners such as
+these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from whose
+roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Unlike his Irish
+comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from village to village;
+the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians listened willingly to one who was
+himself a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the rough
+Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Tweed. His patience, his
+humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and not
+less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for the
+hard life he had chosen. "Never did man die of hunger who served God
+faithfully," he would say, when nightfall found them supperless in the
+waste. "Look at the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him if He
+will"--and once at least he owed his meal to a fish that the scared bird
+let fall. A snowstorm drove his boat on the coast of Fife. "The snow
+closes the road along the shore," mourned his comrades; "the storm bars
+our way over sea." "There is still the way of heaven that lies open,"
+said Cuthbert.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Caedmon]
+
+While missionaries were thus labouring among its peasantry, Northumbria
+saw the rise of a number of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict
+ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model of
+the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person who sought
+devotional retirement. The most notable and wealthy of these houses was
+that of Streoneshealh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her
+abbey on the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern Sea. Hild
+was a Northumbrian Deborah whose counsel was sought even by kings; and
+the double monastery over which she ruled became a seminary of bishops
+and priests. The sainted John of Beverley was among her scholars. But the
+name which really throws glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from
+whose lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first great English song.
+Though well advanced in years, Caedmon had learned nothing of the art of
+verse, the alliterative jingle so common among his fellows, "wherefore
+being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for glee's sake to sing in
+turn, he no sooner saw the harp come towards him than he rose from the
+board and went homewards. Once when he had done thus, and gone from the
+feast to the stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there
+appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, 'Sing,
+Caedmon, some song to Me.' 'I cannot sing,' he answered; 'for this cause
+left I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with him answered,
+'However that be, you shall sing to Me.' 'What shall I sing?' rejoined
+Caedmon. 'The beginning of created things,' replied He. In the morning the
+cowherd stood before Hild and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike
+concluded 'that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord.'
+They translated for Caedmon a passage in Holy Writ, 'bidding him, if he
+could, put the same into verse.' The next morning he gave it them
+composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine
+grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on him the
+monastic life." Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into
+Caedmon's poem. "He sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of
+man, and of all the history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt and
+entering into the Promised Land; of the incarnation, passion, and
+resurrection of Christ, and of His ascension; of the terror of future
+judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven."
+
+[Sidenote: Synod of Whitby]
+
+But even while Caedmon was singing the glories of Northumbria and of the
+Irish Church were passing away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its
+fall. Only a few years after Penda's defeat the Mercians threw off
+Oswin's yoke and set Wulfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne. They were
+aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife which was now
+rending the Northumbrian realm. The labour of Aidan, the victories of
+Oswald and Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church.
+The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses whose foundation
+followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition,
+not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the
+instructions, not of Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims of
+supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by the see of
+Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in the
+North of England was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's queen brought with
+her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church to the Roman See; and the
+visit of two young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love of Rome
+into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of these, Benedict Biscop,
+returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from
+the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so
+hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great
+council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his
+realm should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial
+enough. Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish
+fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid
+pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the authority of
+Columba, the other to that of St. Peter. "You own," cried the king at
+last to Colman, "that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of
+heaven--has He given such power to Columba?" The bishop could but answer
+"No." "Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven," said Oswiu, "lest
+when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back
+on me, and there be none to open." The humorous tone of Oswiu's decision
+could not hide its importance, and the synod had no sooner broken up than
+Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of
+their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed away to
+Iona. Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which
+severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion
+Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after fortunes of
+England. Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical
+history of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid
+of that power of organization which was the strength of the Roman Church,
+the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the
+country as the basis of its government. Tribal quarrels and
+ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the
+clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no element
+save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast
+religious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of
+piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing
+influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a
+picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from
+such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the
+Synod of Whitby. But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
+danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have remained
+spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
+might be from its older greatness, it preserved the traditions of
+civilization, of letters and art and law. Its faith still served as a
+bond which held together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the
+Empire. To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, "to fight against the
+world." To repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation. Dimly as
+such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu's mind, it was the
+instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude
+of his youth and to link England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
+
+[Sidenote: Theodore]
+
+Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization undertaken by a
+Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to secure
+England to her sway as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more
+decisive step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly in the
+organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church of England, as we
+know it to-day, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
+Theodore. His work was determined in its main outlines by the previous
+history of the English people. The conquest of the Continent had been
+wrought either by races which were already Christian, or by heathens who
+bowed to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this
+oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire and their
+Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that survived of the
+Roman world. The Church everywhere remained untouched. The Christian
+bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his
+Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the German and his
+subjects, the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To
+the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that
+was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
+art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been driven out
+together. When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the very
+memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had
+passed away. The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a
+heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings,
+who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally
+followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first
+royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
+In this way realms which are all but forgotten are commemorated in the
+limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an
+obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of
+Mercia may be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of
+Lichfield. In adding many sees to those he found Theodore was careful to
+make their dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations. But
+he soon passed from this extension of the episcopate to its organization.
+In his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them
+round the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesiastical
+canons, Theodore did unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
+kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for the most
+part from mere accidents of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
+The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed by the three
+larger ones, and of these three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
+to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity which
+was to characterize the new England had thus already declared itself; but
+the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form and surrounded with
+divine sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
+The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds
+to the thought of a single throne for their one temporal overlord. The
+regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to primate, in the
+administration of the Church, supplied a mould on which the civil
+organization of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the councils
+gathered by Theodore were the first of our national gatherings for
+general legislation. It was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
+Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to come together in the
+Witenagemot of all England. The synods which Theodore convened as
+religiously representative of the whole English nation led the way by
+their example to our national parliaments. The canons which these synods
+enacted led the way to a national system of law.
+
+[Sidenote: Wulfhere]
+
+The organization of the episcopate was followed by the organization of
+the parish system. The mission-station or monastery from which priest or
+bishop went forth on journey after journey to preach and baptize
+naturally disappeared as the land became Christian. The missionaries
+turned into settled clergy. As the king's chaplain became a bishop and
+the kingdom his diocese, so the chaplain of an English noble became the
+priest and the manor his parish. But this parish system is probably later
+than Theodore, and the system of tithes which has been sometimes coupled
+with his name dates only from the close of the eighth century. What was
+really due to him was the organization of the episcopate, and the impulse
+which this gave to national unity. But the movement towards unity found a
+sudden check in the revived strength of Mercia. Wulfhere proved a
+vigorous and active ruler, and the peaceful reign of Oswiu left him free
+to build up again during fifteen years of rule (659-675) that Mercian
+overlordship over the tribes of Mid-England which had been lost at
+Penda's death. He had more than his father's success. Not only did Essex
+again own his supremacy, but even London fell into Mercian hands. The
+West-Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all their
+settlements to the north of that river were annexed to the Mercian realm.
+Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached even south of the Thames, for Sussex in
+its dread of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlordship,
+and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two outlying settlements of
+the Jutes--the Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras along the
+Southampton water--which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian
+arms. The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in hand
+with its military advance. The forests of its western border, the marshes
+of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by monastic
+colonies, whose success shows the hold which Christianity had now gained
+over its people. Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild western
+woodlands and in the yet wilder fen-country on the eastern border of the
+kingdom which stretched from the "Holland," the sunk, hollow land of
+Lincolnshire, to the channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters
+and reedy islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by
+flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either quarter the new faith made
+its way. In the western woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey
+round which gathered the town of Evesham, and the eastern fen-land was
+soon filled with religious houses. Here through the liberality of King
+Wulfhere rose the Abbey of Peterborough. Here too, Guthlac, a youth of
+the royal race of Mercia, sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes
+of Crowland, and so great was the reverence he won, that only two years
+had passed since his death when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over
+his tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site; the buildings rested
+on oaken piles driven into the marsh; a great stone church replaced the
+hermit's cell; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed the pools
+around them into fertile meadow-land.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Ecgfrith]
+
+In spite however of this rapid recovery of its strength by Mercia,
+Northumbria remained the dominant state in Britain: and Ecgfrith, who
+succeeded Oswiu in 670, so utterly defeated Wulfhere when war broke out
+between them that he was glad to purchase peace by the surrender of
+Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased more hardly had not
+Ecgfrith's ambition turned rather to conquests over the Briton than to
+victories over his fellow Englishmen. The war between Briton and
+Englishman which had languished since the battle of Chester had been
+revived some twelve years before by an advance of the West-Saxons to the
+south-west. Unable to save the possessions of Wessex north of the Thames
+from the grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwealh, sought for compensation
+in an attack on his Welsh neighbours. A victory at Bradford on the Avon
+enabled him to overrun the country near Mendip which had till then been
+held by the Britons; and a second campaign in 658, which ended in a
+victory on the skirts of the great forest that covered Somerset to the
+east, settled the West-Saxons as conquerors round the sources of the
+Parret. It may have been the example of the West-Saxons which spurred
+Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon his British neighbours in the west
+which widened the bounds of his kingdom. His reign marks the highest
+pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies chased the Britons from the
+kingdom of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A
+large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the see of
+Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have seen
+before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new
+mission-station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of
+Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He remained
+there through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby,
+and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with
+endless disputes against which his patience and good humour struggled in
+vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
+of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for
+the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
+In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within
+deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence for
+his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne.
+He entered Carlisle, which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a
+moment when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of
+Ecgfrith's against the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had long
+been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of it owned
+Ecgfrith's supremacy. In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
+subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed on
+Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which
+had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy,
+setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept
+the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved
+the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over a Roman fountain
+which still stood unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
+bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen falling from the old
+man's lips. "Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril
+of the fight is over and done." "Watch and pray," he said, when they
+questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a
+solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had
+turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that
+Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on
+the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.
+
+[Sidenote: Mercian greatness]
+
+The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts
+pressed on the kingdom from the north AEthelred, Wulfhere's successor,
+attacked it on the Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace
+which left him master of Middle-England and free to attempt the direct
+conquest of the south. For the moment this attempt proved a fruitless
+one. Mercia was still too weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping
+from Northumbria's hands, while Wessex which seemed her destined prey
+rose at this moment into fresh power under the greatest of its early
+kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king whose reign covered the long period from
+688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war which Cenwealh and
+Centwine had begun. He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the
+Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier of his new
+conquests by a fort on the banks of the Tone which has grown into the
+present Taunton. The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole
+district which now bears the name of Somerset. The conquest of Sussex and
+of Kent on his eastern border made Ine master of all Britain south of the
+Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king Ceolred in a bloody
+encounter at Wanborough in 715 seemed to establish the threefold division
+of the English race between three realms of almost equal power. But able
+as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife
+that was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the
+disgust which drove him from the world. He had feasted royally at one of
+his country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his queen bade
+him turn back thither. The king returned to find his house stripped of
+curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the dung of cattle, while
+in the royal bed where he had slept with AEthelburh rested a sow with her
+farrow of pigs. The scene had no need of the queen's comment: "See, my
+lord, how the fashion of this world passeth away!" In 726 he sought peace
+in a pilgrimage to Rome. The anarchy which had driven Ine from the throne
+broke out in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to AEthelbald,
+the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian realm. AEthelbald took up with
+better fortune the struggle of his people for supremacy over the south.
+He penetrated to the very heart of the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege
+and capture of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For
+twenty years the overlordship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain
+south of the Humber. It was at the head of the forces not of Mercia only
+but of East-Anglia and Kent, as well as of the West-Saxons, that
+AEthelbald marched against the Welsh on his western border.
+
+[Sidenote: Baeda]
+
+In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King found grounds for
+a hope that Northern Britain would also yield to his sway. But the dream
+of a single England was again destined to be foiled. Fallen as
+Northumbria was from its old glory, it still remained a great power.
+Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Aldfrith and
+Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of Western Europe. No
+schools were more famous than those of Jarrow and York. The whole
+learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar.
+Baeda--the Venerable Bede as later times styled him--was born nine years
+after the Synod of Whitby on ground which passed a year later to Benedict
+Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the
+Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent
+in an offshoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his friend
+Ceolfrid. Baeda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole life in the
+same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order
+and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or
+teaching, or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more
+touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English
+scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the
+tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned
+for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While still young he became a
+teacher, and six hundred monks besides strangers that flocked thither for
+instruction formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how among
+the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the monk, Baeda could have
+found time for the composition of the numerous works that made his name
+famous in the West. But materials for study had accumulated in
+Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and the
+libraries which were forming at Wearmouth and York. The tradition of the
+older Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into that
+path of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his fame.
+Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came to him from the school
+which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded beneath the walls of
+Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from a
+Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop.
+Little by little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole
+range of the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him,
+"the father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic
+culture was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and
+Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
+him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses from the AEneid break
+his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of
+the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of
+spring. His work was done with small aid from others. "I am my own
+secretary," he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my own librarian." But
+forty-five works remained after his death to attest his prodigious
+industry. In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most
+important among these were the commentaries and homilies upon various
+books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings of the Fathers.
+But he was far from confining himself to theology. In treatises compiled
+as textbooks for his scholars, Baeda threw together all that the world had
+then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, in
+philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopaedic
+character of his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He
+loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last
+work was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost
+the last words that broke from his lips were some English rimes upon
+death.
+
+But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which
+immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English
+Nation," Baeda was at once the founder of mediaeval history and the first
+English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that
+follows the landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own
+personal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail
+and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he
+owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and Nothelm. What he owed to no
+informant was his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no story of
+his own telling is so touching as the story of his death. Two weeks
+before the Easter of 735 the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
+and loss of breath. He still preserved however his usual pleasantness and
+gay good-humour, and in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his
+lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his own English tongue broke
+from time to time from the master's lip--rude rimes that told how before
+the "need-fare," Death's stern "must go," none can enough bethink him
+what is to be his doom for good or ill. The tears of Baeda's scholars
+mingled with his song. "We never read without weeping," writes one of
+them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and still master and
+pupils toiled at their work, for Based longed to bring to an end his
+version of St. John's Gospel into the English tongue and his extracts
+from Bishop Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read a lie," he answered
+those who would have had him rest, "or to work to no purpose after I am
+gone." A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, but
+he spent the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his
+scholars, "Learn with what speed you may; I know not how long I may
+last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again the old man
+called his scholars round him and bade them write. "There is still a
+chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning drew on, "and it is
+hard for thee to question thyself any longer." "It is easily done," said
+Baeda; "take thy pen and write quickly." Amid tears and farewells the day
+wore on till eventide. "There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear
+master," said the boy. "Write it quickly," bade the dying man. "It is
+finished now," said the little scribe at last. "You speak truth," said
+the master; "all is finished now." Placed upon the pavement, his head
+supported in his scholar's arms, his face turned to the spot where he was
+wont to pray, Baeda chanted the solemn "Glory to God." As his voice
+reached the close of his song he passed quietly away.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of AEthelbald]
+
+First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first
+among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English
+literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered
+round him for instruction he is the father of our national education. In
+his physical treatises he is the first figure to which our science looks
+back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar's life was broken by the growing
+anarchy of Northumbria, and by threats of war from its Mercian rival. At
+last AEthelbald marched on a state which seemed exhausted by civil discord
+and ready for submission to his arms. But its king Eadberht showed
+himself worthy of the kings that had gone before him, and in 740 he threw
+back AEthelbald's attack in a repulse which not only ruined the Mercian
+ruler's hopes of northern conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
+Already goaded to revolt by exactions, the West-Saxons were roused to a
+fresh struggle for independence, and after twelve years of continued
+outbreaks the whole people mustered at Burford under the golden dragon of
+their race. The fight was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the
+Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a decisive victory freed Wessex
+from the Mercian yoke. AEthelbald's own throne seems to have been shaken;
+for three years later, in 757, the Mercian king was surprised and slain
+in a night attack by his ealdormen, and a year of confusion passed ere
+his kinsman Offa could avenge him on his murderers and succeed to the
+realm.
+
+But though Eadberht might beat back the inroads of the Mercians and even
+conquer Strathclyde, before the anarchy of his own kingdom he could only
+fling down his sceptre and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne.
+From the death of Baeda the history of Northumbria became in fact little
+more than a wild story of lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was
+swept away by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its
+turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by
+famine and plague. An anarchy almost as complete fell on Wessex after the
+recovery of its freedom. Only in Mid-England was there any sign of order
+and settled rule. The crushing defeat at Burford, though it had brought
+about revolts which stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had made, was
+far from having broken the Mercian power. Under the long reign of Offa,
+which went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all but its old dominion.
+Since the dissolution of the temporary alliance which Penda formed with
+the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with the Britons in the west had been
+the one great hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under Offa Mercia
+braced herself to the completion of her British conquests. Pushing after
+779 over the Severn, and carrying his ravages into the heart of Wales,
+Offa drove the King of Powys from his capital, which changed its old name
+of Pengwern for the significant English title of the Town in the Scrub or
+Bush, Scrobbesbyryg, Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught the
+Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and Offa resolved to
+create a military border by planting a settlement of Englishmen between
+the Severn, which had till then served as the western boundary of the
+English race, and the huge "Offa's Dyke" which he drew from the mouth of
+Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later conquests of the West-Saxons,
+the old plan of extermination was definitely abandoned and the Welsh who
+chose to remain dwelled undisturbed among their English conquerors. From
+these conquests over the Britons Offa turned to build up again the realm
+which had been shattered at Burford. But his progress was slow. A
+reconquest of Kent in 775 woke anew the jealousy of the West-Saxons; and
+though Offa defeated their army at Bensington in 779 the victory was
+followed by several years of inaction. It was not till Wessex was again
+weakened by fresh anarchy that he was able in 794 to seize East-Anglia
+and restore his realm to its old bounds under Wulfhere. Further he could
+not go. A Kentish revolt occupied him till his death in 796, and his
+successor Cenwulf did little but preserve the realm he bequeathed him. At
+the close of the eighth century the drift of the English peoples towards
+a national unity was in fact utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria
+had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia had
+broken down before the resistance of Wessex. A threefold division seemed
+to have stamped itself upon the land; and so complete was the balance of
+power between the three realms which parted it that no subjection of one
+to the other seemed likely to fuse the English tribes into an English
+people.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN
+796-947
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Northmen]
+
+The union which each English kingdom in turn had failed to bring about
+was brought about by the pressure of the Northmen. The dwellers in the
+isles of the Baltic or on either side of the Scandinavian peninsula had
+lain hidden till now from Western Christendom, waging their battle for
+existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, and stormy seas. It was
+this hard fight for life that left its stamp on the temper of Dane,
+Swede, or Norwegian alike, that gave them their defiant energy, their
+ruthless daring, their passion for freedom and hatred of settled rule.
+Forays and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty livelihood, and
+at the close of the eighth century these raids found a wider sphere than
+the waters of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth garnered in the
+abbeys and towns of the new Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
+Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the coasts of Northern Gaul;
+and just before Offa's death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
+To men of that day it must have seemed as though the world had gone back
+three hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth their
+pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or Cerdic. There was the same
+wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck inland along the
+river-reaches or moored round the river isles, the same sights of horror,
+firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or
+shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as when the
+English themselves had attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
+slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion,
+government disappeared before these northmen as before the northmen of
+three centuries before.
+
+[Sidenote: Ecgberht]
+
+In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
+and the presence of the freebooters soon told on the political balance of
+the English realms. A great revolution was going on in the south, where
+Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death, while
+the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht.
+In Offa's days Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex
+and had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He
+remained there through the memorable year during which Charles the Great
+restored the Empire of the West, and returned in 802 to be quietly
+welcomed as King by the West-Saxon people. A march into the heart of
+Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in
+the south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia, which broke out
+in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of
+Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all England south of
+Thames to the West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of
+East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great
+overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength when Ecgberht
+crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without
+a struggle to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of
+supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream of a union of all England drew him
+to the north. Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts it stood
+at the head of the English race; and under a king like Eadberht it would
+have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood AEthelbald. But
+the ruin of Jarrow and Wearmouth had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn
+by civil strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed to
+meet the northmen, Northumbria sought union and deliverance in subjection
+to a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the
+supremacy of Wessex.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquests of the Northmen]
+
+With the submission of Northumbria the work which Oswiu and AEthelbald had
+failed to do was done, and the whole English race was for the first time
+knit together under a single rule. The union came not a moment too soon.
+Had the old severance of people from people, the old civil strife within
+each separate realm, gone on it is hard to see how the attacks of the
+northmen could have been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland;
+and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Charmouth in
+Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet
+them, from the field. His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a
+little rest for the land; but AEthelwulf who mounted the throne on
+Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off
+by years of hard fighting. AEthelwulf fought bravely in defence of his
+realm; in his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851
+he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success won
+peace for the land through the short and uneventful reigns of his sons
+AEthelbald and AEthelberht. But the northern storm burst in full force upon
+England when a third son, AEthelred, followed his brothers on the throne.
+The northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland and the coast of
+Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and from west and east alike they
+closed upon Britain. While one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom
+north of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on
+the coast of East-Anglia under Ivar the Boneless and marched the next
+year upon York. A victory over two claimants of its crown gave the
+pirates Northumbrian and seizing the passage of the Trent they threatened
+an attack on the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a march of King
+AEthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he made there with the northmen
+left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose
+under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, was bound to
+a tree and shot to death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen made
+Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure
+gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the
+eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his
+relics. With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his
+kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the
+pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown. Already the northmen
+had turned to the richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen.
+Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their monks fled or
+lay slain among the ruins. Mercia, though still free from actual attack,
+cowered panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment of tribute owned
+them as its overlords.
+
+[Illustration: England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3t.jpg)]
+
+[Sidenote: Wessex and the Northmen]
+
+In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and England north of
+the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a
+change could only have been made possible by the temper of the conquered
+kingdoms. To them the conquest was simply their transfer from one
+overlord to another, and it may be that in all there were men who
+preferred the overlordship of the Northman to the overlordship of the
+West-Saxon. But the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face
+with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight, not for
+supremacy, but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by terror. With
+the exception of his one march on Nottingham, King AEthelred had done
+nothing to save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the pirates no
+sooner pushed up Thames to Reading in 871 than the West-Saxons, attacked
+on their own soil, turned fiercely at bay. A desperate attack drove the
+northmen from Ashdown on the heights that overlook the Vale of White
+Horse, but their camp in the tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames
+proved impregnable. AEthelred died in the midst of the struggle, and his
+brother AElfred, who now became king, bought the withdrawal of the pirates
+and a few years' breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the quick
+eye of AElfred to see that the northmen had withdrawn simply with the view
+of gaining firmer footing for a new attack; three years indeed had hardly
+passed before Mercia was invaded and its under-king driven over sea to
+make place for a tributary of the invaders. From Repton half their host
+marched northwards to the Tyne, while Guthrum led the rest to Cambridge
+to prepare for their next year's attack on Wessex. In 876 his fleet
+appeared before Wareham, and in spite of a treaty bought by AElfred, the
+northmen threw themselves into Exeter. Their presence there was likely to
+stir a rising of the Welsh, and through the winter AElfred girded himself
+for this new peril. At break of spring his army closed round the town, a
+hired fleet cruised off the coast to guard against rescue, and the defeat
+of their fellows at Wareham in an attempt to relieve them drove the
+pirates to surrender. They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
+Gloucester. But AElfred had hardly disbanded his troops when his enemies,
+roused by the arrival of fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at
+Chippenham, and in the opening of 878 marched ravaging over the land. The
+surprise of Wessex was complete, and for a month or two the general panic
+left no hope of resistance. AElfred, with his small band of followers,
+could only throw himself into a fort raised hastily in the isle of
+Athelney among the marshes of the Parret, a position from which he could
+watch closely the movements of his foes. But with the first burst of
+spring he called the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still
+gathering troops as he moved marched through Wiltshire on the northmen.
+He found their host at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after
+a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender and to bind themselves
+by a solemn peace or "frith" at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the Peace of
+Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of Britain to its invaders. All
+Northumbria, all East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line which
+stretched from Thames' mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along the
+Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left
+subject to the northmen. Throughout this "Danelaw"--as it was called--the
+conquerors settled down among the conquered population as lords of the
+soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly in its central districts,
+but everywhere guarding jealously their old isolation and gathering in
+separate "heres" or armies round towns which were only linked in loose
+confederacies. The peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex
+itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England. The spell of terror was
+broken. The tide of invasion turned. From an attitude of attack the
+northmen were thrown back on an attitude of defence. The whole reign of
+AElfred was a preparation for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back from
+the pirates the land they had won.
+
+[Sidenote: AElfred]
+
+What really gave England heart for such a struggle was the courage and
+energy of the King himself. Alfred was the noblest as he was the most
+complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is loveable, in the
+English temper. He combined as no other man has ever combined its
+practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its profound sense of
+duty, the reserve and self-control that steadies in it a wide outlook and
+a restless daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, its
+sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and
+passionate religion. Religion indeed was the groundwork of AElfred's
+character. His temper was instinct with piety. Everywhere throughout his
+writings that remain to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir him
+to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he was no mere saint. He felt
+none of that scorn of the world about him which drove the nobler souls of
+his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness and
+constant pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism. His rare
+geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave colour and
+charm to his life. A sunny frankness and openness of spirit breathes in
+the pleasant chat of his books, and what he was in his books he showed
+himself in his daily converse. AElfred was in truth an artist, and both
+the lights and shadows of his life were those of the artistic
+temperament. His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings
+of travellers and scholars, betray an imaginative restlessness that longs
+to break out of the narrow world of experience which hemmed him in. At
+one time he jots down news of a voyage to the unknown seas of the north.
+At another he listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from the
+churches of Malabar. And side by side with this restless outlook of the
+artistic nature he showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid
+apprehension of unseen danger, its craving for affection, its
+sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself rather than with his reader
+that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and
+opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius. "Oh, what
+a happy man was he," he cries once, "that man that had a naked sword
+hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always did!"
+"Desirest thou power?" he asks at another time. "But thou shalt never
+obtain it without sorrows--sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener
+sorrows from thine own kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks out
+again, "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could. But I
+know that he cannot!" The loneliness which breathes in words like these
+has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the
+judgements of men. But cynicism found no echo in the large and
+sympathetic temper of AElfred. He not only longed for the love of his
+subjects, but for the remembrance of "generations" to come. Nor did his
+inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and versatile
+activity. To the scholars he gathered round him he seemed the very type
+of a scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read or listen to
+books read to him. The singers of his court found in him a brother
+singer, gathering the old songs of his people to teach them to his
+children, breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple verse,
+solacing himself in hours of depression with the music of the Psalms. He
+passed from court and study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in
+gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their business. But
+all this versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good sense.
+AElfred was a thorough man of business. He was careful of detail,
+laborious, methodical. He carried in his bosom a little handbook in which
+he noted things as they struck him--now a bit of family genealogy, now a
+prayer, now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the
+bridge. Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there was the same
+order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of his court.
+
+Wide however and various as was the King's temper, its range was less
+wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion,
+of the predominance of one quality over another which goes commonly with
+an intensity of moral purpose AElfred showed not a trace. Scholar and
+soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his character kept
+that perfect balance which charms us in no other Englishman save
+Shakspere. But full and harmonious as his temper was, it was the temper
+of a king. Every power was bent to the work of rule. His practical energy
+found scope for itself in the material and administrative restoration of
+the wasted land. His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into
+education and literature. His capacity for inspiring trust and affection
+drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began the
+upbuilding of a new England. And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by
+a single aim. "So long as I have lived," said the King as life closed
+about him, "I have striven to live worthily." Little by little men came
+to know what such a life of worthiness meant. Little by little they came
+to recognize in AElfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than the world
+had seen. Never had it seen a King who lived solely for the good of his
+people. Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal aim to
+devote himself solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was this
+grand self-mastery that gave him his power over the men about him.
+Warrior and conqueror as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the
+warrior's dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck
+the key-note of his reign. But still more is it this height and
+singleness of purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest
+faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts AElfred out of the narrow bounds
+of Wessex. If the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the
+comparison of him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest men,
+he rises to their level in the moral grandeur of his life. And it is this
+which has hallowed his memory among his own English people. "I desire,"
+said the King in some of his latest words, "I desire to leave to the men
+that come after me a remembrance of me in good works." His aim has been
+more than fulfilled. His memory has come down to us with a living
+distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time
+gathered round it. The instinct of the people has clung to him with a
+singular affection. The love which he won a thousand years ago has
+lingered round his name from that day to this. While every other name of
+those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of
+Englishmen, that of AElfred remains familiar to every English child.
+
+[Sidenote: English Literature]
+
+The secret of AElfred's government lay in his own vivid energy. He could
+hardly have chosen braver or more active helpers than those whom he
+employed both in his political and in his educational efforts. The
+children whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their time.
+But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be
+done was done by the King himself. His first efforts were directed to the
+material restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw its
+towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys
+founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
+codified and amended. Still more strenuous were AElfred's efforts for its
+moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
+pirates' sword had left few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Baeda,
+and matters were even worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most
+ignorant of the English kingdoms. "When I began to reign," said AElfred,
+"I cannot remember one priest south of the Thames who could render his
+service-book into English." For instructors indeed he could find only a
+few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "In old
+times," the King writes sadly, "men came hither from foreign lands to
+seek for instruction, and now if we are to have it we can only get it
+from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own
+island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, and
+Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
+churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
+Peter's-pence to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his intercourse
+was closest, and it was from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in
+his work of education. Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his
+new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be
+from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that AElfred's
+gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of
+Athelney. The real work however to be done was done, not by these
+teachers but by the King himself. AElfred established a school for the
+young nobles at his own court, and it was to the need of books for these
+scholars in their own tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary
+effort. He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals
+of his age--the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral Book of Pope
+Gregory, the compilation of "Orosius," then the one accessible handbook
+of universal history, and the history of his own people by Baeda. He
+translated these works into English, but he was far more than a
+translator, he was an editor for his people. Here he omitted, there he
+expanded. He enriched "Orosius" by a sketch of the new geographical
+discoveries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections
+from Baeda. In one place he stops to explain his theory of government, his
+wish for a thicker population, his conception of national welfare as
+consisting in a due balance of the priest, the thegn, and the churl. The
+mention of Nero spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power. The cold
+Providence of Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgement of
+the goodness of God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off
+its royal mantle, and he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me," he
+prays with a charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, for
+every man must say what he says and do what he does according to his
+ability." But simple as was his aim, AElfred changed the whole front of
+our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great
+poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The
+mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
+translations of AElfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It
+seems likely that the King's rendering of Baeda's history gave the first
+impulse towards the compilation of what is known as the English or
+Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was certainly thrown into its present form
+during his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and the bishops
+of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were roughly
+expanded into a national history by insertions from Baeda: but it is when
+it reaches the reign of AElfred that the chronicle suddenly widens into
+the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that marks the gift
+of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does from age to age
+in historic value, it remains the first vernacular history of any
+Teutonic people, and save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors
+among his Gothic people, the earliest and most venerable monument of
+Teutonic prose.
+
+But all this literary activity was only a part of that general upbuilding
+of Wessex by which AElfred was preparing for a fresh contest with the
+stranger. He knew that the actual winning back of the Danelaw must be a
+work of the sword, and through these long years of peace he was busy with
+the creation of such a force as might match that of the northmen. A fleet
+grew out of the little squadron which AElfred had been forced to man with
+Frisian seamen. The national fyrd or levy of all freemen at the King's
+call was reorganized. It was now divided into two halves, one of which
+served in the field while the other guarded its own burhs and townships
+and served to relieve its fellow when the men's forty days of service
+were ended. A more disciplined military force was provided by subjecting
+all owners of five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which
+recognized the change that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and
+in which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How effective these
+measures were was seen when the new resistance they met on the Continent
+drove the northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet
+steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting entered the
+Thames. AElfred held both at bay through the year till the men of the
+Danelaw rose at their comrades' call. Wessex stood again front to front
+with the northmen. But the King's measures had made the realm strong
+enough to set aside its old policy of defence for one of vigorous attack.
+His son Eadward and his son-in-law AEthelred, whom he had set as Ealdorman
+over what remained of Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active as
+the King. The aim of the northmen was to rouse again the hostility of the
+Welsh, but while AElfred held Exeter against their fleet, Eadward and
+AEthelred caught their army near the Severn and overthrew it with a vast
+slaughter at Buttington. The destruction of their camp on the Lea by the
+united English forces ended the war; in 897 Hasting again withdrew across
+the Channel, and the Danelaw made peace. It was with the peace he had won
+still about him that AElfred died in 901, and warrior as his son Eadward
+had shown himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest. It was not
+till 910 that a fresh rising of the northmen forced AElfred's children to
+gird themselves to the conquest of the Danelaw.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Elder]
+
+While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister AEthelflaed, in whose hands
+AEthelred's death left English Mercia, attacked the "Five Boroughs," a
+rude confederacy which had taken the place of the older Mercian kingdom.
+Derby represented the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln the
+Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English, Stamford the province of the
+Gyrwas, Nottingham probably that of the Southumbrians. Each of these
+"Five Boroughs" seems to have been ruled by its earl with his separate
+"host"; within each twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law, while a
+common "Thing" may have existed for the whole district. In her attack on
+this powerful league AEthelflaed abandoned the older strategy of battle and
+raid for that of siege and fortress-building. Advancing along the line of
+Trent, she fortified Tamworth and Stafford on its head-waters; when a
+rising in Gwent called her back to the Welsh border, her army stormed
+Brecknock; and its king no sooner fled for shelter to the northmen in
+whose aid he had risen than AEthelflaed at once closed on Derby. Raids from
+Middle-England failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her prey; and Derby
+was hardly her own when, turning southward, she forced the surrender of
+Leicester. Nor had the brilliancy of his sister's exploits eclipsed those
+of the King, for the son of AElfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he
+had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the northmen from France, summoned no
+doubt by the cry of distress from their brethren in England, and had
+bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection of forts at Hertford and
+Witham. On the death of AEthelflaed in 918 he came boldly to the front.
+Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering the whole strength of the
+kingdom into his single hand, he undertook the systematic reduction of
+the Danelaw. South of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a tract watered
+by the Ouse and the Nen--originally the district of a tribe known as the
+South-English, and now, like the Five Boroughs of the north, grouped
+round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The reduction of
+these was followed by that of East-Anglia; the northmen of the Fens
+submitted with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham. Eadward's
+Mercian troops had already seized Manchester; he himself was preparing to
+complete his conquests, when in 924 the whole of the North suddenly laid
+itself at his feet. Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the Britons
+of Strathclyde "chose him to father and lord."
+
+[Sidenote: AEthelstan]
+
+The triumph was his last. Eadward died in 925, but the reign of his son
+AEthelstan, AElfred's golden-haired grandson whom the King had girded as a
+child with a sword set in a golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt,
+proved even more glorious than his own. In spite of its submission the
+North had still to be won. Dread of the northmen had drawn Scot and
+Cumbrian to their acknowledgement of Eadward's overlordship, but
+AEthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria with his dominions than
+dread of Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot King
+Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the
+northmen. The league was broken by AEthelstan's rapid action in 926; the
+North-Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies,
+and to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a
+like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
+till then with its English inhabitants, But eight years later the same
+league called AEthelstan again to the North; and though Constantine was
+punished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet ravaged its
+coasts to Caithness the English army had no sooner withdrawn than
+Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from
+Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
+beside the northmen against the West-Saxon King; but his victory at
+Brunanburh crushed the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
+brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession in 940, and the North
+again rose in revolt. The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
+in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king
+but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again
+laid the Danelaw at his feet.
+
+[Sidenote: Dunstan]
+
+But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword. The completion of
+the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or
+warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of
+ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey and
+ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid
+personality after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born
+in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a
+man of wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester. It
+must have been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with
+scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain songs of
+heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterwards
+roused against him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might have
+derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp
+in hand on journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their
+books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine
+and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane
+letters till his brain broke down in delirium. So famous became his
+knowledge in the neighbourhood that news of it reached the court of
+AEthelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of
+ill-will among the courtiers. Again they drove him from Eadmund's train,
+threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the
+wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The
+outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But
+the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and
+his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny,
+versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring
+others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a
+ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a
+musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker alike at books
+or handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see him followed by a
+train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting,
+designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to design a robe
+which she is embroidering, and as he bends with her maidens over their
+toil his harp hung upon the wall sounds without mortal touch tones which
+the excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of the Danelaw]
+
+From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider sphere of activity
+towards the close of Eadmund's reign. But the old jealousies revived at
+his reappearance at court, and counting the game lost Dunstan prepared
+again to withdraw. The king had spent the day in the chase; the red deer
+which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only
+checked itself on the brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund in
+the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was
+at once summoned on the king's return. "Saddle your horse," said Eadmund,
+"and ride with me." The royal train swept over the marshes to his home;
+and the king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the
+abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury. Dunstan became one of Eadmund's
+councillors, and his hand was seen in the settlement of the north. It was
+the hostility of the states around it to the West-Saxon rule which had
+roused so often revolt in the Danelaw; but from the time of Brunanburh we
+hear nothing more of the hostility of Bernicia, while Cumbria was
+conquered by Eadmund and turned adroitly to account in winning over the
+Scots to his cause. The greater part of it was granted to their king
+Malcolm on terms that he should be Eadmund's "fellow-worker by sea and
+land." The league of Scot and Briton was thus finally broken up, and the
+fidelity of the Scots secured by their need of help in holding down their
+former ally. The settlement was soon troubled by the young king's death.
+As he feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom
+Eadmund had banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at
+the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him
+retire. The king sprang in wrath to his thegn's aid, and seizing Leofa by
+the hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle the robber drove
+his dagger to Eadmund's heart. His death at once stirred fresh troubles
+in the north; the Danelaw rose against his brother and successor, Eadred,
+and some years of hard fighting were needed before it was again driven to
+own the English supremacy. But with its submission in 954 the work of
+conquest was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned
+himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance
+came to an end. The Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.
+North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire might again cross
+swords with men of Hampshire; but their strife was henceforth a local
+strife between men of the same people; it was a strife of Englishmen with
+Englishmen, and not of Englishmen with Northmen.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY
+954-1071
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Absorption of the Northmen]
+
+The fierceness of the northman's onset had hidden the real character of
+his attack. To the men who first fronted the pirates it seemed as though
+the story of the world had gone back to the days when the German
+barbarians first broke in upon the civilized world. It was so above all
+in Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's own attack on the
+island was seen in the northmen's attack on it. Boats of marauders from
+the northern seas again swarmed off the British coast; church and town
+were again the special object of attack; the invaders again settled on
+the conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger than the faith of
+Christ. But the issues of the two attacks showed the mighty difference
+between them. When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman
+Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors
+stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern storm on the other hand
+left land, people, government unchanged. England remained a country of
+Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden
+yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife between Briton and
+Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the
+strife between northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose
+race was the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
+alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its
+wealth, as they were strange to the social degradation which Rome had
+brought on its province. But the northman was little more than an
+Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its
+origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
+Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters
+men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the union of
+the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the
+house of AElfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going
+on. From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelaw the northman
+had been passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few; they were
+scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions
+there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt.
+Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation.
+Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom
+seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the northman settled in
+Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In
+England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even
+quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In a few years a
+northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another northman in
+blood was Archbishop of York.
+
+[Sidenote: The three Northern Kingdoms]
+
+The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued
+descents from the Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign the long
+attack which the northman had directed against western Christendom came,
+for a while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed its
+results had been immense. It had utterly changed the face of the west.
+The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been alike
+dashed to pieces. But break and change as it might, Christendom had held
+the northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power which had grown up on the
+western seas had disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the northman's rule
+had dwindled to the holding of a few coast towns. In France his
+settlements had shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In England
+every northman was a subject of the English King. Even the empire of the
+seas had passed from the sea-kings' hands. It was an English and not a
+Scandinavian fleet that for fifty years to come held mastery in the
+English and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory in fact the
+struggle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats still hung
+off headland and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide to
+gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet
+made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
+energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the
+political changes of Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from
+fiord and dale from dale was breaking down. The little commonwealths
+which had held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn
+together whether they would or no. In each of the three regions of the
+north great kingdoms were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made himself
+lord of the petty states about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the
+same way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway itself was the first to become a
+single monarchy. Legend told how one of its many rulers, Harald of
+Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had
+chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his
+petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald vowed never to clip or comb
+his hair till he had made all Norway his own. So every springtide came
+war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord
+settled the matter, and Harald "Ugly-Head," as men called him while the
+strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again and became Harald
+"Fair-Hair." The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude fled out
+of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some
+swarming to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out again
+and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum's host in the Rhine
+country or follow Hrolf to his fights on the Seine. But little by little
+the land settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian realms
+gathered strength for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our
+after history.
+
+[Sidenote: England and its King]
+
+But of the new danger which threatened it in this union of the north
+England knew little. The storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and
+the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of
+peace. Here as elsewhere the northman had failed in his purpose of
+conquest; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty work. In shattering
+the empire of Charles the Great he had given birth to the nations of
+modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen he had created an
+English people. The national union which had been brought about for a
+moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a union of sheer force which broke
+down at the first blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of the
+northmen were so many wedges that split up the fabric of the
+roughly-built realm. But the very agency which destroyed the new England
+was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life that
+made its union real. The peoples who had so long looked on each other as
+enemies found themselves fronted by a common foe. They were thrown
+together by a common danger and the need of a common defence. Their
+common faith grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in hand
+with England itself against the heathen of the north. They recognized a
+common king as a common struggle changed AElfred and his sons from mere
+leaders of West-Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with
+the stranger. And when the work which AElfred set his house to do was
+done, when the yoke of the northman was lifted from the last of his
+conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the
+battle for a common freedom and a common country, knew themselves in the
+hour of their deliverance as an English people.
+
+The new people found its centre in the King. The heightening of the royal
+power was a direct outcome of the war. The dying out of other royal
+stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship. But
+it was the war with the northmen that raised AElfred and his sons from
+tribal leaders into national kings. The long series of triumphs which
+wrested the land from the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty;
+while the wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed the kings
+further and further from their people, lifted them higher and higher
+above the nobles, and clothed them more and more with a mysterious
+dignity. Above all the religious character of the war against the
+northmen gave a religious character to the sovereigns who waged it. The
+king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, became yet more
+sacred as "the Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he
+was pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good government;
+but his "hallowing" invested him also with a power drawn not from the
+will of man or the assent of his subjects but from the will of God, and
+treason against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign lifted the
+sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with
+him in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman
+himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere
+delegate of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every shire
+by that of the royal shire-reeves, officers charged with levying the
+royal revenues and destined ultimately to absorb judicial authority.
+Among the later nobility of the thegns personal service with such a lord
+was held not to degrade but to ennoble. "Horse-thegn," and "cup-thegn,"
+and "border," the constable, butler, and treasurer, found themselves
+officers of state; and the developement of politics, the wider extension
+of home and foreign affairs were already transforming these royal
+officers into a standing council or ministry for the transaction of the
+ordinary administrative business and the reception of judicial appeals.
+Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates nominated by the king,
+and constituting in itself a large part of the Witenagemot when that
+assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the actual control
+of affairs more and more into the hands of the sovereign himself.
+
+[Sidenote: Growth of Feudalism]
+
+But the king's power was still a personal power. He had to be everywhere
+and to see for himself that everything he willed was done. The royal
+claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of the Crown. There was a
+want of administrative machinery in actual connexion with the government,
+responsible to it, drawing its force directly from it, and working
+automatically in its name even in moments when the royal power was itself
+weak or wavering. The Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose
+personal action was felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose dread lay
+on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak.
+Ealdor-men, provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move
+at the royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or
+removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old
+tendency to severance and isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the
+crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we have
+reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle
+with fresh tendencies towards national disintegration which sprang like
+itself from the struggle with the northman. The tendency towards personal
+dependence and towards a social organization based on personal dependence
+received an overpowering impulse from the strife. The long insecurity of
+a century of warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to
+seek protection more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman
+"commended" himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this
+shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden
+with conditions of military service. The principle of personal allegiance
+which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to
+widen into a theory of general dependence. From AElfred's day it was
+assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The "lordless man" became
+a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the older
+English constitution, died down more and more into the "villein," the man
+who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who
+looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his
+demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater
+nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen. The ealdormen had
+hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants of the national sovereign before
+they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which
+follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or
+Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though it were against the lord of
+the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English
+freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding power. In
+the "great meeting" of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
+rule of the realm. It represented the whole English people, as the
+wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peoples of each; and
+its powers were as supreme in the wider field as theirs in the narrower.
+It could elect or depose the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the
+imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the
+control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great
+officers of state. But such a meeting necessarily differed greatly in
+constitution from the Witan of the lesser kingdoms. The individual
+freeman, save when the host was gathered together, could hardly take part
+in its deliberations. The only relic of its popular character lay at last
+in the ring of citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at London or
+Winchester, and shouted their "aye" or "nay" at the election of a king.
+Distance and the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser
+thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and the national council
+practically shrank into a gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and
+the officers of the crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Feudalism and the Monarchy]
+
+The old English democracy had thus all but passed into an oligarchy of
+the narrowest kind. The feudal movement which in other lands was breaking
+up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at their
+head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king threatened
+to break up England itself. What hindered its triumph was the power of
+the Crown, and it is the story of this struggle between the monarchy and
+these tendencies to feudal isolation which fills the period between the
+death of Eadred and the conquest of the Norman. It was a struggle which
+England shared with the rest of the western world, but its issue here was
+a peculiar one. In other countries feudalism won an easy victory over the
+central government. In England alone the monarchy was strong enough to
+hold feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might be, the English ealdorman
+never succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent of the
+Crown. Kings as weak as AEthelred could drive ealdormen into exile and
+could replace them by fresh nominees. If the Witenagemot enabled the
+great nobles to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it
+preserved at any rate a feeling of national unity and was forced to back
+the Crown against individual revolt. The Church too never became
+feudalized. The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a
+great social and political power. As local in area as the ealdorman, for
+the province was his diocese and he sat by his side in the local
+Witenagemot, he furnished a standing check on the independence of the
+great nobles. But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy,
+it was strong enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the two forces
+could master the other, but each could weaken the other, and throughout
+the whole period of their conflict England lay a prey to disorder within
+and to insult from without.
+
+The first sign of these troubles was seen when the death of Eadred in 955
+handed over the realm to a child king, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig was
+swayed by a woman of high lineage, AEthelgifu; and the quarrel between her
+and the older counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the
+coronation feast. On the young king's insolent withdrawal to her chamber
+Dunstan, at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat.
+But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence of outlawry drove the
+abbot over sea, while the triumph of AEthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the
+marriage of her daughter to the king and the spoliation of the
+monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig's
+kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded his marriage as
+incestuous, and it was followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958
+Archbishop Odo parted the King from his wife by solemn sentence; while
+the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's
+brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan. The death of Eadwig a
+few months later restored the unity of the realm; but his successor
+Eadgar was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his reign the
+direction of affairs must have lain in the hands of Dunstan, whose
+elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as
+of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our
+chroniclers. His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a work
+was best done by the simple enforcement of peace. During the years of
+rest in which King and Primate enforced justice and order northman and
+Englishman drew together into a single people. Their union was the result
+of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan's policy preserved
+to the conquered Danelaw its local rights and local usages. But he
+recognized the men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed northmen in
+the royal service, and promoted them to high posts in Church and State.
+For the rest he trusted to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion
+was marked by a memorable change in the name of the land. Slowly as the
+conquering tribes had learned to know themselves, by the one national
+name of Englishmen, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on
+the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's day that the name of
+Britain passed into the name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen,
+England. The same vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during
+these years of national union told on the growth of material prosperity.
+Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its extension is seen in the complaint
+that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
+the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane. The laws of AEthelred which
+provide for the protection and regulation of foreign trade only recognize
+a state of things which grew up under Eadgar. "Men of the Empire,"
+traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, "Men of Rouen," traders
+from the new Norman duchy of the Seine, were seen in the streets of
+London. It was in Eadgar's day indeed that London rose to the commercial
+greatness it has held ever since.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Martyr]
+
+Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still in the prime of
+manhood when he died in 975. His death gave a fresh opening to the great
+nobles. He had bequeathed the crown to his elder son Eadward; but the
+ealdorman of East-Anglia, AEthelwine, rose at once to set a younger child,
+AEthelred, on the throne. But the two primates of Canterbury and York who
+had joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in
+setting it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as before master
+of the realm. The boy's reign however was troubled by strife between the
+monastic party and their opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short
+by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of AEthelred, the power of
+Dunstan made way for that of ealdorman AEthelwine and the queen-mother.
+Some years of tranquillity followed this victory; but though AEthelwine
+preserved order at home he showed little sense of the danger which
+threatened from abroad. The North was girding itself for a fresh, onset
+on England. The Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into their
+kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and it was no longer in isolated
+bands but in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests in the
+South. As AEthelred drew to manhood some chance descents on the coast told
+of this fresh stir in the North, and the usual result of the northman's
+presence was seen in new risings among the Welsh.
+
+[Sidenote: AEthelred]
+
+In 991 ealdorman Brihtnoth of East-Anglia fell in battle with a Norwegian
+force at Maldon, and the withdrawal of the pirates had to be bought by
+money. AEthelwine too died at this moment, and the death of the two
+ealdormen left AEthelred free to act as King. But his aim was rather to
+save the Crown from his nobles than England from the northmen. Handsome
+and pleasant of address, the young King's pride showed itself in a string
+of imperial titles, and his restless and self-confident temper drove him
+to push the pretensions of the Crown to their furthest extent. His aim
+throughout his reign was to free himself from the dictation of the great
+nobles, and it was his indifference to their "rede" or counsel that won
+him the name of "AEthelred the Redeless." From the first he struck boldly
+at his foes, and AElfric, the ealdorman of Central Wessex, whom the death
+of his rival AEthelwine left supreme in the realm, was driven possibly by
+fear to desert to a Danish force which he was sent in 992 to drive from
+the coast. AEthelred turned from his triumph at home to meet the forces of
+the Danish and Norwegian kings, Swein and Olaf, which anchored off London
+in 994. His policy through-out was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
+arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for intrigues which parted the
+invaders till troubles at home drew both again to the North. AEthelrod
+took quick advantage of his success at home and abroad; the place of the
+great ealdormen in the royal councils was taken by court-thegns, in whom
+we see the rudiments of a ministry, while the king's fleet attacked the
+pirates' haunts in Cumberland and the Cotentin. But in spite of all this
+activity the news of a fresh invasion found England more weak and broken
+than ever. The rise of the "new men" only widened the breach between the
+court and the great nobles, and their resentment showed itself in delays
+which foiled every attempt of AEthelred to meet the pirate-bands who still
+clung to the coast.
+
+[Sidenote: Swein]
+
+They came probably from the other side of the Channel, and it was to
+clear them away as well as secure himself against Swein's threatened
+descent that AEthelred took a step which brought England in contact with a
+land over-sea. Normandy, where the northmen had settled a hundred years
+before, was now growing into a great power, and it was to win the
+friendship of Normandy and to close its harbours against Swein that
+AEthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke's daughter, Emma, to wife. The same
+dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the northern
+mercenaries whom the king had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting
+force against their brethren; and an order of AEthelred brought about a
+general massacre of them on St. Brice's day. Wedding and murder however
+proved feeble defences against Swein. His fleet reached the coast in
+1003, and for four years he marched through the length and breadth of
+southern and eastern England, "lighting his war-beacons as he went" in
+blazing homestead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to
+prepare for a later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for
+the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from
+Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury
+was taken and sacked, AEltheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and
+there in default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set him in the midst
+of their husting, pelting him with bones and skulls of oxen, till one
+more pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe. Meanwhile the
+court was torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels between the
+court-thegns in their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels between
+these favourites and the nobles whom they superseded in the royal
+councils. The King's policy of finding aid among his new ministers broke
+down when these became themselves ealdormen. With their local position
+they took up the feudal claims of independence; and Eadric, whom AEthelred
+raised to be ealdorman of Mercia, became a power that overawed the Crown.
+In this paralysis of the central authority all organization and union was
+lost. "Shire would not help other" when Swein returned in 1013. The war
+was terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried,
+churches plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one exception of
+London, there was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung
+open their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the northmen at Bath.
+Even London was forced at last to give way, and AEthelred fled over-sea to
+a refuge in Normandy.
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut]
+
+He was soon called back again. In the opening of 1014 Swein died suddenly
+at Gainsborough; and the spell of terror was broken. The Witan recalled
+"their own born lord," and AEthelred returned to see the Danish fleet
+under Swein's son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to plan a
+more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the
+first the vigour of his temper. Setting aside his brother he made himself
+king of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh attack
+on England, whose king and nobles were again at strife, and where a
+bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and AEthelred's son
+Eadmund Ironside broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of Eadric
+to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open England to his
+arms; Wessex and Mercia submitted to him; and though the loyalty of
+London enabled Eadmund, when his father's death raised him in 1016 to the
+throne, to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a
+decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition which this
+wrested from him at Olney were soon followed by the young king's death.
+Cnut was left master of the realm. His first acts of government showed
+little but the temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
+uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. Eadric of
+Mercia, whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at
+the king's signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund
+Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
+his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this the young conqueror
+rose abruptly into a wise and temperate king. His aim during twenty years
+seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign character
+of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had begun.
+
+Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that
+the Norman was a foreigner after him. His language differed little from
+the English tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or government.
+Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. He
+dismissed his Danish host, and retaining only a trained band of household
+troops or "hus-carls" to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support
+within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. He
+fell back on "Eadgar's Law," on the old constitution of the realm, for
+his rule of government; and owned no difference between Dane and
+Englishman among his subjects. He identified himself even with the
+patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been the
+centre of the national resistance; Archbishop AElfheah had been slain by
+Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of the Church; he translated
+AElfheah's body with great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his father's
+ravages by gifts to the religious houses; he protected English pilgrims
+even against the robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks broke out
+in a song which he composed as he listened to their chaunt at Ely.
+"Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by" across the vast
+fen-waters that surrounded their abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and
+hear we these monks sing." A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve years
+of rule to his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character and
+the noble conception he had formed of kingship. "I have vowed to God to
+lead a right life in all things," wrote the king, "to rule justly and
+piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement to all.
+If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, through headiness
+or negligence of youth, I am ready, with God's help, to amend it
+utterly." No royal officer, either for fear of the king or for favour of
+any, is to consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor "as
+they would value my friendship and their own well-being." He especially
+denounces unfair exactions: "I have no need that money be heaped together
+for me by unjust demands." "I have sent this letter before me," Cnut
+ends, "that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for
+as you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will I spare, to spend
+myself and my toil in what is needful and good for my people."
+
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut and Scotland]
+
+Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him began the
+long internal tranquillity which was from this time to be the keynote of
+the national history. Without, the Dane was no longer a terror; on the
+contrary it was English ships and English soldiers who now appeared in
+the North and followed Cnut in his campaigns against Wend or Norwegian.
+Within, the exhaustion which follows a long anarchy gave fresh strength
+to the Crown, and Cnut's own ruling temper was backed by the force of
+hus-carls at his disposal. The four Earls of Northumberland, Mercia,
+Wessex, and East-Anglia, whom he set in the place of the older caldormen,
+knew themselves to be the creatures of his will; the ablest indeed of
+their number, Godwine, earl of Wessex, was the minister or close
+counsellor of the King. The troubles along the Northern border were ended
+by a memorable act of policy. From Eadgar's day the Scots had pressed
+further and further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of their
+king Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham in 1018 made him master of
+Northern Northumbria. In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the quarrel
+ended in a formal cession of the district between the Forth and the
+Tweed, Lothian as it was called, to the Scot-king on his doing homage to
+Cnut. The gain told at once on the character of the Northern kingdom. The
+kings of the Scots had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and Celtic
+peoples; but from the moment that Lothian with its English farmers and
+English seamen became a part of their dominions it became the most
+important part. The kings fixed their seat at Edinburgh, and in the midst
+of an English population passed from Gaelic chieftains into the Saxon
+rulers of a mingled people.
+
+[Sidenote: Cnut's Sons]
+
+But the greatness of Cnut's rule hung solely on the greatness of his
+temper, and the Danish power was shaken by his death in 1035. The empire
+he had built up at once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed both England
+and Denmark to his son Harthacnut; but the boy's absence enabled his
+brother, Harald Harefoot, to acquire all England save Godwine's earldom
+of Wessex, and in the end even Godwine was forced to submit to him.
+Harald's death in 1040 averted a conflict between the brothers, and
+placed Harthacnut quietly on the throne. But the love which Cnut's
+justice had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness of his
+successors. The long peace sickened men of their bloodshed and violence.
+"Never was a bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes came," ran a
+popular song, when Harald's men seized AElfred, a brother of Eadmund
+Ironside, who returned to England from Normandy where he had found a
+refuge since his father's flight to its shores. Every tenth man among his
+followers was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and AElfred's eyes torn
+out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage than his predecessor, dug up his
+brother's body and flung it into a marsh; while a rising at Worcester
+against his hus-carls was punished by the burning of the town and the
+pillage of the shire. The young king's death was no less brutal than his
+life; in 1042 "he died as he stood at his drink in the house of Osgod
+Clapa at Lambeth." England wearied of rulers such as these: but their
+crimes helped her to free herself from the impossible dream of Cnut. The
+North, still more barbarous than herself, could give her no new element
+of progress or civilization. It was the consciousness of this and a
+hatred of rulers such as Harald and Harthacnut which co-operated with the
+old feeling of reverence for the past in calling back the line of AElfred
+to the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: Eadward the Confessor]
+
+It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history that it needs
+the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, the quick perception of
+what is possible, which distinguished the adroit politician whom the
+death of Cnut left supreme in England. Originally of obscure origin,
+Godwine's ability had raised him high in the royal favour; he was allied
+to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with the earldom of Wessex, and at
+last made the Viceroy or justiciar of the King in the government of the
+realm. In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill at the
+head of a body of English troops, but his true field of action lay at
+home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine united
+vigilance, industry, and caution with a singular dexterity in the
+management of men. During the troubled years that followed the death of
+Cnut he did his best to continue his master's policy in securing the
+internal union of England under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her
+connexion with the North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut's policy
+had become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
+with the tide of popular feeling which called Eadward, the one living son
+of AEthelred, to the throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in exile at
+the court of Normandy. A halo of tenderness spread in after-time round
+this last king of the old English stock; legends told of his pious
+simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holiness that
+gained him his name of "Confessor" and enshrined him as a saint in his
+abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in manlier tones of the long
+peace and glories of his reign, how warriors and wise counsellors stood
+round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton obeyed him. His was the
+one figure that stood out bright against the darkness when England lay
+trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and so dear became his memory
+that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name.
+Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for the "good
+laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past
+that the exile really returned to the throne of AElfred; there was
+something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his
+transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides
+over the political stage. The work of government was done by sterner
+hands.
+
+[Sidenote: Godwine]
+
+Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in the hands of its
+three Earls, Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of
+Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation
+against which AEthelred had struggled was to triumph with the death of
+Cnut. What hindered this severance was the greed of Godwine. Siward was
+isolated in the North: Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of Mercia.
+But the Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of England,
+seized district after district for his house. His son Swein secured an
+earldom in the south-west; his son Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his
+nephew Beorn was established in Central England: while the marriage of
+his daughter Eadgyth to the king himself gave Godwine a hold upon the
+throne. Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim at winning
+England itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in it. But
+his aim found a sudden check through the lawlessness of his son Swein.
+Swein seduced the abbess of Leominster, sent her home again with a yet
+more outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and on the king's refusal
+to grant it fled from the realm. Godwine's influence secured his pardon,
+but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered his cousin Beorn who had
+opposed the reconciliation and again fled to Flanders. A storm of
+national indignation followed him over-sea. The meeting of the Wise men
+branded him as "nithing," the "utterly worthless," yet in a year his
+father wrested a new pardon from the King and restored him to his
+earldom. The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in
+a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself. The king was a stranger
+in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and friends
+of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman tongue. He used in Norman
+fashion a seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites in the highest
+posts of Church and State. Foreigners such as these, though hostile to
+the minister, were powerless against Godwine's influence and ability, and
+when at a later time they ventured to stand alone against him they fell
+without a blow. But the general ill-will at Swein's inlawing enabled them
+to stir Eadward to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel brought
+the opportunity of a decisive break with him. On his return from a visit
+to the court Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of the king's
+sister, demanded quarters for his train in Dover. Strife arose, and many
+both of the burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine's better
+nature withstood Eadward when the king angrily bade him exact vengeance
+from the town for the affront to his kinsman; and he claimed a fair trial
+for the townsmen. But Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and
+the quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine at once gathered his forces
+and marched upon Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign
+favourites. But even in a just quarrel the country was cold in his
+support. The earls of Mercia and Northumberland united their forces to
+those of Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the king to a gathering
+of the Witenagemot at London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but Swein's
+outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of Wessex, declining with his usual
+prudence a useless struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Harold]
+
+But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall. Great as were
+Godwine's faults, he was the one man who now stood between England and
+the rule of the strangers who flocked to the Court; and a year had hardly
+passed when he was strong enough to return. At the appearance of his
+fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was once more forced to yield. The
+foreign prelates and bishops fled over sea, outlawed by the same meeting
+of the Wise men which restored Godwine to his home. But he returned only
+to die, and the direction of affairs passed quietly to his son Harold.
+Harold came to power unfettered by the obstacles which beset his father,
+and for twelve years he was the actual governor of the realm. The
+courage, the ability, the genius for administration, the ambition and
+subtlety of Godwine were found again in his son. In the internal
+government of England he followed out his father's policy while avoiding
+its excesses. Peace was preserved, justice administered, and the realm
+increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work and embroidery became
+famous in the markets of Flanders and France. Disturbances from without
+were crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold's military talents displayed
+themselves in a campaign against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity
+with which, arming his troops with weapons adapted for mountain conflict,
+he penetrated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country to
+complete submission. With the gift of the Northumbrian earldom on
+Siward's death to his brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
+older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of Godwine, and as the waning
+health of the king, the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who had
+returned from Hungary as his heir, and the childhood of the AEtheling
+Eadgar who stood next in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
+plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward to the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: Normandy]
+
+But his advance was watched by one even more able and ambitious than
+himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the
+Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays
+through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name
+of hamlet after hamlet has memories for English ears; a fragment of
+castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves the
+name of the Percy. The very look of the country and its people seem
+familiar to us; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
+build and features of the small English farmer; the fields about Caen,
+with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the
+very picture of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift themselves
+over the red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately
+fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of AElfred or Dunstan, while
+the windy heights that look over orchard and meadowland are crowned with
+the square grey keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and
+the banks of Thames. It was Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader
+like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from the French king,
+Charles the Simple, in 912, at the moment when AElfred's children were
+beginning their conquest of the English Danelaw. The treaty of
+Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of the
+coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
+was baptized, received the king's daughter in marriage, and became his
+vassal for the territory which now took the name of "the Northman's land"
+or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly on the Dane. No
+such ties of blood and speech tended to unite the northman with the
+French among whom he settled along the Seine as united him to the
+Englishmen among whom he settled along the Humber. William Longsword, the
+son of Hrolf, though wavering towards France and Christianity, remained a
+northman in heart; he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest of
+the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. Michael's Mount to
+the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the northmen of Bayeux
+where the Danish tongue and fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
+heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk of the Normans, with
+the child Duke Richard, fell away for the time from Christianity, while
+new pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. To the close of the century
+the whole people were still "Pirates" to the French around them, their
+land the "Pirates' land," their Duke the "Pirates' Duke." Yet in the end
+the same forces which merged the Dane in the Englishman told even more
+powerfully on the Dane in France. No race has ever shown a greater power
+of absorbing all the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom they
+came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them. During the
+long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a
+reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became
+French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only
+at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died
+silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and
+the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal of the fiefs of France.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Duke William]
+
+From the moment of their settlement on the Frankish coast, the Normans
+had been jealously watched by the English kings; and the anxiety of
+AEthelred for their friendship set a Norman woman on the English throne.
+The marriage of Emma with AEthelred brought about a close political
+connexion between the two countries. It was in Normandy that the King
+found a refuge from Swein's invasion, and his younger boys grew up in
+exile at the Norman court. Their presence there drew the eyes of every
+Norman to the rich land which offered so tempting a prey across the
+Channel. The energy which they had shown in winning their land from the
+Franks, in absorbing the French civilization and the French religion, was
+now showing itself in adventures on far-off shores, in crusades against
+the Moslem of Spain or the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of
+adventure that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against England in
+Cnut's day under pretext of setting AEthelred's children on its throne,
+but the wreck of his fleet in a storm put an end to a project which might
+have anticipated the work of his son. It was that son, William the Great,
+as men of his own day styled him, William the Conqueror as he was to
+stamp himself by one event on English history, who was now Duke of
+Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and
+patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of the
+petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there
+never had been a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the
+greatest of men. His life from the very first was one long mastering of
+difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name
+of "the Bastard." His father Robert had seen Arlotta, a tanner's daughter
+of the town, as she washed her linen in a little brook by Falaise; and
+loving her he had made her the mother of his boy. The departure of Robert
+on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler
+among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom; treason and anarchy
+surrounded him as he grew to manhood; and disorder broke at last into
+open revolt. But in 1047 a fierce combat of horse on the slopes of
+Val-es-dunes beside Caen left the young Duke master of his duchy and he
+soon made his mastery felt. "Normans" said a Norman poet "must be trodden
+down and kept under foot, for he only that bridles them may use them at
+his need." In the stern order he forced on the land Normandy from this
+hour felt the bridle of its Duke.
+
+[Sidenote: William and France]
+
+Secure at home, William seized the moment of Godwine's exile to visit
+England, and received from his cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards
+asserted, a promise of succession to his throne. Such a promise however,
+unconfirmed by the Witenagemot, was valueless; and the return of Godwine
+must have at once cut short the young Duke's hopes. He found in fact work
+enough to do in his own duchy, for the discontent of his baronage at the
+stern justice of his rule found support in the jealousy which his power
+raised in the states around him, and it was only after two great
+victories at Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard fighting that
+outer and inner foes were alike trodden under foot. In 1060 William stood
+first among the princes of France. Maine submitted to his rule. Britanny
+was reduced to obedience by a single march. While some of the rebel
+barons rotted in the Duke's dungeons and some were driven into exile, the
+land settled down into a peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth of
+wealth and culture. Learning and education found their centre in the
+school of Bec, which the teaching of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised
+in a few years into the most famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc's
+first contact with William, if it showed the Duke's imperious temper,
+showed too his marvellous insight into men. In a strife with the Papacy
+which William provoked by his marriage with Matilda, a daughter of the
+Count of Flanders, Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition was met
+by a sentence of banishment, and the Prior had hardly set out on a lame
+horse, the only one his house could afford, when he was overtaken by the
+Duke, impatient that he should quit Normandy. "Give me a better horse and
+I shall go the quicker," replied the imperturbable Lombard, and William's
+wrath passed into laughter and good will. From that hour Lanfranc became
+his minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in the duchy itself or
+for the more daring schemes of ambition which opened up across the
+Channel.
+
+[Sidenote: William and England]
+
+William's hopes of the English crown are said to have been revived by a
+storm which threw Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the coast of
+Ponthieu. Its count sold him to the Duke; and as the price of return to
+England William forced him to swear on the relics of saints to support
+his claim to its throne. But, true or no, the oath told little on
+Harold's course. As the childless King drew to his grave one obstacle
+after another was cleared from the earl's path. His brother Tostig had
+become his most dangerous rival; but a revolt of the Northumbrians drove
+Tostig to Flanders, and the earl was able to win over the Mercian house
+of Leofric to his cause by owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian
+Earl Eadwine, as his brother's successor. His aim was in fact attained
+without a struggle. In the opening of 1066 the nobles and bishops who
+gathered round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly from it to
+the election and coronation of Harold. But at Eouen the news was welcomed
+with a burst of furious passion, and the Duke of Normandy at once
+prepared to enforce his claim by arms. William did not claim the Crown.
+He claimed simply the right which he afterwards used when his sword had
+won it of presenting himself for election by the nation, and he believed
+himself entitled so to present himself by the direct commendation of the
+Confessor. The actual election of Harold which stood in his way, hurried
+as it was, he did not recognize as valid. But with this constitutional
+claim was inextricably mingled resentment at the private wrong which
+Harold had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he
+regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his
+enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within
+England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant
+baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to
+keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very
+trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time amidst
+all this for the common business of government, for negotiations with
+Denmark and the Empire, with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with Flanders
+and with Rome which had been estranged from England by Archbishop
+Stigand's acceptance of his pallium from one who was not owned as a
+canonical Pope.
+
+[Sidenote: Stamford Bridge]
+
+But his rival's difficulties were hardly less than his own. Harold was
+threatened with invasion not only by William but by his brother Tostig,
+who had taken refuge in Norway and secured the aid of its king, Harald
+Hardrada. The fleet and army he had gathered lay watching for months
+along the coast. His one standing force was his body of hus-carls, but
+their numbers only enabled them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the
+other hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of fighting-men was a body easy
+to raise for any single encounter but hard to keep together. To assemble
+such a force was to bring labour to a standstill. The men gathered under
+the King's standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their fields. The
+ships were the fishing-vessels of the coast. In September the task of
+holding them together became impossible, but their dispersion had hardly
+taken place when the two clouds which had so long been gathering burst at
+once upon the realm. A change of wind released the landlocked armament of
+William; but before changing, the wind which prisoned the Duke brought
+the host of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of Yorkshire. The
+King hastened with his household troops to the north and repulsed the
+Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, but ere he could
+hurry back to London the Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who
+had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off Pevensey, was ravaging
+the coast to bring his rival to an engagement. His merciless ravages
+succeeded in drawing Harold from London to the south; but the King wisely
+refused to attack with the troops he had hastily summoned to his banner.
+If he was forced to give battle, he resolved to give it on ground he had
+himself chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to check William's
+ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known afterwards as that of
+Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His position
+covered London and drove William to concentrate his forces. With a host
+subsisting by pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no alternative
+was left to the Duke but a decisive victory or ruin.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Hastings]
+
+On the fourteenth of October William led his men at dawn along the higher
+ground that leads from Hastings to the battle-field which Harold had
+chosen. From the mound of Telham the Normans saw the host of the English
+gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on the height of
+Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right; on the left, the most exposed
+part of the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold, men in full
+armour and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden Dragon of
+Wessex and the Standard of the King. The rest of the ground was covered
+by thick masses of half-armed rustics who had flocked at Harold's summons
+to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre of this
+formidable position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood, while the
+mercenary forces he had gathered in France and Britanny were ordered to
+attack its flanks. A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle;
+in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and
+catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland. He was the first
+of the host who struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The charge
+broke vainly on the stout stockade behind which the English warriors
+plied axe and javelin with fierce cries of "Out, out," and the repulse of
+the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse of the Norman horse. Again
+and again the Duke rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All the
+fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong
+valour that spurred him over the slopes of Val-es-dunes, mingled that day
+with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible
+faculty of resource which shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton
+troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder,
+and as panic spread through the army a cry arose that the Duke was slain.
+William tore off his helmet; "I live," he shouted, "and by God's help I
+will conquer yet." Maddened by a fresh repulse, the Duke spurred right at
+the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down Gyrth, the King's
+brother; again dismounted, a blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
+unmannerly rider who would not lend him his steed. Amidst the roar and
+tumult of the battle he turned the flight he had arrested into the means
+of victory. Broken as the stockade was by his desperate onset, the
+shield-wall of the warriors behind it still held the Normans at bay till
+William by a feint of flight drew a part of the English force from their
+post of vantage. Turning on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to
+pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and made himself master of the
+central ground. Meanwhile the French and Bretons made good their ascent
+on either flank. At three the hill seemed won, at six the fight still
+raged around the Standard where Harold's hus-carls stood stubbornly at
+bay on a spot marked afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey. An
+order from the Duke at last brought his archers to the front. Their
+arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses crowded around the King and
+as the sun went down a shaft pierced Harold's right eye. He fell between
+the royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melly over his
+corpse.
+
+Night covered the flight of the English army: but William was quick to
+reap the advantage of his victory. Securing Romney and Dover, he marched
+by Canterbury upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work for
+him as he advanced; for Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on the
+field of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to contest
+the crown. Of the old royal line there remained but a single boy, Eadgar
+the AEtheling. He was chosen king; but the choice gave little strength to
+the national cause. The widow of the Confessor surrendered Winchester to
+the Duke. The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. The
+citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by their walls, gave
+Southwark to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really rested for
+support on the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and
+William, crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching into
+Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from their earldoms. The
+masterly movement forced the Earls to hurry home, and London gave way at
+once. Eadgar himself was at the head of the deputation who came to offer
+the crown to the Norman Duke. "They bowed to him," says the English
+annalist pathetically, "for need." They bowed to the Norman as they had
+bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit of Cnut.
+London indeed was secured by the erection of a fortress which afterwards
+grew into the Tower, but William desired to reign not as a Conqueror but
+as a lawful king. At Christmas he received the crown at Westminster from
+the hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of "Yea, Yea," from his new
+English subjects. Fines from the greater landowners atoned for a
+resistance which now counted as rebellion; but with this exception every
+measure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling as a successor
+of Eadward or AElfred. As yet indeed the greater part of England remained
+quietly aloof from him, and he can hardly be said to have been recognized
+as king by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia. But to the east
+of a line which stretched from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was
+unquestioned, and over this portion he ruled as an English king. His
+soldiers were kept in strict order. No change was made in law or custom.
+The privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ which still
+remains, the most venerable of its muniments, among the city's archives.
+Peace and order were restored. William even attempted, though in vain, to
+learn the English tongue that he might personally administer justice to
+the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so tranquil that only a few
+months had passed after the battle of Senlac when leaving England in
+charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and his minister, William
+Fitz-Osbern, the King returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The peace
+he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop Odo's tyranny forced the
+Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the Welsh
+princes supported a similar rising against Norman oppression in the west.
+But as yet the bulk of the land held fairly to the new king. Dover was
+saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge in
+lands as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time
+formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians of the Eastern
+Emperors. William returned to take his place again as an English king. It
+was with an English force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with
+Exeter at its head, and it was at the head of an English army that he
+completed his work by marching to the North. His march brought Eadwine
+and Morkere again to submission; a fresh rising ended in the occupation
+of York, and England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's feet.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Norman Conquest]
+
+It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that transformed the King
+into a conqueror. The signal for this revolt came from Swein, king of
+Denmark, who had for two years past been preparing to dispute England
+with the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber all
+northern, all western and south-western England rose as one man. Eadgar
+the AEtheling with a band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland took
+the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south-west the men of Devon,
+Somerset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute;
+while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the
+West. So ably had the revolt been planned that even William was taken by
+surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a storm of York and the slaughter
+of three thousand Normans who formed its garrison. The news of this
+slaughter reached William as he was hunting in the forest of Dean; and in
+a wild outburst of wrath he swore "by the splendour of God" to avenge
+himself on the North. But wrath went hand in hand with the coolest
+statesmanship. The centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and
+pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of horsemen William bought
+at a heavy price its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward
+with the troops that gathered round him he swept the Welsh border and
+relieved Shrewsbury while William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around
+Exeter. His success set the King free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on
+the North. After a long delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he
+entered York and ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees. Town and
+village were harried and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven
+over the Scottish border. The coast was especially wasted that no hold
+might remain for future landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very
+implements of husbandry were so mercilessly destroyed that a famine which
+followed is said to have swept off more than a hundred thousand victims.
+Half a century later indeed the land still lay bare of culture and
+deserted of men for sixty miles northward of York. The work of vengeance
+once over, William led his army back from the Tees to York, and thence to
+Chester and the West. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character so
+memorably as in this terrible march. The winter was hard, the roads
+choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his
+army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses for food, broke out
+into mutiny at the order to cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire
+from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and Britanny demanded their
+release from service. William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot,
+at the head of the troops which still clung to him, he forced his way by
+paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with his own hands to
+clear the road, and as the army descended upon Chester the resistance of
+the English died away.
+
+For two years William was able to busy himself in castle-building and in
+measures for holding down the conquered land. How effective these were
+was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of
+Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to Scotland
+where Eadgar the AEtheling had again found refuge and where his sister
+Margaret had become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably some assurance
+of Malcolm's aid which roused the Mercian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to
+a fresh rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled by the
+vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skirmish, while
+Morkere found shelter for a while in the fen country where a desperate
+band of patriots gathered round an outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had
+William found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway two miles long was
+at last driven across the marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom
+died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of
+England that William marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands and the
+Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp upon the Tay to swear fealty at
+his feet.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS
+1071-1204
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II
+1071-1204
+
+
+Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from this point particularly
+valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Worcester remain the
+primary English authorities, while Simeon of Durham gives much special
+information on northern matters. For the reign of William the Red the
+chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, in his
+"Historia Noverum" and "Life of Anselm." William of Malmesbury and Henry
+of Huntingdon are both contemporary authorities during that of Henry the
+First; the latter remains a brief but accurate annalist; the former is
+the leader of a new historic school, who treat English events as part of
+the history of the world, and emulate classic models by a more
+philosophical arrangement of their materials. To these the opening of
+Stephen's reign adds the "Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail by
+one of the King's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.
+
+All this wealth of historical material however suddenly leaves us in the
+chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle dies out in the midst of Stephen's
+reign, and the close at the same time of the works we have noted leaves a
+blank in our historical literature which extends over the early years of
+Henry the Second. But this dearth is followed by a vast outburst of
+historical industry. For the Beket struggle we have the mass of the
+Archbishop's own correspondence with that of Foliot and John of
+Salisbury. From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is the Chronicle known
+as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose authorship Professor Stubbs
+has shown to be more probably due to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard
+Fitz-Neal. This is continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of
+equally official value. William of Newburgh's history, which ends in
+1198, is a work of the classical school, like William of Malmesbury's. It
+is distinguished by its fairness and good sense. To these may be added
+the Chronicle of Ralph Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall,
+that of Gervase of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh of
+Lincoln.
+
+But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second's time is shown even more
+remarkably in the mass of general literature which lies behind these
+distinctively historical sources, in the treatises of John of Salisbury,
+the voluminous works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the "Trifles" and satires of
+Walter Map, Glanvill's treatise on Law, Richard Fitz-Neal's "Dialogue on
+the Exchequer," to which we owe our knowledge of Henry's financial
+system, the romances of Gaimar and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal.
+But this intellectual fertility is far from ceasing with Henry the
+Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun when the romantic impulse
+quickens even the old English tongue in the long poem of Layamon. The
+Chronicle of Richard of Devizes and an "Itinerarium Regis" supplement
+Roger of Howden for Richard's reign. With John we enter upon the Annals
+of Barnwell and are aided by the invaluable series of the Chroniclers of
+St. Albans. Among the side topics of the time, we may find much
+information as to the Jews in Toovey's "Anglia Judaica"; the Chronicle of
+Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep into social and monastic life; the
+Cistercian revival may be traced in the records of the Cistercian abbeys
+in Dugdale's Monasticon; the Charter Rolls give some information as to
+municipal history; and constitutional developement may be traced in the
+documents collected by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE CONQUEROR
+1071-1085
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Foreign Kings]
+
+In the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest Britain
+had become England, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its
+conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a
+national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political
+order. But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse
+the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation had failed. The
+effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been foiled
+by the resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
+Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings and statesmen, had
+no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than local independence
+rose again at the call of the Northmen. The sense of a single England
+deepened with the pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of AElfred and
+his house broadened into an English kingdom; but still tribal jealousies
+battled with national unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon,
+Northman from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the country
+roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. It came with
+foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings broke local jealousies as they
+had never been broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwine and
+the Confessor. But Cnut was more Englishman than Northman, and his system
+of government was an English system. The true foreign yoke was only felt
+when England saw its conqueror in William the Norman.
+
+For nearly a century and a half, from the hour when William turned
+triumphant from the fens of Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
+Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy
+were followed by kings from Anjou. But whether under Norman or Angevin
+Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange
+blood and of strange speech. And yet it was in these years of subjection
+that England first became really England. Provincial differences were
+finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The
+firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost
+unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness,
+and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in
+Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second
+built up the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were
+developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
+wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a
+feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
+of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed
+from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
+this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation
+of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted
+them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom. The middle
+class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a
+corresponding class in our towns. Commerce and trade were promoted by the
+justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with their advance rose the
+political importance of the trader. The boroughs of England, which at the
+opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich
+enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for
+the mightier part they were to play in the developement of our
+parliament. The shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
+begot a moral and religious revival which raised religion into a living
+thing; while the close connexion with the Continent which foreign
+conquest brought about secured for England a new communion with the
+artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.
+
+
+[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]
+
+In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe
+not merely English wealth and English freedom but England herself. And of
+these foreign masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In William
+the wild impulses of the northman's blood mingled strangely with the cool
+temper of the modern statesman. As he was the last, so he was the most
+terrible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers
+from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
+strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his
+wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his
+enemies owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-es-dunes, horse
+and man went down before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his nature
+broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins
+with but five men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
+Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and
+the chase were one. No man could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its
+way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He
+rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired. His
+voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English
+charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of
+victory. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
+his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear a road through
+the snowdrifts. And with the northman's daring broke out the northman's
+pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alencon hung raw hides along their
+walls in scorn of the "tanner's" grandson, William tore out his
+prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the
+town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him
+a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a
+desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look,
+his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William
+lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "So stark
+and fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that none dared
+resist his will." His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he and no
+man dared speak to him" when the news reached him of Harold's seizure of
+the throne. It was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness
+of the woods that the King's temper unbent. "He loved the wild deer as
+though he had been their father."
+
+[Sidenote: His rule]
+
+It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere northman
+into a great general and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his
+French campaigns, the organization of his attack upon England, the
+victory at Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance which
+achieved the Conquest showed the wide range of his generalship. His
+political ability had shown itself from the first moment of his accession
+to the ducal throne. William had the instinct of government. He had
+hardly reached manhood when Normandy lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was
+crushed. Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke "could never love a
+robber," be he baron or knave. The sternness of his temper stamped itself
+throughout upon his rule. "Stark he was to men that withstood him," says
+the Chronicler of his English system of government; "so harsh and cruel
+was he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that did aught against
+his bidding he cast into bonds; bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
+abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother: first he was in
+the land, but the King cast him into bondage. If a man would live and
+hold his lands, need it were he followed the King's will." Stern as such
+a rule was, its sternness gave rest to the land. Even amidst the
+sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
+Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the enclosure of forests
+or the exactions which built up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen
+were unable to forget "the good peace he made in the land, so that a man
+might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold." Strange touches too
+of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted with this general
+temper of the Conqueror's government. One of the strongest traits in his
+character was an aversion to shed blood by process of law; he formally
+abolished the punishment of death, and only a single execution stains the
+annals of his reign. An edict yet more honourable to his humanity put an
+end to the slave-trade which had till then been carried on at the port of
+Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness and pitifulness of his
+public acts sprang indeed from a contrast within his temper itself. The
+pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a tender and faithful
+husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke
+into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. If William
+was "stark" to rebel and baron, men noted that he was "mild to those that
+loved God."
+
+[Sidenote: William and feudalism]
+
+But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and
+peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
+greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius
+on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on
+this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of
+the world. The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
+his position. He no longer held the land merely as its national and
+elected King. To his elective right he added the right of conquest. It is
+the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that
+marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of
+government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin
+of his rule. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the
+Continent nor the system of the older English royalty: more truly perhaps
+it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of England
+William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was
+necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
+already prepared for such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
+of English feudalism in the warriors, the "companions" or "thegns" who
+were personally attached to the king's war-band and received estates from
+the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times this
+feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the
+nobles followed the king's example and bound their tenants to themselves
+by a similar process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders on the other
+hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society,
+had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the
+class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and
+the social disturbance consequent upon them which forced these freemen to
+seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Even
+before the reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding the older
+freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.
+But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. The
+desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold
+by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush
+at any moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his
+throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of
+the soil, and the failure of the English risings cleared the ground for
+its establishment. The greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle
+or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole
+of their lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest. We see
+the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William
+was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two hundred manors
+in Kent with more than an equal number elsewhere rewarded the services of
+his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's counsellors
+Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares.
+But the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the spoil. The
+meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord.
+Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on condition of its
+holder's service at the King's call; a whole army was by this means
+encamped upon the soil; and William's summons could at any hour gather an
+overwhelming force around his standard.
+
+Such a force however, effective as it was against the conquered English,
+was hardly less formidable to the Crown itself. When once it was
+established, William found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal
+baronage, by the men whom he had so hardly bent to his will in Normandy,
+and who were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal power, as eager
+for an unbridled military and judicial independence within their own
+manors, here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror was shown in
+his appreciation of this danger and in the skill with which he met it.
+Large as the estates he granted were, they were scattered over the
+country in such a way as to render union between the great landowners or
+the hereditary attachment of great areas of population to any one
+separate lord equally impossible. A yet wiser measure struck at the very
+root of feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided by their owners
+into smaller sub-tenancies, the under-tenants were bound by the same
+conditions of service to their lord as he to the Crown. "Hear, my lord,"
+swore the vassal as kneeling bareheaded and without arms he placed his
+hands within those of his superior, "I become liege man of yours for life
+and limb and earthly regard; and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for
+life and death, God help me!" Then the kiss of his lord invested him with
+land as a "fief" to descend to him and his heirs for ever. In other
+countries such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes, be they
+king or no. By the usage however which William enacted in England each
+sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore fealty
+directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the King was thus established as
+the supreme and universal duty of all Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: William and England]
+
+But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so much in these inner checks
+upon feudalism as in the counterbalancing forces which he provided
+without it. He was not only the head of the great garrison that held
+England down, he was legal and elected King of the English people. If as
+Conqueror he covered the country with a new military organization, as the
+successor of Eadward he maintained the judicial and administrative
+organization of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance of
+the land between the greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
+abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire became the largest unit
+of local government, and in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs
+for its administration concentrated the whole executive power in the
+King's hands. The old legal constitution of the country gave him the
+whole judicial power, and William was jealous to retain and heighten
+this. While he preserved the local courts of the hundred and the shire he
+strengthened the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems even in
+the Confessor's day to have become more and more a court of highest
+appeal with a right to call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to
+its bar. The control over the national revenue which had rested even in
+the most troubled times in the hands of the King was turned into a great
+financial power by the Conqueror's system. Over the whole face of the
+land a large part of the manors were burthened with special dues to the
+Crown: and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording these
+that William sent into each county the commissioners whose enquiries are
+recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled in each hundred
+declared on oath the extent and nature of each estate, the names, number,
+and condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the
+Conquest, and the sums due from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
+or land-tax levied since the days of AEthelred, formed as yet the main
+financial resources of the Crown, and their exaction carried the royal
+authority in its most direct form home to every landowner. But to these
+were added a revenue drawn from the old Crown domain, now largely
+increased by the confiscations of the Conquest, the ever-growing income
+from the judicial "fines" imposed by the King's judges in the King's
+courts, and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown on the grant or
+renewal of every privilege or charter. A new source of revenue was found
+in the Jewish traders, many of whom followed William from Normandy, and
+who were glad to pay freely for the royal protection which enabled them
+to settle in their quarters or "Jewries" in all the principal towns of
+England.
+
+[Sidenote: The Church]
+
+William found a yet stronger check on his baronage in the organization of
+the Church. Its old dependence on the royal power was strictly enforced.
+Prelates were practically chosen by the King. Homage was exacted from
+bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated save by the
+King's leave. No synod could legislate without his previous assent and
+subsequent confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be
+received within the realm save by his permission. The King firmly
+repudiated the claims which were beginning to be put forward by the court
+of Rome. When Gregory VII. called on him to do fealty for his kingdom the
+King sternly refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I have never willed to
+do, nor will I do it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my
+predecessors did it to yours." William's reforms only tended to tighten
+this hold of the Crown on the clergy. Stigand was deposed; and the
+elevation of Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed by the
+removal of most of the English prelates and by the appointment of Norman
+ecclesiastics in their place. The new archbishop did much to restore
+discipline, and William's own efforts were no doubt partly directed by a
+real desire for the religious improvement of his realm. But the foreign
+origin of the new prelates cut them off from the flocks they ruled and
+bound them firmly to the foreign throne; while their independent position
+was lessened by a change which seemed intended to preserve it.
+Ecclesiastical cases had till now been decided, like civil cases, in
+shire or hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by side with ealdorman
+or sheriff. They were now withdrawn from it to the separate court of the
+bishop. The change was pregnant with future trouble to the Crown; but for
+the moment it told mainly in removing the bishop from his traditional
+contact with the popular assembly and in effacing the memory of the
+original equality of the religious with the civil power.
+
+
+[Sidenote: William's death]
+
+In any struggle with feudalism a national king, secure of the support of
+the Church, and backed by the royal hoard at Winchester, stood in
+different case from the merely feudal sovereigns of the Continent. The
+difference of power was seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over, and
+the struggle which William had anticipated opened between the baronage
+and the Crown. The wisdom of his policy in the destruction of the great
+earldoms which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at
+their restoration made in 1075 by Roger, the son of his minister William
+Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton, Ralf de Guader, whom the King had
+rewarded for his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The
+rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven
+over sea. The intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in
+William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring
+by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo collected money and men, but the
+treasure was at once seized by the royal officers and the bishop arrested
+in the midst of the court. Even at the King's bidding no officer would
+venture to seize on a prelate of the Church; and it was with his own
+hands that William was forced to effect his arrest. The Conqueror was as
+successful against foes from without as against foes from within. The
+fear of the Danes, which had so long hung like a thunder-cloud over
+England, passed away before the host which William gathered in 1085 to
+meet a great armament assembled by king Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the
+Danish fleet, and the murder of its king removed all peril from the
+north. Scotland, already humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by
+the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and after
+penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales the King commenced its
+systematic reduction by settling three of his great barons along its
+frontier. It was not till his closing years that William's unvarying
+success was troubled by a fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage under his
+son Robert and by an attack which he was forced to meet in 1087 from
+France. Its king mocked at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk and at the
+sickness which bound him to his bed at Rouen. "King William has as long a
+lying-in," laughed Philip, "as a woman behind her curtains." "When I get
+up," William swore grimly, "I will go to mass in Philip's land and bring
+a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my
+fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire
+they make." At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the
+French border fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode down the
+steep street of Mantes which he had given to the flames his horse
+stumbled among the embers, and William was flung heavily against his
+saddle. He was borne home to Rouen to die. The sound of the minster bell
+woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking the
+city--it was the hour of prime--and stretching out his hands in prayer
+the King passed quietly away. Death itself took its colour from the
+savage solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath
+left him, and the Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE NORMAN KINGS
+1085-1154
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: William the Red]
+
+With the death of the Conqueror passed the terror which had held the
+barons in awe, while the severance of his dominions roused their hopes of
+successful resistance to the stern rule beneath which they had bowed.
+William bequeathed Normandy to his eldest son Robert; but William the
+Red, his second son, hastened with his father's ring to England where the
+influence of Lanfranc secured him the crown. The baronage seized the
+opportunity to rise in arms under pretext of supporting the claims of
+Robert, whose weakness of character gave full scope for the growth of
+feudal independence; and Bishop Odo, now freed from prison, placed
+himself at the head of the revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly
+on the loyalty of his English subjects. But the national stamp which
+William had given to his kingship told at once. The English rallied to
+the royal standard; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the one surviving
+bishop of English blood, defeated the insurgents in the west; while the
+King, summoning the freemen of country and town to his host under pain of
+being branded as "nithing" or worthless, advanced with a large force
+against Rochester where the barons were concentrated. A plague which
+broke out among the garrison forced them to capitulate, and as the
+prisoners passed through the royal army cries of "gallows and cord" burst
+from the English ranks. The failure of a later conspiracy whose aim was
+to set on the throne a kinsman of the royal house, Stephen of Albemarle,
+with the capture and imprisonment of its head, Robert Mowbray, the Earl
+of Northumberland, brought home at last to the baronage their
+helplessness in a strife with the King. The genius of the Conqueror had
+saved England from the danger of feudalism. But he had left as weighty a
+danger in the power which trod feudalism under foot. The power of the
+Crown was a purely personal power, restrained under the Conqueror by his
+own high sense of duty, but capable of becoming a pure despotism in the
+hands of his son. The nobles were at his feet, and the policy of his
+minister, Ranulf Flambard, loaded their estates with feudal obligations.
+Each tenant was held as bound to appear if needful thrice a year at the
+royal court, to pay a heavy fine or rent on succession to his estate, to
+contribute aid in case of the king's capture in war or the knighthood of
+the king's eldest son or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir who
+was still a minor passed into the king's wardship, and all profit from
+his lands went during the period of wardship to the king. If the estate
+fell to an heiress, her hand was at the king's disposal, and was
+generally sold by him to the highest bidder. These rights of "marriage"
+and "wardship" as well as the exaction of aids at the royal will poured
+wealth into the treasury while they impoverished and fettered the
+baronage. A fresh source of revenue was found in the Church. The same
+principles of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as to those of
+the nobles; and during the vacancy of a see or abbey its profits, like
+those of a minor, were swept into the royal hoard. William's profligacy
+and extravagance soon tempted him to abuse this resource, and so steadily
+did he refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom death removed that
+at the close of his reign one archbishoprick, four bishopricks, and
+eleven abbeys were found to be without pastors.
+
+Vile as was this system of extortion and misrule but a single voice was
+raised in protest against it. Lanfranc had been followed in his abbey at
+Bec by the most famous of his scholars, Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like
+himself. Friends as they were, no two men could be more strangely unlike.
+Anselm had grown to manhood in the quiet solitude of his mountain-valley,
+a tenderhearted poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the Alpine snows above
+him, and an intelligence keen and clear as the mountain-air. The whole
+temper of the man was painted in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him
+as though heaven lay, a stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks,
+while the women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley became
+harvest-maidens of its king. They reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved at
+their sloth, hastily climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their
+lord. As he reached the palace the king's voice called him to his feet
+and he poured forth his tale; then at the royal bidding bread of an
+unearthly whiteness was set before him, and he ate and was refreshed. The
+dream passed with the morning; but the sense of heaven's nearness to
+earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord, the tender
+restfulness and peace in the Divine presence which it reflected lived on
+in the life of Anselm. Wandering like other Italian scholars to Normandy,
+he became a monk under Lanfranc, and on his teacher's removal to higher
+duties succeeded him in the direction of the Abbey of Bec. No teacher has
+ever thrown a greater spirit of love into his toil. "Force your scholars
+to improve!" he burst out to another teacher who relied on blows and
+compulsion. "Did you ever see a craftsman fashion a fair image out of a
+golden plate by blows alone? Does he not now gently press it and strike
+it with his tools, now with wise art yet more gently raise and shape it?
+What do your scholars turn into under this ceaseless beating?" "They turn
+only brutal," was the reply. "You have bad luck," was the keen answer,
+"in a training that only turns men into beasts." The worst natures
+softened before this tenderness and patience. Even the Conqueror, so
+harsh and terrible to others, became another man, gracious and easy of
+speech, with Anselm. But amidst his absorbing cares as a teacher, the
+Prior of Bec found time for philosophical speculations to which we owe
+the scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle Ages.
+His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to
+elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human reason. His
+passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he
+could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till he could seize
+his conception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But
+not even a fever of intense thought such as this could draw Anselm's
+heart from its passionate tenderness and love. Sick monks in the
+infirmary could relish no drink save the juice which his hand squeezed
+for them from the grape-bunch. In the later days of his archbishoprick a
+hare chased by the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his gentle
+voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman to stir in the chase while the
+creature darted off again to the woods. Even the greed of lands for the
+Church to which so many religious men yielded found its characteristic
+rebuke as the battling lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm quietly close
+his eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep.
+
+[Sidenote: William and Anselm]
+
+A sudden impulse of the Red King drew the abbot from these quiet studies
+into the storms of the world. The see of Canterbury had long been left
+without a Primate when a dangerous illness frightened the king into the
+promotion of Anselm. The Abbot, who happened at the time to be in England
+on the business of his house, was dragged to the royal couch and the
+cross forced into his hands. But William had no sooner recovered from his
+sickness than he found himself face to face with an opponent whose meek
+and loving temper rose into firmness and grandeur when it fronted the
+tyranny of the king. Much of the struggle between William and the
+Archbishop turned on questions such as the right of investiture, which
+have little bearing on our history, but the particular question at issue
+was of less importance than the fact of a contest at all. The boldness of
+Anselm's attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical
+servitude but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of
+independence. The real character of the strife appears in the Primate's
+answer when his remonstrances against the lawless exactions from the
+Church were met by a demand for a present on his own promotion, and his
+first offer of five hundred pounds was contemptuously refused. "Treat me
+as a free man," Anselm replied, "and I devote myself and all that I have
+to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you shall have neither me
+nor mine." A burst of the Red King's fury drove the Archbishop from
+court, and he finally decided to quit the country, but his example had
+not been lost, and the close of William's reign found a new spirit of
+freedom in England with which the greatest of the Conqueror's sons was
+glad to make terms. His exile however left William without a check.
+Supreme at home, he was full of ambition abroad. As a soldier the Red
+King was little inferior to his father. Normandy had been pledged to him
+by his brother Robert in exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to
+march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, and a
+rebellion at Le Mans was subdued by the fierce energy with which William
+flung himself at the news of it into the first boat he found, and crossed
+the Channel in face of a storm. "Kings never drown," he replied
+contemptuously to the remonstrances of his followers. Homage was again
+wrested from Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
+death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an army
+under Eadgar AEtheling to establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an
+English feudatory on the throne. In Wales William was less triumphant,
+and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman cavalry in the
+fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but wiser
+policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and defeat alike ended in a strange
+and tragical close. In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants in a
+glade of the New Forest, with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin
+in his breast.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry the First]
+
+Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy Land, where his
+bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown
+was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the
+baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the union of their
+estates on both sides the Channel under a single ruler. Their attitude
+threw Henry, as it had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and
+the two great measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a
+charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new relation which this
+support brought about between the people and their king. Henry's Charter
+is important, not merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of
+John, but as the first limitation on the despotism established by the
+Conqueror and carried to such a height by his son. The "evil customs" by
+which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church were explicitly
+renounced in it, the unlimited demands made by both the Conqueror and his
+son on the baronage exchanged for customary fees, while the rights of the
+people itself, though recognized more vaguely, were not forgotten. The
+barons were held to do justice to their undertenants and to renounce
+tyrannical exactions from them, the king promising to restore order and
+the "law of Eadward," the old constitution of the realm, with the changes
+which his father had introduced. His marriage gave a significance to
+these promises which the meanest English peasant could understand. Edith,
+or Matilda, was the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret,
+the sister of Eadgar AEtheling. She had been brought up in the nunnery of
+Romsey where her aunt Christina was a nun; and the veil which she had
+taken there formed an obstacle to her union with the King, which was only
+removed by the wisdom of Anselm. While Flambard, the embodiment of the
+Red King's despotism, was thrown into the Tower, the Archbishop's recall
+had been one of Henry's first acts after his accession. Matilda appeared
+before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate earnestness. She
+had been veiled in her childhood, she asserted, only to save her from the
+insults of the rude soldiery who infested the land, had flung the veil
+from her again and again, and had yielded at last to the unwomanly
+taunts, the actual blows of her aunt. "As often as I stood in her
+presence," the girl pleaded, "I wore the veil, trembling as I wore it
+with indignation and grief. But as soon as I could get out of her sight I
+used to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground, and trample it
+under foot. That was the way, and none other, in which I was veiled."
+Anselm at once declared her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of
+the English multitude when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the
+murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery of the Norman nobles, who
+nicknamed the king and his spouse Godric and Godgifu, was lost in the joy
+of the people at large. For the first time since the Conquest an English
+sovereign sat on the English throne. The blood of Cerdic and AElfred was
+to blend itself with that of Hrolf and the Conqueror. Henceforth it was
+impossible that the two peoples should remain parted from each other; so
+quick indeed was their union that the very name of Norman had passed away
+in half a century, and at the accession of Henry's grandson it was
+impossible to distinguish between the descendants of the conquerors and
+those of the conquered at Senlac.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry and the Barons]
+
+Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm among his subjects which
+enabled Henry to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffection of
+his nobles. Early in 1101 Robert landed at Portsmouth to win the crown in
+arms. The great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof from the
+king. But the Norman Duke found himself face to face with an English army
+which gathered at Anselm's summons round Henry's standard. The temper of
+the English had rallied from the panic of Senlac. The soldiers who came
+to fight for their king "nowise feared the Normans." As Henry rode along
+their lines showing them how to keep firm their shield-wall against the
+lances of Robert's knighthood, he was met with shouts for battle. But
+king and duke alike shrank from a contest in which the victory of either
+side would have undone the Conqueror's work. The one saw his effort was
+hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his rival from the realm,
+and by a peace which the Count of Meulan negotiated Robert recognized
+Henry as King of England while Henry gave up his fief in the Cotentin to
+his brother the Duke. Robert's retreat left Henry free to deal sternly
+with the barons who had forsaken him. Robert de Lacy was stripped of his
+manors in Yorkshire; Robert Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk;
+Ivo of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to the Holy Land as a
+pilgrim. But greater even than these was Robert of Belesme, the son of
+Roger of Montgomery, who held in England the earldoms of Shrewsbury and
+Arundel, while in Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and Alencon. Robert
+stood at the head of the baronage in wealth and power: and his summons to
+the King's Court to answer for his refusal of aid to the king was
+answered by a haughty defiance. But again the Norman baronage had to feel
+the strength which English loyalty gave to the Crown. Sixty thousand
+Englishmen followed Henry to the attack of Robert's strongholds along the
+Welsh border. It was in vain that the nobles about the king, conscious
+that Robert's fall left them helpless in Henry's hands, strove to bring
+about a peace. The English soldiers shouted "Heed not these traitors, our
+lord King Henry," and with the people at his back the king stood firm.
+Only an early surrender saved Robert's life. He was suffered to retire to
+his estates in Normandy, but his English lands were confiscated to the
+Crown. "Rejoice, King Henry," shouted the English soldiers, "for you
+began to be a free king on that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme
+and drove him from the land." Master of his own realm and enriched by the
+confiscated lands of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy, where
+the misgovernment of the Duke had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk,
+and where the outrages of nobles like Robert of Belesme forced the more
+peaceful classes to call the king to their aid. In 1106 his forces met
+those of his brother on the field of Tenchebray, and a decisive English
+victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered duchy
+became a dependency of the English crown, and Henry's energies were
+frittered away through a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts,
+the hostility of the French, and the efforts of his nephew William, the
+son of Robert, to regain the crown which his father had lost.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's rule]
+
+With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was free to enter on that work of
+administration which was to make his reign memorable in our history.
+Successful as his wars had been he was in heart no warrior but a
+statesman, and his greatness showed itself less in the field than in the
+council chamber. His outer bearing like his inner temper stood in marked
+contrast to that of his father. Well read, accomplished, easy and fluent
+of speech, the lord of a harem of mistresses, the centre of a gay
+court where poet and jongleur found a home, Henry remained cool,
+self-possessed, clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless himself, and
+neither seeking nor desiring his people's love, but wringing from them
+their gratitude and regard by sheer dint of good government. His work of
+order was necessarily a costly work; and the steady pressure of his
+taxation, a pressure made the harder by local famines and plagues during
+his reign, has left traces of the grumbling it roused in the pages of the
+English Chronicle. But even the Chronicler is forced to own amidst his
+grumblings that Henry "was a good man, and great was the awe of him." He
+had little of his father's creative genius, of that far-reaching
+originality by which the Conqueror stamped himself and his will on the
+very fabric of our history. But he had the passion for order, the love of
+justice, the faculty of organization, the power of steady and unwavering
+rule, which was needed to complete the Conqueror's work. His aim was
+peace, and the title of the Peace-loving King which was given him at his
+death showed with what a steadiness and constancy he carried out his aim.
+In Normandy indeed his work was ever and anon undone by outbreaks of its
+baronage, outbreaks sternly repressed only that the work might be
+patiently and calmly taken up again where it had been broken off. But in
+England his will was carried out with a perfect success. For more than a
+quarter of a century the land had rest. Without, the Scots were held in
+friendship, the Welsh were bridled by a steady and well-planned scheme of
+gradual conquest. Within, the licence of the baronage was held sternly
+down, and justice secured for all. "He governed with a strong hand," says
+Orderic, but the strong hand was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant.
+"Great was the awe of him," writes the annalist of Peterborough. "No man
+durst ill-do to another in his days. Peace he made for man and beast."
+Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they
+were blows which his English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.
+"While he mastered by policy the foremost counts and lords and the
+boldest tyrants, he ever cherished and protected peaceful men and men of
+religion and men of the middle class." What impressed observers most was
+the unswerving, changeless temper of his rule. The stern justice, the
+terrible punishments he inflicted on all who broke his laws, were parts
+of a fixed system which differed widely from the capricious severity of a
+mere despot. Hardly less impressive was his unvarying success. Heavy as
+were the blows which destiny levelled at him, Henry bore and rose
+unconquered from all. To the end of his life the proudest barons lay
+bound and blinded in his prison. His hoard grew greater and greater.
+Normandy, toss as she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last. In
+England it was only after his death that men dared mutter what evil
+things they had thought of Henry the Peace-lover, or censure the
+pitilessness, the greed, and the lust which had blurred the wisdom and
+splendour of his rule.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's Administration]
+
+His vigorous administration carried out into detail the system of
+government which the Conqueror had sketched. The vast estates which had
+fallen to the crown through revolt and forfeiture were granted out to new
+men dependent on royal favour. On the ruins of the great feudatories whom
+he had crushed Henry built up a class of lesser nobles, whom the older
+barons of the Conquest looked down on in scorn, but who were strong
+enough to form a counterpoise to their influence, while they furnished
+the Crown with a class of useful administrators whom Henry employed as
+his sheriffs and judges. A new organization of justice and finance bound
+the kingdom more tightly together in Henry's grasp. The Clerks of the
+Royal Chapel were formed into a body of secretaries or royal ministers,
+whose head bore the title of Chancellor. Above them stood the Justiciar,
+or Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the
+king acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected from the
+barons connected with the royal household, were formed into a Supreme
+Court of the realm. The King's Court, as this was called, permanently
+represented the whole court of royal vassals which had hitherto been
+summoned thrice in the year. As the royal council, it revised and
+registered laws, and its "counsel and consent," though merely formal,
+preserved the principle of the older popular legislation. As a court of
+justice, it formed the highest court of appeal: it could call up any suit
+from a lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the union of
+several sheriffdoms under some of its members connected it closely with
+the local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the
+assessment and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the
+name of the Court of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like a
+chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In
+their financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer."
+Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons
+and rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld
+or land tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids from the
+baronial estates, which formed the chief part of the royal revenue. Local
+disputes respecting these payments or the assessment of the town-rents
+were settled by a detachment of barons from the court who made the
+circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the judicial
+visitations, the "judges' circuits," which still form so marked a feature
+in our legal system.
+
+[Sidenote: The Angevin Marriage]
+
+Measures such as these changed the whole temper of the Norman rule. It
+remained a despotism, but from this moment it was a despotism regulated
+and held in check by the forms of administrative routine. Heavy as was
+the taxation under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering
+throughout his reign from famine and plague, the peace and order which
+his government secured through thirty years won a rest for the land in
+which conqueror and conquered blended into a single people and in which
+this people slowly moved forward to a new freedom. But while England thus
+rested in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her king. In 1120
+his son, William the "AEtheling," with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry
+on his return from Normandy; but the White Ship in which he embarked
+lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet till the guards of the king's
+treasure pressed its departure. It had hardly cleared the harbour when
+the ship's side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank beneath the
+waves. One terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the night, was
+heard by the royal fleet; but it was not till the morning that the fatal
+news reached the king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the
+ground, and rose never to smile again. He had no other son, and the
+circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that
+William, the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his natural heir.
+Henry hated William while he loved his own daughter Maud, who had been
+married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored by his
+death to her father's court. The succession of a woman was new in English
+history; it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when all hope of issue
+from a second wife whom he wedded was over Henry forced priests and
+nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress, and
+affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the son of the one foe whom he
+dreaded, Count Fulk of Anjou.
+
+[Sidenote: Anjou]
+
+The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the wonderful history by which
+the descendants of a Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but
+of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and
+Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Normandy had
+won. The legend of the father of their race carries us back to the times
+of our own AElfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they
+ravaged along Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the
+debateable land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf the Forester,
+half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free
+outlaw-fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his
+rough forest school "how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground,
+to bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear
+nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle
+with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire, and his son
+Ingelger, who had swept the northmen from Touraine and the land to the
+west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became the
+first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is a mere
+creation of some twelfth century jongleur. The earliest Count whom
+history recognizes is Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of
+France who were now drawing nearer to the throne, and between 909 and 929
+he received from them in guerdon the county of Anjou. The story of his
+son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of
+his house. Alone of his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight was
+to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called "Canon." One Martinmas eve
+Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the French king, Lewis
+d'Outremer, entered the church. "He sings like a priest," laughed the
+king as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon.
+But Fulk was ready with his reply. "Know, my lord," wrote the Count of
+Anjou, "that a king unlearned is a crowned ass." Fulk was in fact no
+priest, but a busy ruler, governing, enforcing peace, and carrying
+justice to every corner of the wasted land. To him alone of his race men
+gave the title of "the Good."
+
+[Sidenote: Fulk the Black]
+
+Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a bold, dashing
+soldier, Fulk's son, Geoffry Greygown, sank almost into a vassal of his
+powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and Champagne. But this
+vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, Fulk the
+Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we can trace
+that marked type of character which their house was to preserve through
+two hundred years. He was without natural affection. In his youth he
+burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom
+decked out in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his bitterest
+war against his son, and exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation
+which men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. "You are conquered,
+you are conquered!" shouted the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffry,
+bridled and saddled like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his
+father's feet. In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which
+startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he
+was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the
+fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot
+and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the
+Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem,
+and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of penitence. He
+rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from
+utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his
+lands. He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by
+despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who
+had troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and
+blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the
+wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst
+forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the
+curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.
+
+At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important of the greater
+provinces of France. At his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at
+least in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted,
+quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk's career was one long series of
+victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and he had
+the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his greatest
+descendants. There was a moment in the first of his battles when the day
+seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of the Bretons drew the Angevin
+horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung
+heavily to the ground. Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he
+swept down almost singly on the foe "as a storm-wind" (so rang the paean
+of the Angevins) "sweeps down on the thick corn-rows," and the field was
+won. But to these qualities of the warrior he added a power of political
+organization, a capacity for far-reaching combinations, a faculty of
+statesmanship, which became the heritage of his race, and lifted them as
+high above the intellectual level of the rulers of their time as their
+shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man. His overthrow
+of Britanny on the field of Conquereux was followed by the gradual
+absorption of Southern Touraine; a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival
+house of Blois; the seizure of Saumur completed his conquests in the
+south, while Northern Touraine was won bit by bit till only Tours
+resisted the Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its Count, Herbert
+Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Henry]
+
+His work of conquest was completed by his son. Geoffry Martel wrested
+Tours from the Count of Blois, and by the seizure of Le Mans brought his
+border to the Norman frontier. Here however his advance was checked by
+the genius of William the Conqueror, and with his death the greatness of
+Anjou came for a while to an end. Stripped of Maine by the Normans and
+broken by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule of Fulk Rechin
+left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to fresh energy with the
+accession of his son, Fulk of Jerusalem. Now urging the turbulent Norman
+nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert's son, William, in his strife
+with his uncle, offering himself throughout as the loyal supporter of the
+French kingdom which was now hemmed in on almost every side by the forces
+of the English king and of his allies the Counts of Blois and Champagne,
+Fulk was the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared. It was to
+disarm his restless hostility that the king gave the hand of Matilda to
+Geoffry the Handsome. But the hatred between Norman and Angevin had been
+too bitter to make such a marriage popular, and the secrecy with which it
+was brought about was held by the barons to free them from the oath they
+had previously sworn. As no baron if he was sonless could give a husband
+to his daughter save with his lord's consent, the nobles held by a
+strained analogy that their own assent was needful to the marriage of
+Maud. Henry found a more pressing danger in the greed of her husband
+Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the common broom of Anjou, the planta
+genista, in his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet. His claims
+ended at last in intrigues with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to
+the border to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his
+presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 the old king
+withdrew to the Forest of Lions to die.
+
+[Sidenote: Stephen]
+
+"God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry's death-bed,
+"the peace he loved." With him indeed closed the long peace of the Norman
+rule. An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his departure, and
+in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew, appeared at the
+gates of London. Stephen was a son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela,
+who had married a Count of Blois; he had been brought up at the English
+court, had been made Count of Mortain by Henry, had become Count of
+Boulogne by his marriage, and as head of the Norman baronage had been the
+first to pledge himself to support Matilda's succession. But his own
+claim as nearest male heir of the Conqueror's blood (for his cousin, the
+son of Robert, had fallen some years before in Flanders) was supported by
+his personal popularity; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humour, his
+generosity, his very prodigality made Stephen a favourite with all. No
+noble however had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town opened its
+gates when London poured out to meet him with uproarious welcome. Neither
+baron nor prelate was present to constitute a National Council, but the
+great city did not hesitate to take their place. The voice of her
+citizens had long been accepted as representative of the popular assent
+in the election of a king; but it marks the progress of English
+independence under Henry that London now claimed of itself the right of
+election. Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the
+crown its "Aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk-moot, and
+these providing at their own will for the good of the realm unanimously
+resolved to choose a king." The solemn deliberation ended in the choice
+of Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king with money and blood,
+Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacification and good
+government of the realm. It was in fact the new union of conquered and
+conquerors into a single England that did Stephen's work. The succession
+of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of Anjou, and to Norman as to
+Englishman the rule of the Angevin was a foreign rule. The welcome
+Stephen won at London and Winchester, his seizure of the royal treasure,
+the adhesion of the Justiciar Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant
+consent of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from Anjou where
+Geoffry was at this moment pressed by revolt, the need above all of some
+king to meet the outbreak of anarchy which followed Henry's death,
+secured Stephen the voice of the baronage. He was crowned at
+Christmas-tide; and soon joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester, a bastard
+son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; while the issue of a charter
+from Oxford in 1136, a charter which renewed the dead king's pledge of
+good government, promised another Henry to the realm. The charter
+surrendered all forests made in the last reign as a sop to the nobles,
+and conciliated the Church by granting freedom of election and renouncing
+all right to the profits of vacant churches; while the king won the
+people by a promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of the Standard]
+
+The king's first two years were years of success and prosperity. Two
+risings of barons in the east and west were easily put down, and in 1137
+Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the Duchy against an attack from
+Anjou. But already the elements of trouble were gathering round him.
+Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly qualities save that of a
+soldier's bravery; and the realm soon began to slip from his grasp. He
+turned against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to which he owed
+his accession by surrounding himself with hired knights from Flanders; he
+drained the treasury by creating new earls endowed with pensions from it,
+and recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness of the
+gathering storm only drove Stephen to bind his friends to him by
+suffering them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal tyranny which
+Henry had struck down. But the long reign of the dead king had left the
+Crown so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own. A plot which
+Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from the outset of his reign came
+indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl's revolt stripped Stephen of Caen
+and half Normandy. But when his partizans in England rose in the south
+and the west and the King of Scots, whose friendship Stephen had bought
+in the opening of his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the
+northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king. Stephen himself
+marched on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds save
+Bristol. His people fought for him in the north. The pillage and
+cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the
+spirit of the Yorkshiremen. Baron and freeman gathered at York round
+Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the field of Northallerton to await
+the foe. The sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York,
+St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in
+a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre of the host. The first onset
+of David's host was a terrible one. "I who wear no armour," shouted the
+chief of the Galwegians, "will go as far this day as any one with
+breastplate of mail"; his men charged with wild shouts of "Albin, Albin,"
+and were followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands. But their
+repulse was complete; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the close
+English ranks around the Standard, and the whole army fled in confusion
+to Carlisle.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Bishops]
+
+Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative organization of Henry
+still did its work. Roger remained justiciar, his son was chancellor, his
+nephew Nigel, the Bishop of Ely, was treasurer. Finance and justice were
+thus concentrated in the hands of a single family which preserved amidst
+the deepening misrule something of the old order and rule, and which
+stood at the head of the "new men," whom Henry had raised into importance
+and made the instruments of his will. These new men were still weak by
+the side of the older nobles; and conscious of the jealousy and ill-will
+with which they were regarded they followed in self-defence the example
+which the barons were setting in building and fortifying castles on their
+domains. Roger and his house, the objects from their official position of
+a deeper grudge than any, were carried away by the panic. The justiciar
+and his son fortified their castles, and it was only with a strong force
+at their back that the prelates appeared at court. Their attitude was one
+to rouse Stephen's jealousy, and the news of Matilda's purpose of
+invasion lent strength to the doubts which the nobles cast on their
+fidelity. All the weak violence of the king's temper suddenly broke out.
+He seized Roger the Chancellor and the Bishop of Lincoln when they
+appeared at Oxford in June 1139, and forced them to surrender their
+strongholds. Shame broke the justiciar's heart; he died at the close of
+the year, and his nephew Nigel of Ely was driven from the realm. But the
+fall of this house shattered the whole system of government. The King's
+Court and the Exchequer ceased to work at a moment when the landing of
+Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda set Stephen face to face with a
+danger greater than he had yet encountered, while the clergy, alienated
+by the arrest of the Bishops and the disregard of their protests, stood
+angrily aloof.
+
+[Sidenote: Civil War]
+
+The three bases of Henry's system of government, the subjection of the
+baronage to the law, the good-will of the Church, and the organization of
+justice and finance, were now utterly ruined; and for the fourteen years
+which passed from this hour to the Treaty of Wallingford England was
+given up to the miseries of civil war. The country was divided between
+the adherents of the two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London and
+the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in 1141 left the latter a captive
+in the hands of his enemies, while Matilda was received throughout the
+land as its "Lady." But the disdain with which she repulsed the claim of
+London to the enjoyment of its older privileges called its burghers to
+arms; her resolve to hold Stephen a prisoner roused his party again to
+life, and she was driven to Oxford to be besieged there in 1142 by
+Stephen himself, who had obtained his release in exchange for Earl Robert
+after the capture of the Earl in a battle at Winchester. She escaped from
+the castle, but with the death of Robert her struggle became a hopeless
+one, and in 1148 she withdrew to Normandy. The war was now a mere chaos
+of pillage and bloodshed. The royal power came to an end. The royal
+courts were suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come at the king's
+call. The bishops met in council to protest, but their protests and
+excommunications fell on deafened ears. For the first and last time in
+her history England was in the hands of the baronage, and their outrages
+showed from what horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had saved
+her. Castles sprang up everywhere. "They filled the land with castles,"
+say the terrible annals of the time. "They greatly oppressed the wretched
+people by making them work at these castles, and when they were finished
+they filled them with devils and armed men." In each of these
+robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a king. The strife for the Crown
+had broken into a medley of feuds between baron and baron, for none could
+brook an equal or a superior in his fellow. "They fought among themselves
+with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and rapine;
+in what had been the most fertile of counties they destroyed almost all
+the provision of bread." For fight as they might with one another, all
+were at one in the plunder of the land. Towns were put to ransom.
+Villages were sacked and burned. All who were deemed to have goods,
+whether men or women, were carried off and flung into dungeons and
+tortured till they yielded up their wealth. No ghastlier picture of a
+nation's misery has ever been painted than that which closes the English
+Chronicle whose last accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.
+"They hanged up men by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke. Some
+were hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and burning things
+were hung on to their feet. They put knotted strings about men's heads,
+and writhed them till they went to the brain. They put men into prisons
+where adders and snakes and toads were crawling, and so they tormented
+them. Some they put into a chest short and narrow and not deep and that
+had sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all
+their limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and grim things called
+rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to carry. It was
+thus made: it was fastened to a beam and had a sharp iron to go about a
+man's neck and throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but
+he bore all the iron. Many thousands they starved with hunger."
+
+[Sidenote: Religious Revival]
+
+It was only after years of this feudal anarchy that England was rescued
+from it by the efforts of the Church. The political influence of the
+Church had been greatly lessened by the Conquest: for pious, learned, and
+energetic as the bulk of the Conqueror's bishops were, they were not
+Englishmen. Till the reign of Henry the First no Englishman occupied an
+English see. This severance of the higher clergy from the lower
+priesthood and from the people went far to paralyze the constitutional
+influence of the Church. Anselm stood alone against Rufus, and when
+Anselm was gone no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the silence of
+the reign of Henry the First. But at the close of Henry's reign and
+throughout the reign of Stephen England was stirred by the first of those
+great religious movements which it was to experience afterwards in the
+preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the
+Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys. Everywhere in
+town and country men banded themselves together for prayer: hermits
+flocked to the woods: noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a
+reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order, as they spread over the moors
+and forests of the North. A new spirit of devotion woke the slumbers of
+the religious houses, and penetrated alike to the home of the noble and
+the trader. London took its full share in the revival. The city was proud
+of its religion, its thirteen conventual and more than a hundred
+parochial churches. The new impulse changed its very aspect. In the midst
+of the city Bishop Richard busied himself with the vast cathedral church
+of St. Paul which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges came up the river with
+stone from Caen for the great arches that moved the popular wonder, while
+street and lane were being levelled to make room for its famous
+churchyard. Rahere, a minstrel at Henry's court, raised the Priory of St.
+Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built St. Giles's at Cripplegate.
+The old English Cnichtenagild surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site
+for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house paints
+admirably the temper of the citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior
+Norman, built church and cloister and bought books and vestments in so
+liberal a fashion that no money remained to buy bread. The canons were at
+their last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the refectory as they
+passed round the cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the
+tables laid but not a single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set out," said
+the citizens; "but where is the bread to come from?" The women who were
+present vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday, and there was soon bread
+enough and to spare for the priory and its priests.
+
+[Sidenote: Thomas of London]
+
+We see the strength of the new movement in the new class of ecclesiastics
+whom it forced on to the stage. Men like Archbishop Theobald drew
+whatever influence they wielded from a belief in their holiness of life
+and unselfishness of aim. The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new
+impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at the moment we have
+reached its power was found strong enough to wrest England out of the
+chaos of feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen's reign his brother
+Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been appointed in 1139 Papal
+Legate for the realm, had striven to supply the absence of any royal or
+national authority by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the
+moral right of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne.
+The compact between king and people which became a part of constitutional
+law in the Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the Charter of
+Stephen, but its legitimate consequence in the responsibility of the
+crown for the execution of the compact was first drawn out by these
+ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions of Stephen and
+Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward and Richard, and the
+solemn act by which the succession was changed in the case of James.
+Extravagant and unauthorized as their expression of it may appear, they
+expressed the right of a nation to good government. Henry of Winchester
+however, "half monk, half soldier," as he was called, possessed too
+little religious influence to wield a really spiritual power, and it was
+only at the close of Stephen's reign that the nation really found a moral
+leader in Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald's ablest agent
+and adviser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert Beket, a leading citizen and,
+it is said, Portreeve of London, the site of whose house is still marked
+by the Mercers' chapel in Cheapside. His mother Rohese was a type of the
+devout woman of her day; she weighed her boy every year on his birthday
+against money, clothes, and provisions which she gave to the poor. Thomas
+grew up amidst the Norman barons and clerks who frequented his father's
+house with a genial freedom of character tempered by the Norman
+refinement; he passed from the school of Merton to the University of
+Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of the young nobles of
+the time. Tall, handsome, bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his
+firmness of temper showed itself in his very sports; to rescue his hawk
+which had fallen into the water he once plunged into a millrace and was
+all but crushed by the wheel. The loss of his father's wealth drove him
+to the court of Archbishop Theobald, and he soon became the Primate's
+confidant in his plans for the rescue of England.
+
+[Illustration: The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Treaty of Wallingford]
+
+The natural influence which the Primate would have exerted was long held
+in suspense by the superior position of Bishop Henry of Winchester as
+Papal Legate; but this office ceased with the Pope who granted it, and
+when in 1150 it was transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald soon
+made his weight felt. The long disorder of the realm was producing its
+natural reaction in exhaustion and disgust, as well as in a general
+craving for return to the line of hereditary succession whose breaking
+seemed the cause of the nation's woes. But the growth of their son Henry
+to manhood set naturally aside the pretensions both of Count Geoffry and
+Matilda. Young as he was Henry already showed the cool long-sighted
+temper which was to be his characteristic on the throne. Foiled in an
+early attempt to grasp the crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder
+which was doing his work till the death of his father at the close of
+1151 left him master of Normandy and Anjou. In the spring of the
+following year his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, added
+Aquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw the gathering storm, and strove
+to meet it. He called on the bishops and baronage to secure the
+succession of his son Eustace by consenting to his association with him
+in the kingdom. But the moment was now come for Theobald to play his
+part. He was already negotiating through Thomas of London with Henry and
+the Pope; he met Stephen's plans by a refusal to swear fealty to his son,
+and the bishops, in spite of Stephen's threats, went with their head. The
+blow was soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as Theobald's agent,
+invited Henry to appear in England, and though the Duke disappointed his
+supporters' hopes by the scanty number of men he brought with him in
+1153, his weakness proved in the end a source of strength. It was not to
+foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success but to the arms of
+Englishmen. An English army gathered round him, and as the hosts of
+Stephen and the Duke drew together a battle seemed near which would
+decide the fate of the realm. But Theobald who was now firmly supported
+by the greater barons again interfered and forced the rivals to an
+agreement. To the excited partizans of the house of Anjou it seemed as if
+the nobles were simply playing their own game in the proposed settlement
+and striving to preserve their power by a balance of masters. The
+suspicion was probably groundless, but all fear vanished with the death
+of Eustace, who rode off from his father's camp, maddened with the ruin
+of his hopes, to die in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand of
+God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground was now clear, and in November
+the Treaty of Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy. The
+castles were to be razed, the crown lands resumed, the foreign
+mercenaries banished from the country, and sheriffs appointed to restore
+order. Stephen was recognized as king, and in turn recognized Henry as
+his heir. The duke received at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and
+passed into Normandy in the spring of 1154. The work of reformation had
+already begun. Stephen resented indeed the pressure which Henry put on
+him to enforce the destruction of the castles built during the anarchy;
+but Stephen's resistance was but the pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He
+was in fact fast drawing to the grave; and on his death in October 1154
+Henry returned to take the crown without a blow.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+HENRY THE SECOND
+1154-1189
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: Henry Fitz-Empress]
+
+Young as he was, and he had reached but his twenty-first year when he
+returned to England as its king, Henry mounted the throne with a purpose
+of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical,
+serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
+something in his build and look, in the square stout form, the fiery
+face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the
+coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring,
+coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who
+observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning till night."
+Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing in diet, never
+resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a
+singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or
+hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough,
+passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the
+character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation
+when neighbourhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
+Normans into a single people. A national feeling was thus springing up
+before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away.
+Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his
+day: he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which
+enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's
+impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older
+constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance
+to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and
+traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
+co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable
+and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to
+gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such
+anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of
+a kingly rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class,
+administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the
+nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in
+the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized
+this idea. But of the currents of thought and feeling which were tending
+in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and
+social impulses which were telling on men about him was simply to let
+them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under
+the eyes of a king who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at
+picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild
+frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of
+the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold
+together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably
+destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's
+position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of
+the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion
+alien to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to be swept away in
+the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and
+activity blinded him. But whether by the anti-national temper of his
+general system or by the administrative reforms of his English rule his
+policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for
+the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Scutage]
+
+He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. His
+first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till his
+accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First; and it was
+with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were
+driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite of the
+opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and Exchequer restored. Age
+and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post of
+minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of
+Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser and was now
+made Chancellor. Thomas won the personal favour of the king. The two
+young men had, in Theobald's words, "but one heart and mind"; Henry
+jested in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in
+rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. He loaded his
+favourite with riches and honours, but there is no ground for thinking
+that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's policy
+seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own. His work of
+reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad. Welsh
+outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an army over the border; and a
+crushing repulse showed that he was less skilful as a general than as a
+statesman. The next year saw him drawn across the Channel, where he was
+already master of a third of the present France. Anjou, Maine, and
+Touraine he had inherited from his father, Normandy from his mother, he
+governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven provinces of the
+South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche, Perigord, the Limousin, the
+Angoumois, and Gascony, belonged to his wife. As Duchess of Aquitaine
+Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared in 1159 to
+enforce by arms. But the campaign was turned to the profit of his
+reforms. He had already begun the work of bringing the baronage within
+the grasp of the law by sending judges from the Exchequer year after year
+to exact the royal dues and administer the king's justice even in castle
+and manor. He now attacked its military influence. Each man who held
+lands of a certain value was bound to furnish a knight for his lord's
+service; and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at their
+disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to serve in the war of
+Toulouse, he allowed the lower tenants to commute their service for
+sums payable to the royal treasury under the name of "scutage," or
+shield-money. The "Great Scutage" did much to disarm the baronage, while
+it enabled the king to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.
+Again however he was luckless in war. King Lewis of France threw himself
+into Toulouse. Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide
+dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain; he
+withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance
+and the betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of Lewis.
+
+[Sidenote: Archbishop Thomas]
+
+Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the relations of the
+State with the Church. These rested in the main on the system established
+by the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had no wish to meddle. But
+he was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal before the
+law; and he had no more mercy for clerical than for feudal immunities.
+The immunities of the clergy indeed were becoming a hindrance to public
+justice. The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended far beyond the
+priesthood; it included in Henry's day the whole of the professional and
+educated classes. It was subject to the jurisdiction of the Church courts
+alone; but bodily punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the
+lay courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and laity become
+that the bishops no longer sought civil aid but restricted themselves to
+the purely spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation of orders.
+Such penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while preserving
+the Church courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted offenders
+to secular punishment. For the carrying out of these designs he sought an
+agent in Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister for
+eight years, and had fought bravely in the war against Toulouse at the
+head of the seven hundred knights who formed his household. But the king
+had other work for him than war. On Theobald's death he forced on the
+monks of Canterbury his election as Archbishop. But from the moment of
+his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its
+whole energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first
+intimation of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to his gay court
+attire: "You are choosing a fine dress," he said, "to figure at the head
+of your Canterbury monks"; once monk and Archbishop he passed with a
+fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism; and a visit to the Council
+of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority
+were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third, strengthened his purpose of
+struggling for the privileges of the Church. His change of attitude
+encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty lawsuits, but no
+breach had come with the king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts
+should be punished by the civil power. Thomas refused; he would only
+consent that a clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer
+like a layman. Both parties appealed to the "customs" of the realm; and
+it was to state these "customs" that a court was held in 1164 at
+Clarendon near Salisbury.
+
+[Sidenote: Legal Reforms]
+
+The report presented by bishops and barons formed the Constitutions of
+Clarendon, a code which in the bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted
+the system of the Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to
+take place before royal officers, in the king's chapel, and with the
+king's assent. The prelate-elect was bound to do homage to the king for
+his lands before consecration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the
+king, subject to all feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in the
+King's Court. No bishop might leave the realm without the royal
+permission. No tenant in chief or royal servant might be excommunicated,
+or their land placed under interdict, but by the king's assent. What was
+new was the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
+King's Court was to decide whether a suit between clerk and layman, whose
+nature was disputed, belonged to the Church courts or the King's. A royal
+officer was to be present at all ecclesiastical proceedings in order to
+confine the Bishop's court within its own due limits, and a clerk
+convicted there passed at once under the civil jurisdiction. An appeal
+was left from the Archbishop's court to the King's Court for defect of
+justice, but none might appeal to the Papal court save with the king's
+leave. The privilege of sanctuary in churches and churchyards was
+repealed, so far as property and not persons was concerned. After a
+passionate refusal the Primate was at last brought to give his assent to
+these Constitutions, but the assent was soon retracted, and Henry's
+savage resentment threw the moral advantage of the position into his
+opponent's hands. Vexatious charges were brought against Thomas, and he
+was summoned to answer at a Council held in the autumn at Northampton.
+All urged him to submit; his very life was said to be in peril from the
+king's wrath. But in the presence of danger the courage of the man rose
+to its full height. Grasping his archiepiscopal cross he entered the
+royal court, forbade the nobles to condemn him, and appealed in the teeth
+of the Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of "Traitor!" followed him
+as he withdrew. The Primate turned fiercely at the word: "Were I a
+knight," he shouted back, "my sword should answer that foul taunt!" Once
+alone however, dread pressed more heavily; he fled in disguise at
+nightfall and reached France through Flanders.
+
+Great as were the dangers it was to bring with it, the flight of Thomas
+left Henry free to carry on the reforms he had planned. In spite of
+denunciations from Primate and Pope, the Constitutions regulated from
+this time the relations of the Church with the State. Henry now turned to
+the actual organization of the realm. His reign, it has been truly said,
+"initiated the rule of law" as distinct from the despotism, whether
+personal or tempered by routine, of the Norman sovereigns. It was by
+successive "assizes" or codes issued with the sanction of the great
+councils of barons and prelates which he summoned year by year, that he
+perfected in a system of gradual reforms the administrative measures
+which Henry the First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legislation
+commences in 1166 with the Assize of Clarendon, the first object of which
+was to provide for the order of the realm by reviving the old English
+system of mutual security or frankpledge. No stranger might abide in any
+place save a borough and only there for a single night unless sureties
+were given for his good behaviour; and the list of such strangers was to
+be submitted to the itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize
+for the repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so often
+attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred, with four
+from each township, were sworn to present those who were known or reputed
+as criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The jurors were
+thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also in determining
+the value of the charge, and it is this double character of Henry's
+jurors that has descended to our "grand jury," who still remain charged
+with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after examination of the
+witnesses against them. Two later steps brought the jury to its modern
+condition. Under Edward the First witnesses acquainted with the
+particular fact in question were added in each case to the general jury,
+and by the separation of these two classes of jurors at a later time the
+last became simply "witnesses" without any judicial power, while the
+first ceased to be witnesses at all and became our modern jurors, who are
+only judges of the testimony given. With this assize too a practice which
+had prevailed from the earliest English times, the practice of
+"compurgation," passed away. Under this system the accused could be
+acquitted of the charge by the voluntary oath of his neighbours and
+kinsmen; but this was abolished by the Assize of Clarendon, and for the
+fifty years which followed it his trial, after the investigation of the
+grand jury, was found solely in the ordeal or "judgement of God," where
+innocence was proved by the power of holding hot iron in the hand or by
+sinking when flung into the water, for swimming was a proof of guilt. It
+was the abolition of the whole system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran
+in 1216 which led the way to the establishment of what is called a "petty
+jury" for the final trial of prisoners.
+
+[Sidenote: Murder of Thomas]
+
+But Henry's work of reorganization had hardly begun when it was broken by
+the pressure of the strife with the Primate. For six years the contest
+raged bitterly; at Rome, at Paris, the agents of the two powers intrigued
+against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest persecution in
+driving the Primate's kinsmen from England, and in confiscating the lands
+of their order till the monks of Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home;
+while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his friends by his violence
+and excommunications, as well as by the stubbornness with which he clung
+to the offensive clause "Saving the honour of my order," the addition of
+which to his consent would have practically neutralised the king's
+reforms. The Pope counselled mildness, the French king for a time
+withdrew his support, his own clerks gave way at last. "Come up," said
+one of them bitterly when his horse stumbled on the road, "saving the
+honour of the Church and my order." But neither warning nor desertion
+moved the resolution of the Primate. Henry, in dread of Papal
+excommunication, resolved in 1170 on the coronation of his son: and this
+office, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he transferred to the
+Archbishop of York. But the Pope's hands were now freed by his successes
+in Italy, and the threat of an interdict forced the king to a show of
+submission. The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconciliation
+with the king at Freteval, and the Kentishmen flocked around him with
+uproarious welcome as he entered Canterbury. "This is England," said his
+clerks, as they saw the white headlands of the coast. "You will wish
+yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said Thomas sadly, and
+his foreboding showed his appreciation of Henry's character. He was now
+in the royal power, and orders had already been issued in the younger
+Henry's name for his arrest when four knights from the King's Court,
+spurred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their master's wrath,
+crossed the sea, and on the 29th of December forced their way into the
+Archbishop's palace. After a stormy parley with him in his chamber they
+withdrew to arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the cathedral, but
+as he reached the steps leading from the transept to the choir his
+pursuers burst in from the cloisters. "Where," cried Reginald Fitzurse in
+the dusk of the dimly-lighted minster, "where is the traitor, Thomas
+Beket?" The Primate turned resolutely back: "Here am I, no traitor, but a
+priest of God," he replied, and again descending the steps he placed
+himself with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All the
+bravery and violence of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas
+as he tossed back the threats and demands of his assailants. "You are our
+prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to drag him
+from the church. "Do not touch me, Reginald," cried the Primate, "pander
+that you are, you owe me fealty"; and availing himself of his personal
+strength he shook him roughly off. "Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse,
+and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Ranulf de
+Broc with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains on the
+ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly, "this traitor will never
+rise again."
+
+[Sidenote: The Church and Literature]
+
+The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout
+Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was
+canonized, and became the most popular of English saints. The stately
+"martyrdom" which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the
+triumph which his blood had won. But the contest had in fact revealed a
+new current of educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church
+than the reforms of the king. Throughout it Henry had been aided by a
+silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from
+the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have seen
+literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself
+against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical
+privileges. Almost all our writers from Baeda to the days of the Angevins
+are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed the Conquest
+was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee
+had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman
+abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and
+writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature,
+patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints
+compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this
+time a part of every religious house of any importance. But the
+literature which found this religious shelter was not so much
+ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional impulse
+given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics. The
+literary revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old
+historical form. At Durham Turgot and Simeon threw into Latin shape the
+national annals to the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to
+northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen's reign were noted
+down by two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between England and
+the Scots.
+
+These however were the colourless jottings of mere annalists; it was in
+the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern's lives of the English saints or
+in Eadmer's record of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his
+successor, that we see the first indications of a distinctively English
+feeling telling on the new literature. The national impulse is yet more
+conspicuous in the two historians that followed. The war-songs of the
+English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, an Archdeacon of
+Huntingdon, who wove them into annals compiled from Baeda, and the
+Chronicle; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously
+collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular traditions of
+the English kings. It is in William above all others that we see the new
+tendency of English literature. In himself, as in his work, he marks the
+fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for he was of both English
+and Norman parentage and his sympathies were as divided as his blood. The
+form and style of his writings show the influence of those classical
+studies which were now reviving throughout Christendom. Monk as he is,
+William discards the older ecclesiastical models and the annalistic form.
+Events are grouped together with no strict reference to time, while the
+lively narrative flows rapidly and loosely along with constant breaks of
+digression over the general history of Europe and the Church. It is in
+this change of historic spirit that William takes his place as first of
+the more statesmanlike and philosophic school of historians who began to
+arise in direct connexion with the Court, and among whom the author of
+the chronicle which commonly bears the name of "Benedict of Peterborough"
+with his continuator Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous. Both held
+judicial offices under Henry the Second, and it is to their position at
+Court that they owe the fulness and accuracy of their information as to
+affairs at home and abroad, as well as their copious supply of official
+documents. What is noteworthy in these writers is the purely political
+temper with which they regard the conflict of Church and State in their
+time. But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly
+secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of
+Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the
+royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on
+English government.
+
+[Sidenote: Gerald of Wales]
+
+Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work of a priest who
+claimed to be a bishop, are the writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is
+the father of our popular literature as he is the originator of the
+political and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of
+Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his veins, and
+something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and
+his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the
+wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald
+became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his
+hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of
+the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw
+pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be
+understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style:
+"new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the
+old and dry method of some authors and aimed at adopting the fashion of
+speech which is actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest of
+Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two
+journeys undertaken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin,
+illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and
+his good sense. They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we
+find in the correspondence of a modern journal. There is the same modern
+tone in his political pamphlets; his profusion of jests, his fund of
+anecdote, the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness and
+critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a
+fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant even to
+such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in which Gerald poured
+out his resentment against the Angevins are the cause of half the scandal
+about Henry and his sons which has found its way into history. His life
+was wasted in an ineffectual attempt to secure the see of St. David's,
+but his pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation to its later
+struggle with the Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: Romance]
+
+A tone of distinct hostility to the Church developed itself almost from
+the first among the singers of romance. Romance had long before taken
+root in the court of Henry the First, where under the patronage of Queen
+Maud the dreams of Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Britanny,
+and which had travelled to Wales in the train of the exile Rhys ap
+Tewdor, took shape in the History of the Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth.
+Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes
+of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades and of the
+world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, were mingled together by this
+daring fabulist in a work whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred
+of Beverley transferred Geoffry's inventions into the region of sober
+history, while two Norman _trouveurs_, Gaimar and Wace, translated them
+into French verse. So complete was the credence they obtained that
+Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second, while the
+child of his son Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny received the name
+of the Celtic hero. Out of Geoffry's creation grew little by little the
+poem of the Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled with the story of
+Arthur the older and more mysterious legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent
+that of Lancelot to the wandering minstrels of the day, who moulded it as
+they wandered from hall to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood
+wrested from its loyalty by the love of woman. The stories of Tristram
+and Gawayne, at first as independent as that of Lancelot, were drawn with
+it into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance; and when the Church, jealous
+of the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a counteracting
+influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the San Graal which held the blood
+of the Cross invisible to all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the
+genius of a Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends together,
+sent Arthur and his knights wandering over sea and land in quest of the
+San Graal, and crowned the work by the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of
+ideal knighthood, without fear and without reproach.
+
+[Sidenote: Walter de Map]
+
+Walter stands before us as the representative of a sudden outburst of
+literary, social, and religious criticism which followed this growth of
+romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the
+two Henries. Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite
+with the king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, his genius
+was as various as it was prolific. He is as much at his ease in sweeping
+together the chitchat of the time in his "Courtly Trifles" as in creating
+the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest strength
+when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform and
+embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his
+"Bishop Goliath." The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their
+struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and
+confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the
+veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its
+thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy from
+Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what
+escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the
+archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor
+officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd
+of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars,
+abbots "purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering together
+like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of
+purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the
+Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
+this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.
+
+[Illustration: Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5t.jpg)]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Invasion of Ireland]
+
+It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such invectives as
+sober history, or to judge the Church of the twelfth century by the
+taunts of Walter de Map. What writings such as his bring home to us is
+the upgrowth of a new literary class, not only standing apart from the
+Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, and breaking
+down the unquestioning reverence with which men had till now regarded it
+by their sarcasm and abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which
+begins with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer
+and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard. But even in these early
+days we can hardly doubt that it gave Henry strength in his contest with
+the Church. So little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop
+Thomas that the years which follow it form the grandest portion of his
+reign. While Rome was threatening excommunication he added a new realm to
+his dominions. Ireland had long since fallen from the civilization and
+learning which its missionaries brought in the seventh century to the
+shores of Northumbria. Every element of improvement or progress which had
+been introduced into the island disappeared in the long and desperate
+struggle with the Danes. The coast-towns which the invaders founded, such
+as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish, in blood and manners and at feud
+with the Celtic tribes around them, though sometimes forced by the
+fortunes of war to pay tribute and to accept the overlordship of the
+Irish kings. It was through these towns however that the intercourse with
+England which had ceased since the eighth century was to some extent
+renewed in the eleventh. Cut off from the Church of the island by
+national antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the See of
+Canterbury for the ordination of their bishops, and acknowledged a right
+of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The relations thus
+formed were drawn closer by a slave-trade between the two countries which
+the Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time in suppressing at
+Bristol but which appears to have quickly revived. In the twelfth century
+Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into
+slavery in spite of royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the
+English Church. The slave-trade afforded a legitimate pretext for war,
+had a pretext been needed by the ambition of Henry the Second; and within
+a few months of that king's coronation John of Salisbury was despatched
+to obtain the Papal sanction for an invasion of the island. The
+enterprise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the colour of a
+crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the general body of Christendom,
+the absence of learning and civilization, the scandalous vices of its
+people, were alleged as the grounds of Henry's action. It was the general
+belief of the time that all islands fell under the jurisdiction of the
+Papal See, and it was as a possession of the Roman Church that Henry
+sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland. His aim was "to enlarge the
+bounds of the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the
+manners of its people and to plant virtue among them, and to increase the
+Christian religion." He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to
+extirpate vicious customs, to respect the rights of the native Churches,
+and to enforce the payment of Peter's pence" as a recognition of the
+overlordship of the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved the
+enterprise, as one prompted by "the ardour of faith and love of
+religion," and declared his will that the people of Ireland should
+receive Henry with all honour, and revere him as their lord.
+
+The Papal bull was produced in a great council of the English baronage,
+but the opposition was strong enough to force on Henry a temporary
+abandonment of his designs, and twelve years passed before the scheme was
+brought to life again by the flight of Dermod, King of Leinster, to
+Henry's court. Dermod had been driven from his dominions in one of the
+endless civil wars which devastated the island; he now did homage for his
+kingdom to Henry, and returned to Ireland with promises of aid from the
+English knighthood. He was followed in 1168 by Robert FitzStephen, a son
+of the Constable of Cardigan, with a little band of a hundred and forty
+knights, sixty men-at-arms, and three or four hundred Welsh archers.
+Small as was the number of the adventurers, their horses and arms proved
+irresistible by the Irish kernes; a sally of the men of Wexford was
+avenged by the storm of their town; the Ossory clans were defeated with a
+terrible slaughter, and Dermod, seizing a head from the heap of trophies
+which his men piled at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and
+lips with his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of
+Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, a ruined baron later
+known by the nickname of Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's
+prohibition landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen hundred men as
+Dermod's mercenary. The city was at once stormed, and the united forces
+of the earl and king marched to the siege of Dublin. In spite of a relief
+attempted by the King of Connaught, who was recognized as overking of the
+island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken by surprise; and the
+marriage of Richard with Eva, Dermod's daughter, left the Earl on the
+death of his father-in-law, which followed quickly on these successes,
+master of his kingdom of Leinster. The new lord had soon however to hurry
+back to England and appease the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of
+Dublin to the Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English lordship,
+and by accompanying the king in 1171 on a voyage to the new dominion
+which the adventurers had won.
+
+[Sidenote: Revolt of the younger Henry]
+
+Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his purpose, the conquest of Ireland
+would now have been accomplished. The King of Connaught indeed and the
+chiefs of Ulster refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes
+owned his suzerainty; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized him as
+their lord; and he was preparing to penetrate to the north and west, and
+to secure his conquest by a systematic erection of castles throughout the
+country, when the need of making terms with Rome, whose interdict
+threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop Thomas, recalled him in the
+spring of 1172 to Normandy. Henry averted the threatened sentence by a
+show of submission. The judicial provisions in the Constitutions of
+Clarendon were in form annulled, and liberty of election was restored in
+the case of bishopricks and abbacies. In reality however the victory
+rested with the king. Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments
+remained practically in his hands, and the King's Court asserted its
+power over the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops. But the strife with
+Thomas had roused into active life every element of danger which
+surrounded Henry, the envious dread of his neighbours, the disaffection
+of his own house, the disgust of the barons at the repeated blows which
+he levelled at their military and judicial power. The king's withdrawal
+of the office of sheriff from the great nobles of the shire to entrust it
+to the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff of the royal
+judges quickened the resentment of the baronage into revolt. His wife
+Eleanor, now parted from Henry by a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son,
+whose coronation had given him the title of king, to demand possession of
+the English realm. On his father's refusal the boy sought refuge with
+Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal for a vast rising. France,
+Flanders, and Scotland joined in league against Henry; his younger sons,
+Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Aquitaine, while the Earl of
+Leicester sailed from Flanders with an army of mercenaries to stir up
+England to revolt. The Earl's descent ended in a crushing defeat near St.
+Edmundsbury at the hands of the king's justiciars; but no sooner had the
+French king entered Normandy and invested Rouen than the revolt of the
+baronage burst into flame. The Scots crossed the border, Roger Mowbray
+rose in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in the midland shires, Hugh
+Bigod in the eastern counties, while a Flemish fleet prepared to support
+the insurrection by a descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop
+Thomas still hung round Henry's neck, and his first act in hurrying to
+England to meet these perils in 1174 was to prostrate himself before the
+shrine of the new martyr and to submit to a public scourging in expiation
+of his sin. But the penance was hardly wrought when all danger was
+dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of Scotland, William the
+Lion, surprised by the English under cover of a mist, fell into the hands
+of Henry's minister, Ranulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots
+the English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With the army of
+mercenaries which he had brought over sea Henry was able to return to
+Normandy, to raise the siege of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to
+submission.
+
+[Sidenote: Later reforms]
+
+Through the next ten years Henry's power was at its height. The French
+king was cowed. The Scotch king bought his release in 1175 by owning
+Henry's suzerainty. The Scotch barons did homage, and English garrisons
+manned the strongest of the Scotch castles. In England itself church and
+baronage were alike at the king's mercy. Eleanor was imprisoned; and the
+younger Henry, though always troublesome, remained powerless to do harm.
+The king availed himself of this rest from outer foes to push forward his
+judicial and administrative organization. At the outset of his reign he
+had restored the King's Court and the occasional circuits of its
+justices; but the revolt was hardly over when in 1176 the Assize of
+Northampton rendered this institution permanent and regular by dividing
+the kingdom into six districts, to each of which three itinerant judges
+were assigned. The circuits thus marked out correspond roughly with those
+that still exist. The primary object of these circuits was financial; but
+the rendering of the king's justice went on side by side with the
+exaction of the king's dues, and this carrying of justice to every corner
+of the realm was made still more effective by the abolition of all feudal
+exemptions from the royal jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new
+system lay in the opportunities it afforded to judicial corruption; and
+so great were its abuses, that in 1178 Henry was forced to restrict for a
+while the number of justices to five, and to reserve appeals from their
+court to himself in council. The Court of Appeal which was thus created,
+that of the King in Council, gave birth as time went on to tribunal after
+tribunal. It is from it that the judicial powers now exercised by the
+Privy Council are derived, as well as the equitable jurisdiction of the
+Chancellor. In the next century it became the Great Council of the realm,
+and it is from this Great Council, in its two distinct capacities, that
+the Privy Council drew its legislative, and the House of Lords its
+judicial character. The Court of Star Chamber and the Judicial Committee
+of the Privy Council are later offshoots of Henry's Court of Appeal. From
+the judicial organization of the realm, he turned to its military
+organization, and in 1181 an Assize of Arms restored the national fyrd or
+militia to the place which it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution
+of scutage for military service had freed the crown from its dependence
+on the baronage and its feudal retainers; the Assize of Arms replaced
+this feudal organization by the older obligation of every freeman to
+serve in defence of the realm. Every knight was now bound to appear in
+coat of mail and with shield and lance, every freeholder with lance and
+hauberk, every burgess and poorer freeman with lance and helmet, at the
+king's call. The levy of an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the
+disposal of the Crown for purposes of defence.
+
+[Sidenote: Henry's death]
+
+A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his brother Geoffry in 1183
+hardly broke the current of Henry's success. The revolt ended with the
+young king's death, and in 1186 this was followed by the death of
+Geoffry. Richard, now his father's heir, remained busy in Aquitaine; and
+Henry was himself occupied with plans for the recovery of Jerusalem,
+which had been taken by Saladin in 1187. The "Saladin tithe," a tax
+levied on all goods and chattels, and memorable as the first English
+instance of taxation on personal property, was granted to the king at the
+opening of 1188 to support his intended Crusade. But the Crusade was
+hindered by strife which broke out between Richard and the new French
+king, Philip; and while Henry strove in vain to bring about peace, a
+suspicion that he purposed to make his youngest son, John, his heir drove
+Richard to Philip's side. His father, broken in health and spirits,
+negotiated fruitlessly through the winter, but with the spring of 1189
+Richard and the French king suddenly appeared before Le Mans. Henry was
+driven in headlong flight from the town. Tradition tells how from a
+height where he halted to look back on the burning city, so dear to him
+as his birthplace, the king hurled his curse against God: "Since Thou
+hast taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born and bred, and
+where my father lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too--I will
+rob Thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." If the words were
+uttered, they were the frenzied words of a dying man. Death drew Henry to
+the home of his race, but Tours fell as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted
+king was driven to beg mercy from his foes. They gave him the list of the
+conspirators against him: at its head was the name of one, his love for
+whom had brought with it the ruin that was crushing him, his youngest
+son, John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, "let things
+go as they will--I care no more for myself or for the world." The end was
+come at last. Henry was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne,
+and muttering, "Shame, shame on a conquered king," passed sullenly away.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE ANGEVIN KINGS
+1189-1204
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: John and Longchamp]
+
+The fall of Henry the Second only showed the strength of the system he
+had built up on this side the sea. In the hands of the Justiciar, Ranulf
+de Glanvill, England remained peaceful through the last stormy months of
+his reign, and his successor Richard found it undisturbed when he came
+for his crowning in the autumn of 1189. Though born at Oxford, Richard
+had been bred in Aquitaine; he was an utter stranger to his realm, and
+his visit was simply for the purpose of gathering money for a Crusade.
+Sheriffdoms, bishopricks, were sold; even the supremacy over Scotland was
+bought back again by William the Lion; and it was with the wealth which
+these measures won that Richard made his way in 1190 to Marseilles and
+sailed thence to Messina. Here he found his army and a host under King
+Philip of France; and the winter was spent in quarrels between the two
+kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred of Sicily. In the spring
+of 1191 his mother Eleanor arrived with ill news from England. Richard
+had left the realm under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of
+Durham and William Longchamp of Ely; but before quitting France he had
+entrusted it wholly to the latter, who stood at the head of Church and
+State as at once Justiciar and Papal Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the
+king, but his exactions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred
+among the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John. While richly
+gifting his brother with earldoms and lands, Richard had taken oath from
+him that he would quit England for three years. But tidings that the
+Justiciar was striving to secure the succession of Arthur, the child of
+his elder brother Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny, to the English
+crown at once recalled John to the realm, and peace between him and
+Longchamp was only preserved by the influence of the queen-mother
+Eleanor. Richard met this news by sending Walter of Coutances, the
+Archbishop of Rouen, with full but secret powers to England. On his
+landing in the summer of 1191 Walter found the country already in arms.
+No battle had been fought, but John had seized many of the royal castles,
+and the indignation stirred by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop Geoffry
+of York, a bastard son of Henry the Second, called the whole baronage to
+the field. The nobles swore fealty to John as Richard's successor, and
+Walter of Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission as
+Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's exile from the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Richard]
+
+The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the Holy Land. He had
+landed at Acre in the summer and joined with the French king in its
+siege. But on the surrender of the town Philip at once sailed home, while
+Richard, marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem. The
+city however was saved by false news of its strength, and through the
+following winter and the spring of 1192 the king limited his activity to
+securing the fortresses of southern Palestine. In June he again advanced
+on Jerusalem, but the revolt of his army forced him a second time to fall
+back, and news of Philip's intrigues with John drove him to abandon
+further efforts. There was need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's sake
+in a merchant vessel, he was driven by a storm on the Adriatic coast, and
+while journeying in disguise overland arrested in December at Vienna by
+his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. Through the whole year John,
+in disgust at his displacement by Walter of Coutances, had been plotting
+fruitlessly with Philip. But the news of this capture at once roused both
+to activity. John secured his castles and seized Windsor, giving out that
+the king would never return; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor,
+Henry the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria had given Richard up, to
+retain his captive. But a new influence now appeared on the scene. The
+see of Canterbury was vacant, and Richard from his prison bestowed it on
+Hubert Walter, the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill,
+and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp. Hubert's ability was
+seen in the skill with which he held John at bay and raised the enormous
+ransom which Henry demanded, the whole people, clergy as well as lay,
+paying a fourth of their moveable goods. To gain his release however
+Richard was forced besides this payment of ransom to do homage to the
+Emperor, not only for the kingdom of Arles with which Henry invested him
+but for England itself, whose crown he resigned into the Emperor's hands
+and received back as a fief. But John's open revolt made even these terms
+welcome, and Richard hurried to England in the spring of 1194. He found
+the rising already quelled by the decision with which the Primate led an
+army against John's castles, and his landing was followed by his
+brother's complete submission.
+
+[Sidenote: Richard and Philip]
+
+The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in England, but oversea
+Richard found himself face to face with dangers which he was too
+clear-sighted to undervalue. Destitute of his father's administrative
+genius, less ingenious in his political conceptions than John, Richard
+was far from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in sheer
+physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, jostled roughly
+with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his race; but he
+was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execution of his plans
+as he was bold in their conception. "The devil is loose; take care of
+yourself," Philip had written to John at the news of Richard's release.
+In the French king's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by
+insults which he had borne during the Crusade. He had availed himself of
+Richard's imprisonment to invade Normandy, while the lords of Aquitaine
+rose in open revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of
+the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary
+soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their
+financial administration, combined with an impatience of their firm
+government and vigorous justice to alienate the nobles of their provinces
+on the Continent. Loyalty among the people there was none; even Anjou,
+the home of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. But
+in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's peer. He held him in
+check on the Norman frontier and surprised his treasure at Freteval while
+he reduced to submission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
+vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard led against
+his foes. The country groaned under its burdens, but it owned the justice
+and firmness of the Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to
+procure money with as little oppression as might be proved steps in the
+education of the nation in its own self-government. The taxes were
+assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each circuit of the justices; the
+grand jury of the county was based on the election of knights in the
+hundred courts; and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from the
+sheriff and given to a newly-elected officer, the coroner. In these
+elections were found at a later time precedents for parliamentary
+representation; in Hubert's mind they were doubtless intended to do
+little more than reconcile the people to the crushing taxation. His work
+poured a million into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short
+truce to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance, and to
+unite the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Boulogne with the Bretons in
+a revolt against Philip. He won a yet more valuable aid in the election
+of his nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the German
+throne, and his envoy William Longchamp knitted an alliance which would
+bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris.
+
+[Sidenote: Chateau Gaillard]
+
+But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider
+plans, and Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the
+loyalty of the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through
+Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a
+stranger to the Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize his
+Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving
+along the border at the head of Brabancon mercenaries, in whose camp the
+old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provencal
+ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site that Richard
+selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his
+realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of
+arms. As a monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle," Chateau
+Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages. Richard
+fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great
+semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the
+line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown
+the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat
+meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with
+the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to
+Rouen. The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard
+designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked
+by a stockade and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid
+stream, and by a fortified town which the king built in the valley of the
+Gambon, then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and
+the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land
+connects with the general plateau, rose at the height of three hundred
+feet above the river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
+the walls which connected it with the town and stockade have for the most
+part gone, but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the
+fortifications themselves--the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with
+casemates hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel,
+the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables of Les
+Andelys. Even now in its ruin we can understand the triumphant outburst
+of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky: "How pretty a
+child is mine, this child of but one year old!"
+
+[Sidenote: Richard's death]
+
+The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau Gaillard at a later
+time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were mingled
+in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to honour. "I
+would take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
+saw the fortress rise. "I would hold it, were its walls of butter," was
+the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land and the Archbishop of
+Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but the king met the
+interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was
+withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a "rain of blood," whose fall scared
+his courtiers. "Had an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says
+a cool observer, "he would have answered with a curse." The twelve
+months' hard work, in fact, by securing the Norman frontier set Richard
+free to deal his long-planned blow at Philip. Money only was wanting; for
+England had at last struck against the continued exactions. In 1198 Hugh,
+Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and bishops to refuse a new demand for
+the maintenance of foreign soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in
+despair. A new justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted
+some money by a harsh assize of the forests; but the exchequer was soon
+drained, and Richard listened with more than the greed of his race to
+rumours that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin.
+Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was
+said, of the Lord of Chalus. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and in
+the spring of 1199 Richard prowled around the walls. But the castle held
+stubbornly out till the king's greed passed into savage menace. He would
+hang all, he swore--man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the
+midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as
+he had lived, owning the wild passion which for seven years past had kept
+him from confession lest he should be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving
+with kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.
+
+[Sidenote: Loss of Normandy]
+
+The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. John was acknowledged
+as king in England and Normandy, Aquitaine was secured for him by its
+duchess, his mother Eleanor; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
+Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Britanny.
+The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against
+Arthur; the Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the
+French king practically annexed the country, and in May 1200 a treaty
+between the two kings left John master of the whole dominion of his
+house. But fresh troubles broke out in Poitou; Philip, on John's refusal
+to answer the charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, declared in
+1202 his fiefs forfeited; and Arthur, now a boy of fifteen, strove to
+seize Eleanor in the castle of Mirebeau. Surprised at its siege by a
+rapid march of the king, the boy was taken prisoner to Rouen, and
+murdered there in the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his uncle's
+hand. This brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces in revolt,
+while Philip sentenced John to forfeiture as a murderer, and marched
+straight on Normandy. The ease with which the conquest of the Duchy was
+effected can only be explained by the utter absence of any popular
+resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century before
+the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have roused every peasant to
+arms from Avranches to Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
+mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly over before Normandy
+settled down into the most loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this
+was due to the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of the
+towns to independence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering
+force and military ability with which the conquest was effected. But the
+utter absence of opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman his
+transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing from one foreign master
+to another, and foreigner for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the
+two. Between France and Normandy there had been as many years of
+friendship as of strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of
+bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in
+fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip entered
+Rouen as the overlord of its dukes; while the submission to the house of
+Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to
+an equal. In 1204 Philip turned on the south with as startling a success.
+Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into his hands,
+and the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of
+Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the Garonne; and
+from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne to the
+Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of England.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+THE CHARTER
+1204-1307
+
+
+AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III
+1204-1307
+
+
+A Chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell near Cambridge, and
+which has been embodied in the "Memoriale" of Walter of Coventry, gives
+us a contemporary account of the period from 1201 to 1225. We possess
+another contemporary annalist for the same period in Roger of Wendover,
+the first of the published chroniclers of St. Albans, whose work extends
+to 1235. Though full of detail Roger is inaccurate, and he has strong
+royal and ecclesiastical sympathies; but his chronicle was subsequently
+revised in a more patriotic sense by another monk of the same abbey,
+Matthew Paris, and continued in the "Greater Chronicle" of the latter.
+
+Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of the time in his
+"Historia Anglorum" (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of the
+great chroniclers of his house; for the chronicles of Rishanger, his
+successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked on at
+that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and lifeless
+jottings of events which become more and more local as time goes on. The
+annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have been
+published in the "Annales Monastici" of the Rolls series, add important
+details for the reigns of John and Henry III. Those of Melrose, Osney,
+and Lanercost help us in the close of the latter reign, where help is
+especially welcome. For the Barons' war we have besides these the
+royalist chronicle of Wykes, Rishanger's fragment published by the Camden
+Society, and a chronicle of Bartholomew de Cotton, which is contemporary
+from 1264 to 1298. Where the chronicles fail however the public documents
+of the realm become of high importance. The "Royal Letters" (1216-1272)
+which have been printed from the Patent Rolls by Professor Shirley (Rolls
+Series) throw great light on Henry's politics.
+
+Our municipal history during this period is fully represented by that of
+London. For the general history of the capital the Rolls series has given
+us its "Liber Albus" and "Liber Custumarum," while a vivid account of its
+communal revolution is to be found in the "Liber de Antiquis Legibus"
+published by the Camden Society. A store of documents will be found in
+the Charter Rolls published by the Record Commission, in Brady's work on
+"English Boroughs," and in the "Ordinances of English Gilds," published
+with a remarkable preface from the pen of Dr. Brentano by the Early
+English Text Society. For our religious and intellectual history
+materials now become abundant. Grosseteste's Letters throw light on the
+state of the Church and its relations with Rome; those of Adam Marsh give
+us interesting details of Earl Simon's relation to the religious movement
+of his day; and Eceleston's tract on the arrival of the Friars is
+embodied in the "Monumenta Franciscana." For the Universities we have the
+collection of materials edited by Mr. Anstey under the name of "Munimenta
+Academica."
+
+With the close of Henry's reign our directly historic materials become
+scantier and scantier. The monastic annals we have before mentioned are
+supplemented by the jejune entries of Trivet and Murimuth, by the
+"Annales Anglic et Scotias," by Rishanger's Chronicle, his "Gesta Edwardi
+Primi," and three fragments of his annals (all published in the Rolls
+Series). The portion of the so-called "Walsingham's History" which
+relates to this period is now attributed by Mr. Riley to Rishanger's
+hand. For the wars in the north and in the west we have no records from
+the side of the conquered. The social and physical state of Wales indeed
+is illustrated by the "Itinerarium" which Gerald de Barri drew up in the
+twelfth century, but Scotland has no contemporary chronicles for this
+period; the jingling rimes of Blind Harry are two hundred years later
+than his hero, Wallace. We possess however a copious collection of State
+papers in the "Rotuli Scotiae," the "Documents and Records illustrative of
+the History of Scotland" which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well as
+in Rymer's Foedera. For the history of our Parliament the most noteworthy
+materials have been collected by Professor Stubbs in his Select Charters,
+and he has added to them a short treatise called "Modus Tenendi
+Parliamentum," which may be taken as a fair account of its actual state
+and powers in the fourteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+JOHN
+1204-1216
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: England and the Conquest]
+
+The loss of Normandy did more than drive John from the foreign dominions
+of his race; it set him face to face with England itself. England was no
+longer a distant treasure-house from which gold could be drawn for wars
+along the Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in order
+by wise ministers and by flying visits from its foreign king. Henceforth
+it was his home. It was to be ruled by his personal and continuous rule.
+People and sovereign were to know each other, to be brought into contact
+with each other as they had never been brought since the conquest of the
+Norman. The change in the attitude of the king was the more momentous
+that it took place at a time when the attitude of the country itself was
+rapidly changing. The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect to the land.
+A foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers. Foreign nobles were
+quartered in every manor. A military organization of the country changed
+while it simplified the holding of every estate. Huge castles of white
+stone bridled town and country; huge stone minsters told how the Norman
+had bridled even the Church. But the change was in great measure an
+external one. The real life of the nation was little affected by the
+shock of the Conquest. English institutions, the local, judicial, and
+administrative forms of the country were the same as of old. Like the
+English tongue they remained practically unaltered. For a century after
+the Conquest only a few new words crept in from the language of the
+conquerors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the nation at large
+remain unchanged that William himself tried to learn it that he might
+administer justice to his subjects. Even English literature, banished as
+it was from the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable
+rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious works, in
+poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in the great monument of
+our prose, the English Chronicle. It was not till the miserable reign of
+Stephen that the Chronicle died out in the Abbey of Peterborough. But the
+"Sayings of AElfred" show a native literature going on through the reign
+of Henry the Second, and the appearance of a great work of English verse
+coincides in point of time with the return of John to his island realm.
+"There was a priest in the land whose name was Layamon; he was the son of
+Leovenath; may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble
+church on the bank of Severn (good it seemed to him!) near Radstone,
+where he read books. It came to mind to him and in his chiefest thought
+that he would tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were named
+and whence they came who first had English land." Journeying far and wide
+over the country, the priest of Earnley found Baeda and Wace, the books
+too of St. Albin and St. Austin. "Layamon laid down these books and
+turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly; may the Lord be gracious to
+him! Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the true words
+set together, and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's church
+is now that of Areley, near Bewdley in Worcestershire; his poem was in
+fact an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Baeda.
+Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is
+beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty
+Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the
+same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly
+affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes
+of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same rough, simple joy.
+
+[Sidenote: English Patriotism]
+
+Instead of crushing England, indeed, the Conquest did more than any event
+that had gone before to build up an English people. All local
+distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian, of both from
+Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The
+Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling,
+of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence
+strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the
+defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. AElfred, the great name of the English
+past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of AElfred"
+embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn from
+this deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action which
+began as soon as the Conquest had given place to strife among the
+conquerors. A common hostility to the conquering baronage gave the nation
+leaders in its foreign sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed
+at Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged it. It was under William
+the Red that English soldiers shouted scorn at the Norman barons who
+surrendered at Rochester. It was under Henry the First that an English
+army faced Duke Robert and his foreign knighthood when they landed for a
+fresh invasion, "not fearing the Normans." It was under the same great
+king that Englishmen conquered Normandy in turn on the field of
+Tenchebray. This overthrow of the conquering baronage, this union of the
+conquered with the king, brought about the fusion of the conquerors in
+the general body of the English people. As early as the days of Henry the
+Second the descendants of Norman and Englishman had become
+indistinguishable. Both found a bond in a common English feeling and
+English patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin
+"foreigners" who streamed into England in the wake of Henry and his sons.
+Both had profited by the stern discipline of the Norman rule. The
+wretched reign of Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace without
+parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched from the settlement of the
+Conquest to the return of John. Of her kings' forays along Norman or
+Aquitanian borders England heard little; she cared less. Even Eichard's
+crusade woke little interest in his island realm. What England saw in her
+kings was "the good peace they made in the land." And with peace came a
+stern but equitable rule, judicial and administrative reforms that
+carried order and justice to every corner of the land, a wealth that grew
+steadily in spite of heavy taxation, an immense outburst of material and
+intellectual activity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Universities]
+
+It was with a new English people therefore that John found himself face
+to face. The nation which he fronted was a nation quickened with a new
+life and throbbing with a new energy. Not least among the signs of this
+energy was the upgrowth of our Universities. The establishment of the
+great schools which bore this name was everywhere throughout Europe a
+special mark of the impulse which Christendom gained from the crusades. A
+new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more
+cultured East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first
+rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of
+Cordova or Bagdad. In the twelfth century a classical revival restored
+Caesar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on
+the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like
+William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic philosophy
+sprang up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the
+imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal
+Europe broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers such
+as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to spread the new power of
+knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience
+with the older traditions of mankind either local or intellectual that
+drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with
+thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers
+were gathered together. A new power sprang up in the midst of a world
+which had till now recognized no power but that of sheer brute force.
+Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars
+who lectured in every cloister were hailed as "masters" by the crowds at
+their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats of councils, of the
+thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was of note
+enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king.
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford]
+
+Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald where
+Thomas of London and John of Salisbury were already busy with the study
+of the Civil Law. But when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was at
+once silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at war with the Church
+and jealous of the power which the wreck of the royal authority was
+throwing into Theobald's hands. At this time Oxford stood in the first
+rank among English towns. Its town church of St. Martin rose from the
+midst of a huddled group of houses, girded in with massive walls, that
+lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of
+Cherwell and the Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, eastward
+and westward, to these rivers; while on the south a sharper descent led
+down across swampy meadows to the ford from which the town drew its name
+and to the bridge that succeeded it. Around lay a wild forest country,
+moors such as Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, great
+woods of which Shotover and Bagley are the relics closing the horizon to
+the south and east. Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle
+marked the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river valley
+along which the commerce of Southern England mainly flowed, its walls
+formed the least element in the town's military strength, for on every
+side but the north it was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell or
+by an intricate network of streams into which the Thames breaks among the
+meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of
+Austin Canons, which with the older priory of St. Frideswide gave Oxford
+some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of the
+D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a
+palace without its walls, the presence again and again of important
+Parliaments, marked its political weight within the realm. The settlement
+of one of the wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of
+the town indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No
+place better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of
+its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden
+expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the
+Conquest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English
+castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of
+Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his
+palace of Beaumont. In the southern quarter of the city the canons of St.
+Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan
+cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all
+its parish churches and founded within their new castle walls the church
+of the Canons of St. George.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford Scholars]
+
+We know nothing of the causes which drew students and teachers within the
+walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher
+quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney
+and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst into a larger
+life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet however the fortunes of the
+University were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars
+gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or
+Abelard. The English took their place as one of the "nations" of the
+French University. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian
+teachers. Thomas of London wandered to Paris from his school at Merton.
+But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford quietly grew in
+numbers and repute, and forty years after the visit of Vacarius its
+educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his
+amusing Topography of Ireland to its students the most learned and famous
+of the English clergy were to be found within its walls. At the opening
+of the thirteenth century Oxford stood without a rival in its own
+country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest
+schools of the Western world. But to realize this Oxford of the past we
+must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the
+present. In the outer look of the new University there was nothing of the
+pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the "High" or looks
+down from the gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of
+venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history
+plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a mediaeval town. Thousands
+of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as
+poor as themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking,
+quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the
+place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and
+Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething
+mass of turbulent life. The retainers who followed their young lords to
+the University fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets.
+Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter struggle
+of North and South. At nightfall roysterer and reveller roamed with
+torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down
+burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry and
+wiped off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two.
+Now a tavern squabble between scholar and townsman widened into a general
+broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary's vied with the town bell of
+St. Martin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical
+controversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in
+this turbulent, surging mob. When England growled at the exactions of the
+Papacy in the years that were to follow the students besieged a legate in
+the abbot's house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row preceded the
+opening of the Barons' war. "When Oxford draws knife," ran an old rime,
+"England's soon at strife."
+
+[Sidenote: Edmund Rich]
+
+But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of life. A keen
+thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thousands
+round the poorest scholar and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich--
+Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days--came about the time we
+have reached to Oxford, a boy of twelve years old, from a little lane at
+Abingdon that still bears his name. He found his school in an inn that
+belonged to the abbey of Eynsham where his father had taken refuge from
+the world. His mother was a pious woman of the day, too poor to give her
+boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every
+Wednesday; but Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He plunged at
+once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for knowledge, its
+mystical piety. "Secretly," perhaps at eventide when the shadows were
+gathering in the church of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and
+students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the
+Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary for his
+bride. Years of study, broken by a fever that raged among the crowded,
+noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris;
+and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way as
+poor scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christendom. Here
+a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that
+Edmund consented at last to an assignation; but when he appeared it was
+in company of grave academical officials who, as the maiden declared in
+the hour of penitence which followed, "straightway whipped the offending
+Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return
+from Paris became the most popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that
+Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him
+in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his
+grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep
+in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a
+grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training and a
+chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would.
+"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of
+scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as
+he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish student
+would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its troubles;
+the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long formed his
+sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which
+Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the
+form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood
+among his mathematical diagrams. "What are these?" she seemed to say; and
+seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles
+interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian
+Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as the figure faded away, "thy diagrams
+henceforth, my son."
+
+[Sidenote: The University and Feudalism]
+
+The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training,
+and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the
+spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old
+mediaeval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so
+strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local
+isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from
+barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of
+material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of
+place and social position. The University on the other hand was a protest
+against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European
+and not local. Not merely every province of France, but every people of
+Christendom had its place among the "nations" of Paris or Padua. A common
+language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the
+warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took
+the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or
+realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both
+failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast
+commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt
+himself as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter round Mont St.
+Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars
+carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the
+work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere,
+but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and
+Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at
+any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been
+brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of
+national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of
+the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of
+Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with
+Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the
+fray with the legate. At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found
+hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within this
+strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely
+democratic basis. Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on
+precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical
+strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on
+which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room. The
+University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were
+admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the "master."
+To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or
+"ruler" in the schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy all were
+equal. When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles
+of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in
+the final decision. Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.
+It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned
+every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an
+officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Universities and the Church]
+
+If the democratic spirit of the Universities' threatened feudalism, their
+spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer
+seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension which
+mediaeval usage gave to the word "orders" gathered the whole educated
+world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be their age or
+proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay
+responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to
+the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This
+ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.
+The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the
+University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it
+had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the
+Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then
+situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only
+rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them. The
+sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of
+those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto
+absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of
+classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a
+greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
+society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of
+denial into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for
+reason a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a smile
+the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these,
+Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new
+culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the "World's
+Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an
+infidel. A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by
+the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact
+with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer an
+accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere
+Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and against what
+obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.
+"Slowly," he tells us, "has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle
+come into use among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his
+Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and others, were
+translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace
+1237 because of their assertion of the eternity of the world and of time
+and because of the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third
+book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many passages erroneously
+translated. Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For St.
+Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read
+the Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the
+book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his writing. So there were
+but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, who were of any account
+in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up
+to this year of grace 1292."
+
+[Sidenote: The Town]
+
+If we pass from the English University to the English Town we see a
+progress as important and hardly less interesting. In their origin our
+boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the western world. The
+cities of Italy and Provence had preserved the municipal institutions of
+their Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler
+with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around
+them; the communes of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt
+against feudal outrage within their walls. But in England the tradition
+of Rome passed utterly away, while feudal oppression was held fairly in
+check by the Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning
+simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed precisely
+in the same manner as the townships around it. Its existence witnessed
+indeed to the need which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help
+and protection. The burh or borough was probably a more defensible place
+than the common village; it may have had a ditch or mound about it
+instead of the quickset-hedge or "tun" from which the township took its
+name. But in itself it was simply a township or group of townships where
+men clustered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.
+The towns were different in the circumstances and date of their rise.
+Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders. Some dated
+from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns. Some
+clustered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of
+church and monastery. Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.
+There was the same variety in the mode in which the various town
+communities were formed. While the bulk of them grew by simple increase
+of population from township to town, larger boroughs such as York with
+its "six shires" or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show
+how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and
+claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its shire or share of the
+town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the
+town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the
+constitution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of
+the people at large. Whether we regard it as a township, or rather from
+its size as a hundred or collection of townships, the obligations of the
+dwellers within its bounds were those of the townships round, to keep
+fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd, and a
+reeve and four men to the hundred court and shire court. As in other
+townships, land was a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless
+man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life; for
+purposes of government or property the town consisted simply of the
+landed proprietors within its bounds. The common lands which are still
+attached to many of our boroughs take us back to a time when each
+township lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as
+boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common
+pasture; Oxford has still its own "Port-meadow."
+
+[Sidenote: Towns and their lords]
+
+The inner rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the
+hands of its own freemen, gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote."
+But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal
+requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it
+affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great
+thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.
+A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution.
+It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered
+justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's dues or annual rent of
+the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To modern
+eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When
+Leicester, for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into
+those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's
+corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his
+pound. The great forest around was the Earl's, and it was only out of his
+grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or
+pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and government of a town
+lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the
+fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their
+markets and fairs. But in fact when once these dues were paid and these
+services rendered the English townsman was practically free. His rights
+were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and
+person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a
+fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his
+master's reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of
+his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town tower
+gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exercise
+rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs. Their
+merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums
+due from the town among the different burgesses, looked to the due
+repairs of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same part as
+a town-council of to-day.
+
+[Sidenote: The Merchant Gild]
+
+The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to closer association
+which found support in those principles of mutual aid and mutual
+restraint that lay at the base of our old institutions. Gilds or clubs
+for religious, charitable, or social purposes were common throughout the
+country, and especially common in boroughs, where men clustered more
+thickly together. Each formed a sort of artificial family. An oath of
+mutual fidelity among its members was substituted for the tie of blood,
+while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the
+gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth. But within this new
+family the aim of the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as
+close as that of the old. "Let all share the same lot," ran its law; "if
+any misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for aid from his
+gild-brothers in atoning for guilt incurred by mishap. He could call on
+them for assistance in case of violence or wrong. If falsely accused they
+appeared in court as his compurgators, if poor they supported, and when
+dead they buried him. On the other hand he was responsible to them, as
+they were to the State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of
+brother against brother was also a wrong against the general body of the
+gild and was punished by fine or in the last resort by an expulsion which
+left the offender a "lawless" man and an outcast. The one difference
+between these gilds in country and town was this, that in the latter case
+from their close local neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.
+Under AEthelstan the London gilds united into one for the purpose of
+carrying out more effectually their common aims, and at a later time we
+find the gilds of Berwick enacting "that where many bodies are found side
+by side in one place they may become one, and have one will, and in the
+dealings of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The process
+was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods naturally
+differed much in social rank, and even after the union was effected we
+see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent of some one or
+more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In London for instance
+the Cnighten-gild which seems to have stood at the head of its fellows
+retained for a long time its separate property, while its Alderman--as
+the chief officer of each gild was called--became the Alderman of the
+united gild of the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar gild of
+Thanes from which the chief officers of the town seem commonly to have
+been selected. Imperfect however as the union might be, when once it was
+effected the town passed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a
+powerful community, far more effectually organized than in the loose
+organization of the township, and whose character was inevitably
+determined by the circumstances of its origin. In their beginnings our
+boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings of persons engaged in
+agricultural pursuits; the first Dooms of London provide especially for
+the recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing
+security of the country invited the farmer or the landowner to settle
+apart in his own fields, and the growth of estate and trade told on the
+towns themselves, the difference between town and country became more
+sharply defined. London of course took the lead in this new developement
+of civic life. Even in AEthelstan's day every London merchant who had made
+three long voyages on his own account ranked as a Thegn. Its "lithsmen,"
+or shipmen's-gild, were of sufficient importance under Harthacnut to
+figure in the election of a king, and its principal street still tells of
+the rapid growth of trade in its name of "Cheap-side" or the bargaining
+place. But at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had become
+universal. The name given to the united brotherhood in a borough is in
+almost every case no longer that of the "town-gild," but of the
+"merchant-gild."
+
+[Sidenote: Emancipation of Towns]
+
+This social change in the character of the townsmen produced important
+results in the character of their municipal institutions. In becoming a
+merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the "town" enlarged their
+powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their
+internal trade. It became their special business to obtain from the crown
+or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage,
+grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself
+they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control
+of markets, and the recovery of debts. It was only by slow and difficult
+advances that each step in this securing of privilege was won. Still it
+went steadily on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an
+English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services
+disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities
+are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were
+king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture
+of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new
+minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who
+were ready to fill again their master's treasury at the price of the
+strip of parchment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of
+government. In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the
+boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble
+they preserved or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.
+The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting,
+the right to equal justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought
+safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of
+the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and
+market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that
+swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and
+church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing
+more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their
+home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their
+steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.
+
+[Sidenote: London]
+
+London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its
+citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even
+at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all
+its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited
+by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One
+immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England
+from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed
+quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he
+quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered
+his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French
+domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on
+the site of his great victory "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver,
+Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed
+with the English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play so
+notable a part as in London. The Normans had had mercantile
+establishments in London as early as the reign of AEthelred, if not of
+Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a
+trading colony like the colony of the "Emperor's Men," or Easterlings.
+But with the Conquest their number greatly increased. "Many of the
+citizens of Rouen and Caen passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers
+in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better
+stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic." The
+status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They could no longer
+be looked upon as strangers in cities which had passed under the Norman
+rule. In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in
+a separate French town, side by side with the English borough. But in
+London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing class.
+Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later
+days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of
+its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within
+the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the
+annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a
+little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet
+Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the
+Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a
+burgher family from Caen.
+
+[Sidenote: Freedom of London]
+
+It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the
+long internal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that London
+owed the wealth and importance to which it attained during the reign of
+Henry the First. The charter which Henry granted it became a model for
+lesser boroughs. The king yielded its citizens the right of justice; each
+townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court
+or hustings whose sessions took place every week. They were subject only
+to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle
+which the Normans introduced. Their trade was protected from toll or
+exaction over the length and breadth of the land. The king however still
+nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve, or magistrate of the
+town, nor were the citizens as yet united together in a commune or
+corporation. But an imperfect civic organization existed in the "wards"
+or quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman, and in the
+"gilds" or voluntary associations of merchants or traders which ensured
+order and mutual protection for their members. Loose too as these bonds
+may seem, they were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions
+of freedom which the towns preserved. The London burgesses gathered in
+their town-mote when the bell swung out from the bell-tower of St. Paul's
+to deliberate freely on their own affairs under the presidency of their
+alderman. Here, too, they mustered in arms if danger threatened the city,
+and delivered the town-banner to their captain, the Norman baron
+Fitz-Walter, to lead them against the enemy.
+
+[Sidenote: Early Oxford]
+
+Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as this, but the instance
+of Oxford shows how the freedom of London told on the general advance of
+English towns. In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town
+had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the withdrawal of
+the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. Though the monastery of St.
+Frideswide rose in the turmoil of the eighth century on the slope which
+led down to a ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a glimpse
+of the borough that must have grown up under its walls. The first
+definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
+Chronicle which recalls its seizure by Eadward the Elder, but the form of
+this entry shows that the town was already a considerable one, and in the
+last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the borders of
+Mercia and Wessex combined with its command of the upper valley of the
+Thames to give it military and political importance. Of the life of its
+burgesses however we still know little or nothing. The names of its
+parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund, show how early
+church after church gathered round the earlier town-church of St. Martin.
+But the men of the little town remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the
+"Portmannimote" as it was called, which was held in the churchyard of St.
+Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older self as the Freeman's Common
+Hall--their town-mead is still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later
+charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
+judging and law-making in their hustings, their merchant-gild regulating
+trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or money or
+marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats paying
+toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon, as they
+floated down the Thames towards London.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford and the Normans]
+
+The number of houses marked waste in the survey marks the terrible
+suffering of Oxford in the Norman Conquest: but the ruin was soon
+repaired, and the erection of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches,
+the planting of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what various
+ways the energy of its new masters was giving an impulse to its life. It
+is a proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian
+houses about them that each of the later town-halls of the borough had,
+before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the larger
+dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently converted into academic
+halls bore traces of the same origin in names such as Moysey's Hall,
+Lombard's Hall, or Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for
+besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a lesser Jewry
+scattered over its southern quarter, and we can hardly doubt that this
+abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the
+causes which drew teachers and scholars within its walls. The Jewry, a
+town within a town, lay here as elsewhere isolated and exempt from the
+common justice, the common life and self-government of the borough. On
+all but its eastern side too the town was hemmed in by jurisdictions
+independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide
+"bailey" of the Castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north,
+stretching away beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of
+the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor
+and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet-court in the hamlet
+of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within the walls
+subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry had a rule and
+law of its own. Scores of householders, dotted over street and lane, were
+tenants of castle or abbey and paid no suit or service at the borough
+court.
+
+[Sidenote: Oxford and London]
+
+But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the
+spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so
+closely cabined and confined. Nowhere indeed was the impulse which London
+was giving likely to tell with greater force. The "bargemen" of Oxford
+were connected even before the Conquest with the "boatmen," or shippers,
+of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing
+these names represented what is known as the merchant-gild of the town.
+Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant-gild of Oxford from
+the time of Henry the First. Even then lands, islands, pastures belonged
+to it, and amongst them the same Port-meadow which is familiar to Oxford
+men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow. The connexion between
+the two gilds was primarily one of trade. "In the time of King Eadward
+and Abbot Ordric" the channel of the Thames beneath the walls of the
+Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up that boats could scarce pass as
+far as Oxford, and it was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
+and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
+south of his church. But by the time of Henry the Second closer bonds
+than this linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
+about judgements in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were
+empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatsoever
+the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed
+right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were
+assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatsoever matter the men of Oxford
+be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and
+custom of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the
+citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
+
+[Sidenote: Life of the Town]
+
+A legal connexion such as this could hardly fail to bring with it an
+identity of municipal rights. Oxford had already passed through the
+earlier steps of her advance towards municipal freedom before the
+conquest of the Norman. Her burghers assembled in their own
+Portmannimote, and their dues to the crown were assessed at a fixed sum
+of honey or coin. But the formal definition of their rights dates, as in
+the case of London, from the time of Henry the First. The customs and
+exemptions of its townsmen were confirmed by Henry the Second "as ever
+they enjoyed them in the time of Henry my grandfather, and in like manner
+as my citizens of London hold them." By this date the town had attained
+entire judicial and commercial freedom, and liberty of external commerce
+was secured by the exemption of its citizens from toll on the king's
+lands. Complete independence was reached when a charter of John
+substituted a mayor of the town's own choosing for the reeve or bailiff
+of the crown. But dry details such as these tell little of the quick
+pulse of popular life that beat in the thirteenth century through such a
+community as that of Oxford. The church of St. Martin in the very heart
+of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four streets met, was the
+centre of the city life. The town-mote was held in its churchyard.
+Justice was administered ere yet a townhall housed the infant magistracy
+by mayor or bailiff sitting beneath a low pent-house, the "penniless
+bench" of later days, outside its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the
+burghers to council or arms. Around the church the trade-gilds were
+ranged as in some vast encampment. To the south of it lay Spicery and
+Vintnery, the quarter of the richer burgesses. Fish-street fell noisily
+down to the bridge and the ford. The Corn-market occupied then as now the
+street which led to Northgate. The stalls of the butchers stretched along
+the "Butcher-row," which formed the road to the bailey and the castle.
+Close beneath the church lay a nest of huddled lanes, broken by a stately
+synagogue, and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the
+Jew. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets;
+the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; processions of
+pilgrims wound through gates and lane to the shrine of St. Frideswide.
+Frays were common enough; now the sack of a Jew's house; now burgher
+drawing knife on burgher; now an outbreak of the young student lads who
+were growing every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town was
+well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his
+door; the call of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand
+and banners flying to enforce the king's peace.
+
+[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury]
+
+The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal domain but
+around abbey or castle was slower and more difficult. The story of St.
+Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an
+imperfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land here in the Confessor's
+time was covered with houses by the time of Henry the Second. The
+building of the great abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to
+mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot's domain. The troubles
+of the time helped here as elsewhere the progress of the town; serfs,
+fugitives from justice or their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally
+sought shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were
+wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not a settler but was bound to pay his pence
+to the Abbot's treasury, to plough a rood of his land, to reap in his
+harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the
+annual catch of eels from the Abbey waters. Within the four crosses that
+bounded the Abbot's domain land and water were his; the cattle of the
+townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the
+loan of their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream and
+seize their cloths wherever he found them. No toll might be levied from
+tenants of the Abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and
+stall till the buyers of the Abbot had had the pick of the market. There
+was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk-mote it
+was before the Abbot's officers that its meeting was held; if they
+appealed to the alderman he was the Abbot's nominee and received the
+horn, the symbol of his office, at the Abbot's hands. Like all the
+greater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was a
+silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem to have
+slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishing, were commuted for
+an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of
+flax, simply disappeared. By usage, by omission, by downright
+forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to a needy
+abbot, the town won freedom.
+
+[Sidenote: The Towns and Justice]
+
+But progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in the history
+of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance of
+law, but yet more as marking the part which a new moral sense of man's
+right to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
+Rude as the borough was, it possessed the right of meeting in full
+assembly of the townsmen for government and law. Justice was administered
+in presence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted or condemned by
+the oath of his neighbours. Without the borough bounds however the system
+of Norman judicature prevailed; and the rural tenants who did suit and
+service at the Cellarer's court were subjected to the trial by battle.
+The execution of a farmer named Ketel who came under this feudal
+jurisdiction brought the two systems into vivid contrast. Ketel seems to
+have been guiltless of the crime laid to his charge; but the duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
+townsmen woke his fellow farmers to a sense of wrong. "Had Ketel been a
+dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
+acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is"; and even
+the monks were moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal
+freedom and justice with the townsmen. The franchise of the town was
+extended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers
+"came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll, and paid
+the town-penny." A chance story preserved in a charter of later date
+shows the same struggle for justice going on in a greater town. At
+Leicester the trial by compurgation, the rough predecessor of trial by
+jury, had been abolished by the Earls in favour of trial by battle. The
+aim of the burgesses was to regain their old justice, and in this a
+touching incident at last made them successful. "It chanced that two
+kinsmen, Nicholas the son of Acon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged
+a duel about a certain piece of land concerning which a dispute had
+arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour,
+each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he
+came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and was
+about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him 'Take care of the pit,
+turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so much clamour and
+noise was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around that
+the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he enquired
+of some how it was there was such a clamour, and answer was made to him
+that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that
+one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood
+over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him. Then the
+townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they
+should give him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street
+that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the
+twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from
+that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among
+themselves."
+
+[Sidenote: Division of Labour]
+
+At the time we have reached this struggle for emancipation was nearly
+over. The larger towns had secured the privilege of self-government, the
+administration of justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns
+of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal history at which towns
+began to acquire the right of electing their own chief magistrate, the
+Portreeve or Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown. But
+with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle between
+the various classes of the townsmen themselves. The growth of wealth and
+industry was bringing with it a vast increase of population. The mass of
+the new settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders
+without landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot in
+the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no part in
+the actual life of the town. The right of trade and of the regulation of
+trade in common with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the
+hands of the landed burghers whom we have described. By a natural process
+too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the
+"burghers" of the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised mass around them.
+The same change which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or
+trades from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three
+occupations of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth, to a
+position of superiority even within the privileged circle of the seven,
+told though with less force on the English boroughs. The burghers of the
+merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves on the greater operations
+of commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, while the meaner
+employments of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neighbours.
+This advance in the division of labour is marked by such severances as we
+note in the thirteenth century of the cloth merchant from the tailor or
+the leather merchant from the butcher.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Trade-Gilds]
+
+But the result of this severance was all-important in its influence on
+the constitution of our towns. The members of the trades thus abandoned
+by the wealthier burghers formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon
+rose into dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant-gild of the town.
+A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full
+membership of these trade-gilds. Their regulations were of the minutest
+character; the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, the
+hours of toil fixed "from day-break to curfew," and strict provision made
+against competition in labour. At each meeting of these gilds their
+members gathered round the Craft-box which contained the rules of their
+Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a
+quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of
+the gild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful
+tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by
+fines or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of a
+right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions among the
+members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the gild but
+sufficed to found chantries and masses and set up painted windows in the
+church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of a
+craft-gild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with
+those of prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow degrees that they
+rose to such a height as this. The first steps in their existence were
+the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects
+with any success it was first necessary that the whole body of craftsmen
+belonging to the trade should be compelled to join the gild, and secondly
+that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured to it. A
+royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of
+these charters took place the first struggle with the merchant-gilds
+which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the
+boroughs. The weavers, who were the first trade-gild to secure royal
+sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in a contest
+for existence as late as the reign of John when the citizens of London
+bought for a time the suppression of their gild. Even under the House of
+Lancaster Exeter was engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailors'
+gild. From the eleventh century however the spread of these societies
+went steadily on, and the control of trade passed more and more from the
+merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.
+
+[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Folk]
+
+It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time, of the
+"greater folk" against the "lesser folk," or of the "commune," the
+general mass of the inhabitants, against the "prudhommes," or "wiser"
+few, which brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade to
+the general government of the town, the great civic revolution of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Continent, and especially
+along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older
+burghers had been complete. In Koeln the craftsmen had been reduced to all
+but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears
+of "the man without heart or honour who lives by his toil." Such social
+tyranny of class over class brought a century of bloodshed to the cities
+of Germany; but in England the tyranny of class over class was restrained
+by the general tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the most
+part a milder form. The longest and bitterest strife of all was naturally
+at London. Nowhere had the territorial constitution struck root so
+deeply, and nowhere had the landed oligarchy risen to such a height of
+wealth and influence. The city was divided into wards, each of which was
+governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class. In some indeed the
+office seems to have become hereditary. The "magnates," or "barons," of
+the merchant-gild advised alone on all matters of civic government or
+trade regulation, and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues
+or burthens of the town. Such a position afforded an opening for
+corruption and oppression of the most galling kind; and it seems to have
+been a general impression of the unfair assessment of the dues levied on
+the poor and the undue burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised
+classes which provoked the first serious discontent. In the reign of
+Richard the First William of the Long Beard, though one of the governing
+body, placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in the
+panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered fifty thousand of the
+craftsmen. His eloquence, his bold defiance of the aldermen in the
+town-mote, gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who
+surrounded him hailed him as "the saviour of the poor." One of his
+addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer of the time. In mediaeval
+fashion he began with a text from the Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with
+joy from the fountain of the Saviour." "I," he began, "am the saviour of
+the poor. Ye poor men who have felt the weight of rich men's hands, draw
+from my fountain waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for
+the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from
+the waters. It is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the
+lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faithless folk; I will part
+the chosen from the reprobate as light from darkness." But it was in vain
+that he strove to win royal favour for the popular cause. The support of
+the moneyed classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars with
+Philip of France; and the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert, after a moment of
+hesitation issued orders for William Longbeard's arrest. William felled
+with an axe the first soldier who advanced to seize him, and taking
+refuge with a few adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow summoned his
+adherents to rise. Hubert however, who had already flooded the city with
+troops, with bold contempt of the right of sanctuary set fire to the
+tower. William was forced to surrender, and a burgher's son, whose father
+he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth. With his death the quarrel
+slumbered for more than fifty years. But the movement towards equality
+went steadily on. Under pretext of preserving the peace the
+unenfranchised townsmen united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and
+mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the
+wealthier burgesses. Nor did London stand alone in this movement. In all
+the larger towns the same discontent prevailed, the same social growth
+called for new institutions, and in their silent revolt against the
+oppression of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training themselves
+to stand forward as champions of a wider liberty in the Barons' War.
+
+[Sidenote: The Villein]
+
+Without the towns progress was far slower and more fitful. It would seem
+indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural
+population than on any other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings
+of the house of AElfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of
+freemen had alike diminished. The pure slave class had never been
+numerous, and it had been reduced by the efforts of the Church, perhaps
+by the general convulsion of the Danish wars. But these wars had often
+driven the ceorl or freeman of the township to "commend" himself to a
+thegn who pledged him his protection in consideration of payment in a
+rendering of labour. It is probable that these dependent ceorls are the
+"villeins" of the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the Domesday
+Survey, men sunk indeed from pure freedom and bound both to soil and
+lord, but as yet preserving much of their older rights, retaining their
+land, free as against all men but their lord, and still sending
+representatives to hundred-moot and shire-moot. They stood therefore far
+above the "landless man," the man who had never possessed even under the
+old constitution political rights, whom the legislation of the English
+kings had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who
+served as household servant or as hired labourer or at the best as
+rent-paying tenant of land which was not his own. The Norman knight or
+lawyer however saw little distinction between these classes; and the
+tendency of legislation under the Angevins was to blend all in a single
+class of serfs. While the pure "theow" or absolute slave disappeared
+therefore the ceorl or villein sank lower in the social scale. But though
+the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more together and fused into
+a more homogeneous class, its actual position corresponded very
+imperfectly with the view of the lawyers. All indeed were dependents on a
+lord. The manor-house became the centre of every English village. The
+manor-court was held in its hall; it was here that the lord or his
+steward received homage, recovered fines, held the view of frank-pledge,
+or enrolled the villagers in their tithing. Here too, if the lord
+possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without
+its doors stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord's demesne or
+home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the "villeins"
+of the manor. It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves,
+the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.
+These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and
+it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class
+of the population from another. The "villein," in the strict sense of the
+word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the
+ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The cottar, the bordar, and the
+labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the
+year.
+
+But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited
+by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of
+the originally meaner "landless man." The possession of his little
+homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his
+cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere
+indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord's caprice into
+rights that could be pleaded at law. The number of teams, the fines, the
+reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of
+oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy
+of which became the title-deed of the villein. It was to this that he
+owed the name of "copy-holder" which at a later time superseded his older
+title. Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on oral
+evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was
+eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise generally
+secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord. It was the
+duty of the lord's bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins,
+but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was
+chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of their
+interests and rights. A fresh step towards freedom was made by the
+growing tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments. The
+population was slowly increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was
+applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure divided the
+inheritance of the tenantry equally among their sons, the holding of each
+tenant and the services due from it became divided in a corresponding
+degree. A labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the
+increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of
+independence made it more burthensome to those who rendered it. It was
+probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears of labour
+for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every estate, gradually
+developed into a general commutation of services. We have already
+witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change in the
+case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon became universal, and
+"malt-silver," "wood-silver," and "larder-silver" gradually took the
+place of the older personal services on the court-rolls. The process of
+commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords themselves. The
+luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost
+of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of
+freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an
+easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took
+part. At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to
+royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the
+king's serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were
+enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the
+exhausted exchequer.
+
+
+[Sidenote: England]
+
+Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a
+national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.
+But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl. The
+loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was
+the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a
+half a national temper to the baronage. Not only the "new men," the
+ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound
+to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as
+Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a
+love of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as the natural
+leaders of a people bound together by the stern government which had
+crushed all local division, which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of
+a peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was almost
+unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had trained them to something
+of their old free government again by the very machinery of election it
+used to facilitate its heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of
+Normandy brought home the king. The growth which had been going on had
+easily escaped the eyes of rulers who were commonly absent from the realm
+and busy with the affairs of countries beyond the sea. Henry the Second
+had been absent for years from England: Richard had only visited it twice
+for a few months: John had as yet been almost wholly occupied with his
+foreign dominions. To him as to his brother England had as yet been
+nothing but a land whose gold paid the mercenaries that followed him, and
+whose people bowed obediently to his will. It was easy to see that
+between such a ruler and such a nation once brought together strife must
+come: but that the strife came as it did and ended as it did was due
+above all to the character of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: John]
+
+"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John."
+The terrible verdict of his contemporaries has passed into the sober
+judgement of history. Externally John possessed all the quickness, the
+vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which
+distinguished his house. His worst enemies owned that he toiled steadily
+and closely at the work of administration. He was fond of learned men
+like Gerald of Wales. He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of
+winning the love of women. But in his inner soul John was the worst
+outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their
+insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and
+tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical
+indifference to honour or truth. In mere boyhood he tore with brutal
+levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their
+lord. His ingratitude and perfidy brought his father with sorrow to the
+grave. To his brother he was the worst of traitors. All Christendom
+believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur of Britanny. He
+abandoned one wife and was faithless to another. His punishments were
+refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men
+under copes of lead. His court was a brothel where no woman was safe from
+the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his
+victims' shame. He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in
+his impiety. Though he scoffed at priests and turned his back on the mass
+even amidst the solemnities of his coronation, he never stirred on a
+journey without hanging relics round his neck. But with the wickedness of
+his race he inherited its profound ability. His plan for the relief of
+Chateau Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur's hopes at
+Mirebeau, showed an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of
+his political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time.
+Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern the difficulties of his
+position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which he met them. The
+overthrow of his continental power only spurred him to the formation of a
+league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt
+of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The
+closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and
+incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The
+awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost
+Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of
+despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but
+the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.
+
+[Sidenote: Innocent the Third]
+
+From the moment of his return to England in 1204 John's whole energies
+were bent to the recovery of his dominions on the Continent. He
+impatiently collected money and men for the support of those adherents of
+the House of Anjou who were still struggling against the arms of France
+in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of 1205 he gathered an army at
+Portsmouth and prepared to cross the Channel. But his project was
+suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert
+Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal. So completely had both
+the baronage and the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude
+of their representatives revealed to the king a new spirit of national
+freedom which was rising around him, and John at once braced himself to a
+struggle with it. The death of Hubert Walter in July, only a few weeks
+after his protest, removed his most formidable opponent, and the king
+resolved to neutralize the opposition of the Church by placing a creature
+of his own at its head. John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by
+the monks of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as Primate. But in
+a previous though informal gathering the convent had already chosen its
+sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop. The rival claimants hastened to
+appeal to Rome, and their appeal reached the Papal Court before
+Christmas. The result of the contest was a startling one both for
+themselves and for the king. After a year's careful examination Innocent
+the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, quashed at the close of
+1206 both the contested elections. The decision was probably a just one,
+but Innocent was far from stopping there. The monks who appeared before
+him brought powers from the convent to choose a new Primate should their
+earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly assured of their
+choice of Grey, had promised to confirm their election. But the bribes
+which the king lavished at Rome failed to win the Pope over to this plan;
+and whether from mere love of power, for he was pushing the Papal claims
+of supremacy over Christendom further than any of his predecessors, or as
+may fairly be supposed in despair of a free election within English
+bounds, Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his presence Stephen
+Langton to the archiepiscopal see.
+
+[Sidenote: The Interdict]
+
+Personally a better choice could not have been made, for Stephen was a
+man who by sheer weight of learning and holiness of life had risen to the
+dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed him in the front rank
+of English patriots. But in itself the step was an usurpation of the
+rights both of the Church and of the Crown. The king at once met it with
+resistance. When Innocent consecrated the new Primate in June 1207, and
+threatened the realm with interdict if Langton were any longer excluded
+from his see, John replied by a counter-threat that the interdict should
+be followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every
+Italian he could seize in the realm. How little he feared the priesthood
+he showed when the clergy refused his demand of a thirteenth of movables
+from the whole country and Archbishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax
+before the Council. John banished the Archbishop and extorted the money.
+Innocent however was not a man to draw back from his purpose, and in
+March 1208 the interdict he had threatened fell upon the land. All
+worship save that of a few privileged orders, all administration of
+Sacraments save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and
+breadth of the country: the church-bells were silent, the dead lay
+unburied on the ground. Many of the bishops fled from the country. The
+Church in fact, so long the main support of the royal power against the
+baronage, was now driven into opposition. Its change of attitude was to
+be of vast moment in the struggle which was impending; but John recked
+little of the future; he replied to the interdict by confiscating the
+lands of the clergy who observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their
+privileges to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them
+unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a Welshman was brought before
+him for the murder of a priest, "he has killed my enemy." In 1209 the
+Pope proceeded to the further sentence of excommunication, and the king
+was formally cut off from the pale of the Church. But the new sentence
+was met with the same defiance as the old. Five of the bishops fled over
+sea, and secret disaffection was spreading widely, but there was no
+public avoidance of the excommunicated king. An Archdeacon of Norwich who
+withdrew from his service was crushed to death under a cope of lead, and
+the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or noble from following
+his example.
+
+[Sidenote: The Deposition]
+
+The attitude of John showed the power which the administrative reforms of
+his father had given to the Crown. He stood alone, with nobles estranged
+from him and the Church against him, but his strength seemed utterly
+unbroken. From the first moment of his rule John had defied the baronage.
+The promise to satisfy their demand for redress of wrongs in the past
+reign, a promise made at his election, remained unfulfilled; when the
+demand was repeated he answered it by seizing their castles and taking
+their children as hostages for their loyalty. The cost of his fruitless
+threats of war had been met by heavy and repeated taxation, by increased
+land tax and increased scutage. The quarrel with the Church and fear of
+their revolt only deepened his oppression of the nobles. He drove De
+Braose, one of the most powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile,
+while his wife and grandchildren were believed to have been starved to
+death in the royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic-stricken
+to the court of the excommunicate king John heaped outrages worse than
+death. Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, the preference
+shown to foreigners, were small provocations compared with his attacks on
+the honour of their wives and daughters. But the baronage still
+submitted. The financial exactions indeed became light as John filled his
+treasury with the goods of the Church; the king's vigour was seen in the
+rapidity with which he crushed a rising of the nobles in Ireland, and
+foiled an outbreak of the Welsh; while the triumphs of his father had
+taught the baronage its weakness in any single-handed struggle against
+the Crown. Hated therefore as he was the land remained still. Only one
+weapon was now left in Innocent's hands. Men held then that a king, once
+excommunicate, ceased to be a Christian or to have any claims on the
+obedience of Christian subjects. As spiritual heads of Christendom, the
+Popes had ere now asserted their right to remove such a ruler from his
+throne and to give it to a worthier than he; and it was this right which
+Innocent at last felt himself driven to exercise. After useless threats
+he issued in 1212 a bull of deposition against John, absolved his
+subjects from their allegiance, proclaimed a crusade against him as an
+enemy to Christianity and the Church, and committed the execution of the
+sentence to the king of the French. John met the announcement of this
+step with the same scorn as before. His insolent disdain suffered the
+Roman legate, Cardinal Pandulf, to proclaim his deposition to his face at
+Northampton. When Philip collected an army for an attack on England an
+enormous host gathered at the king's call on Barham Down; and the English
+fleet dispelled all danger of invasion by crossing the Channel, by
+capturing a number of French ships, and by burning Dieppe.
+
+
+[Sidenote: John's Submission]
+
+But it was not in England only that the king showed his strength and
+activity. Vile as he was, John possessed in a high degree the political
+ability of his race, and in the diplomatic efforts with which he met the
+danger from France he showed himself his father's equal. The barons of
+Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the south. John bought the aid
+of the Count of Flanders on his northern border. The German king, Otto,
+pledged himself to bring the knighthood of Germany to support an invasion
+of France. But at the moment of his success in diplomacy John suddenly
+gave way. It was in fact the revelation of a danger at home which shook
+him from his attitude of contemptuous defiance. The bull of deposition
+gave fresh energy to every enemy. The Scotch king was in correspondence
+with Innocent. The Welsh princes who had just been forced to submission
+broke out again in war. John hanged their hostages, and called his host
+to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales, but the army met only to become
+a fresh source of danger. Powerless to oppose the king openly, the
+baronage had plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies. The
+hostility of Philip had dispelled their dread of isolated action; many
+indeed had even promised aid to the French king on his landing. John
+found himself in the midst of hidden enemies; and nothing could have
+saved him but the haste--whether of panic or quick decision--with which
+he disbanded his army and took refuge in Nottingham Castle. The arrest of
+some of the barons showed how true were his fears, for the heads of the
+French conspiracy, Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, at once fled
+over sea to Philip. His daring self-confidence, the skill of his
+diplomacy, could no longer hide from John the utter loneliness of his
+position. At war with Rome, with France, with Scotland, Ireland, and
+Wales, at war with the Church, he saw himself disarmed by this sudden
+revelation of treason in the one force left at his disposal. With
+characteristic suddenness he gave way. He endeavoured by remission of
+fines to win back his people. He negotiated eagerly with the Pope,
+consented to receive the Archbishop, and promised to repay the money he
+had extorted from the Church.
+
+[Sidenote: John becomes vassal of Rome]
+
+But the shameless ingenuity of the king's temper was seen in his resolve
+to find in his very humiliation a new source of strength. If he yielded
+to the Church he had no mind to yield to the rest of his foes; it was
+indeed in the Pope who had defeated him that he saw the means of baffling
+their efforts. It was Rome that formed the link between the varied
+elements of hostility which combined against him. It was Rome that gave
+its sanction to Philip's ambition and roused the hopes of Scotch and
+Welsh, Rome that called the clergy to independence, and nerved the barons
+to resistance. To detach Innocent by submission from the league which
+hemmed him in on every side was the least part of John's purpose. He
+resolved to make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thunders on his
+foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy it had formed, in crushing
+the baronage, in oppressing the clergy, in paralyzing--as Rome only could
+paralyze--the energy of the Primate. That greater issues even than these
+were involved in John's rapid change of policy time was to show; but
+there is no need to credit the king with the foresight that would have
+discerned them. His quick versatile temper saw no doubt little save the
+momentary gain. But that gain was immense. Nor was the price as hard to
+pay as it seems to modern eyes. The Pope stood too high above earthly
+monarchs, his claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed them,
+were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate business and interests
+of the day, to make the owning of his suzerainty any very practical
+burthen. John could recall a time when his father was willing to own the
+same subjection as that which he was about to take on himself. He could
+recall the parallel allegiance which his brother had pledged to the
+Emperor. Shame indeed there must be in any loss of independence, but in
+this less than any, and with Rome the shame of submission had already
+been incurred. But whatever were the king's thoughts his act was
+decisive. On the 15th of May 1213 he knelt before the legate Pandulf,
+surrendered his kingdom to the Roman See, took it back again as a
+tributary vassal, swore fealty and did liege homage to the Pope.
+
+[Sidenote: Its Results]
+
+In after times men believed that England thrilled at the news with a
+sense of national shame such as she had never felt before. "He has become
+the Pope's man" the whole country was said to have murmured; "he has
+forfeited the very name of king; from a free man he has degraded himself
+into a serf." But this was the belief of a time still to come when the
+rapid growth of national feeling which this step and its issues did more
+than anything to foster made men look back on the scene between John and
+Pandulf as a national dishonour. We see little trace of such a feeling in
+the contemporary accounts of the time. All seem rather to have regarded
+it as a complete settlement of the difficulties in which king and kingdom
+were involved. As a political measure its success was immediate and
+complete. The French army at once broke up in impotent rage, and when
+Philip turned on the enemy John had raised up for him in Flanders, five
+hundred English ships under the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the fleet
+which accompanied the French army along the coast and utterly destroyed
+it. The league which John had so long matured at once disclosed itself.
+Otto, reinforcing his German army by the knighthood of Flanders and
+Boulogne as well as by a body of mercenaries in the pay of the English
+king, invaded France from the north. John called on his baronage to
+follow him over sea for an attack on Philip from the south.
+
+[Sidenote: Geoffry Fitz-Peter]
+
+Their plea that he remained excommunicate was set aside by the arrival of
+Langton and his formal absolution of the king on a renewal of his
+coronation oath and a pledge to put away all evil customs. But the barons
+still stood aloof. They would serve at home, they said, but they refused
+to cross the sea. Those of the north took a more decided attitude of
+opposition. From this point indeed the northern barons begin to play
+their part in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies, Percies,
+Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those of de Ros or de Vaux, all had
+sprung to greatness on the ruins of the Mowbrays and the great houses of
+the Conquest, and had done service to the Crown in its strife with the
+older feudatories. But loyal as was their tradition they were English to
+the core; they had neither lands nor interest over sea, and they now
+declared themselves bound by no tenure to follow the king in foreign
+wars. Furious at this check to his plans John marched in arms northwards
+to bring these barons to submission. But he had now to reckon with a new
+antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter. Geoffry had hitherto
+bent to the king's will; but the political sagacity which he drew from
+the school of Henry the Second in which he had been trained showed him
+the need of concession, and his wealth, his wide kinship, and his
+experience of affairs gave his interposition a decisive weight. He seized
+on the political opportunity which was offered by the gathering of a
+Council at St. Albans at the opening of August with the purpose of
+assessing the damages done to the Church. Besides the bishops and barons,
+a reeve and his four men were summoned to this Council from each royal
+demesne, no doubt simply as witnesses of the sums due to the plundered
+clergy. Their presence however was of great import. It is the first
+instance which our history presents of the summons of such
+representatives to a national Council, and the instance took fresh weight
+from the great matters which came to be discussed. In the king's name the
+Justiciar promised good government for the time to come, and forbade all
+royal officers to practise extortion as they prized life and limb. The
+king's peace was pledged to those who had opposed him in the past; and
+observance of the laws of Henry the First was enjoined upon all within
+the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Stephen Langton]
+
+But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that English freedom was to find its
+champion and the baronage their leader. From the moment of his landing in
+England Stephen Langton had taken up the constitutional position of the
+Primate in upholding the old customs and rights of the realm against the
+personal despotism of the kings. As Anselm had withstood William the Red,
+as Theobald had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand and
+rescue his country from the tyranny of John. He had already forced him to
+swear to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor, in other words the
+traditional liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to sail for
+Poitou he compelled the king to deal with them not by arms but by process
+of law. But the work which he now undertook was far greater and weightier
+than this. The pledges of Henry the First had long been forgotten when
+the Justiciar brought them to light, but Langton saw the vast importance
+of such a precedent. At the close of the month he produced Henry's
+charter in a fresh gathering of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at once
+welcomed as a base for the needed reforms. From London Langton hastened
+to the king, whom he reached at Northampton on his way to attack the
+nobles of the north, and wrested from him a promise to bring his strife
+with them to legal judgement before assailing them in arms. With his
+allies gathering abroad John had doubtless no wish to be entangled in a
+long quarrel at home, and the Archbishop's mediation allowed him to
+withdraw with seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at Durham
+John marched hastily south again, and reached London in October. His
+Justiciar at once laid before him the claims of the Councils of St.
+Alban's and St. Paul's; but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed
+him from the pressure which his minister was putting upon him. "Now, by
+God's feet," cried John, "I am for the first time King and Lord of
+England," and he entrusted the vacant justiciarship to a Poitevin, Peter
+des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony with
+his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the Archbishop to the
+front, and Langton at once demanded the king's assent to the charter of
+Henry the First. In seizing on this charter as a basis for national
+action Langton showed a political ability of the highest order. The
+enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed showed the sagacity with
+which the Archbishop had chosen his ground. From that moment the baronage
+was no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a sense of common
+wrong or a vague longing for common deliverance: they were openly united
+in a definite claim of national freedom and national law.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Bouvines]
+
+John could as yet only meet the claim by delay. His policy had still to
+wait for its fruits at Rome, his diplomacy to reap its harvest in
+Flanders, ere he could deal with England. From the hour of his submission
+to the Papacy his one thought had been that of vengeance on the barons
+who, as he held, had betrayed him; but vengeance was impossible till he
+should return a conqueror from the fields of France. It was a sense of
+this danger which nerved the baronage to their obstinate refusal to
+follow him over sea: but furious as he was at their resistance, the
+Archbishop's interposition condemned John still to wait for the hour of
+his revenge. In the spring of 1214 he crossed with what forces he could
+gather to Poitou, rallied its nobles round him, passed the Loire in
+triumph, and won back again Angers, the home of his race. At the same
+time Otto and the Count of Flanders, their German and Flemish knighthood
+strengthened by reinforcements from Boulogne as well as by a body of
+English troops under the Earl of Salisbury, threatened France from the
+north. For the moment Philip seemed lost: and yet on the fortunes of
+Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in this crisis of her
+fate, France was true to herself and her king. From every borough of
+Northern France the townsmen marched to his rescue, and the village
+priests led their flocks to battle with the Church-banners flying at
+their head. The two armies met at the close of July near the bridge of
+Bouvines, between Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day went
+against the allies. The Flemish knights were the first to fly; then the
+Germans in the centre of the host were crushed by the overwhelming
+numbers of the French; last of all the English on the right of it were
+broken by a fierce onset of the Bishop of Beauvais who charged mace in
+hand and struck the Earl of Salisbury to the ground. The news of this
+complete overthrow reached John in the midst of his triumphs in the
+South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at once deserted by
+the Poitevin nobles; and a hasty retreat alone enabled him to return in
+October, baffled and humiliated, to his island kingdom.
+
+[Sidenote: Rising of the Baronage]
+
+His return forced on the crisis to which events had so long been
+drifting. The victory at Bouvines gave strength to his opponents. The
+open resistance of the northern barons nerved the rest of their order to
+action. The great houses who had cast away their older feudal traditions
+for a more national policy were drawn by the crisis into close union with
+the families which had sprung from the ministers and councillors of the
+two Henries. To the first group belonged such men as Saher de Quinci, the
+Earl of Winchester, Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the Earl of
+Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin, William Mallet, the houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant.
+Among the second group were Henry Bohun and Roger Bigod, the Earls of
+Hereford and Norfolk, the younger William Marshal, and Robert de Vere.
+Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the command of their united force,
+represented both parties equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house
+of Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard de Lucy, had
+been his grandfather. Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these
+nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John's
+delays. If he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make war
+on him till he confirmed them by Charter under the king's seal, and they
+parted to raise forces with the purpose of presenting their demands at
+Christmas. John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy
+of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election, while he
+embittered still more the strife with his nobles by demanding scutage
+from the northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou. But the
+barons were now ready to act, and early in January in the memorable year
+1215 they appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands
+before the king.
+
+[Sidenote: John deserted]
+
+John was taken by surprise. He asked for a truce till Easter-tide, and
+spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the blow. Again he offered
+freedom to the Church, and took vows as a Crusader against whom war was a
+sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance and fealty
+from the whole body of his subjects. But month after month only showed
+the king the uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was with
+him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of aid from
+Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his cause at the
+shire-courts brought back news that no man would help him against the
+charter that the barons claimed: and his efforts to detach the clergy
+from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The nation was against
+the king. He was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers
+still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival,
+Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the
+administrative school of his father and who, dissent as they might from
+John's mere oppression, still looked on the power of the Crown as the one
+barrier against feudal anarchy: and beside them stood some of the great
+nobles of royal blood, his father's bastard Earl William of Salisbury,
+his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a
+grandson of Henry the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of
+Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the
+elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the rising of the
+younger Henry against Henry the Second, and stood by him as he died; he
+had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the outlawry of
+John. He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course,
+to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking
+from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and
+looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to
+bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.
+
+[Sidenote: John yields]
+
+But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him rather as
+mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with the demands of the
+barons when the delay which had been granted was over and the nobles
+again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their
+claims before the King. Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely
+despotic idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the
+passionate surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask
+for my kingdom?" he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will
+make me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's
+court had done their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry,
+they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. Richard and John
+both held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law of the
+land; and to fetter that will by the customs and franchises which were
+embodied in the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of
+his rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of his
+people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the close of May
+London threw open her gates to the forces of the barons, now arrayed
+under Robert Fitz-Walter as "Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church."
+Exeter and Lincoln followed the example of the capital; promises of aid
+came from Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
+Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the nobles who
+had as yet clung to the king, but whose hopes of conciliation were
+blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the summons of the "Army of
+God." Pandulf indeed and Archbishop Langton still remained with John, but
+they counselled, as Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counselled, his
+acceptance of the Charter. None in fact counselled its rejection save his
+new Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners who
+knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But even the number
+of these was small; there was a moment when John found himself with but
+seven knights at his back and before him a nation in arms. Quick as he
+was, he had been taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the
+short respite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
+mercenaries to his aid and appealed to his new suzerain, the Pope.
+Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart, John
+bowed to necessity and called the barons to a conference on an island in
+the Thames, between Windsor and Staines, near a marshy meadow by the
+river side, the meadow of Runnymede. The king encamped on one bank of the
+river, the barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their
+delegates met on the 15th of June in the island between them, but the
+negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of unconditional
+submission. The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to in a single
+day.
+
+[Sidenote: The Great Charter]
+
+Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathedrals and
+churches, and one copy may still be seen in the British Museum, injured
+by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown,
+shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the
+earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes
+and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age
+men have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in itself
+the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new
+constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the First formed the
+basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal
+recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by
+Henry the Second. What was new in it was its origin. In form, like the
+Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In
+actual fact it was a treaty between the whole English people and its
+king. In it England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
+nation bound together by common national interests, by a common national
+sympathy. In words which almost close the Charter, the "community of the
+whole land" is recognized as the great body from which the restraining
+power of the baronage takes its validity. There is no distinction of
+blood or class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble. All are
+recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.
+Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not of
+baron and churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, of
+townsman and villein. The provisions against wrong and extortion which
+the barons drew up as against the king for themselves they drew up as
+against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on
+Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone
+before. The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for
+precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the
+older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold
+the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of
+written and defined law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks
+the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the
+nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of
+written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.
+
+Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had shown its power of
+self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which
+recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form. But all
+vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of
+Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and
+property, to good government. "No freeman," ran a memorable article that
+lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be seized or
+imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin:
+we will not go against any man nor send against him, save by legal
+judgement of his peers or by the law of the land." "To no man will we
+sell," runs another, "or deny, or delay, right or justice." The great
+reforms of the past reigns were now formally recognized; judges of assize
+were to hold their circuits four times in the year, and the King's Court
+was no longer to follow the king in his wanderings over the realm but to
+sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was a small
+danger compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and his
+predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of the scutage which Henry
+the Second had introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom.
+He had restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often abolished, under the
+new name of "carucage," had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the
+plate of the churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
+raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his
+pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met this
+abuse by a provision on which our constitutional system rests. "No
+scutage or aid [other than the three customary feudal aids] shall be
+imposed in our realm save by the common council of the realm"; and to
+this Great Council it was provided that prelates and the greater barons
+should be summoned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the
+sheriffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
+what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the definition
+turned it into a national right, a right so momentous that on it rests
+our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baronage seem to have been
+startled when they realized the extent of their claim; and the provision
+was dropped from the later issue of the Charter at the outset of the next
+reign. But the clause brought home to the nation at large their
+possession of a right which became dearer as years went by. More and more
+clearly the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
+of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England fought
+for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hampden. It was the
+establishment of this right which established English freedom.
+
+The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they claimed for the
+nation at large. The boon of free and unbought justice was a boon for
+all, but a special provision protected the poor. The forfeiture of the
+freeman on conviction of felony was never to include his tenement, or
+that of the merchant his wares, or that of the countryman, as Henry the
+Second had long since ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood
+were to be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, the
+exaction of forced labour, by royal officers was forbidden; and the
+abuses of the forest system were checked by a clause which disafforested
+all forests made in John's reign. The under-tenants were protected
+against all lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms
+as these were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown. The
+towns were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their
+freedom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common
+deliberation, of regulation of trade. "Let the city of London have all
+its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water.
+Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and
+towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." The
+influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments by which
+freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign merchants, and an
+uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced throughout
+the realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Innocent annuls the Charter]
+
+There remained only one question, and that the most difficult of all; the
+question how to secure this order which the Charter established in the
+actual government of the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate
+abuses; the hostages were restored to their homes, the foreigners
+banished by a clause in the Charter from the country. But it was less
+easy to provide means for the control of a king whom no man could trust.
+By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-five barons
+were to be chosen from the general body of their order to enforce on John
+the observance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the
+king should its provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the
+Charter should not only be published throughout the whole country but
+sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by order from the king.
+"They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a burst of
+fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his
+impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of which
+he was a master. After a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for
+months along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid he had
+solicited from Rome and from the Continent. It was not without definite
+purpose that he had become the vassal of the Papacy. While Innocent was
+dreaming of a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its head to enforce
+justice and religion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal
+protection would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would. The
+thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the
+armies of England are at hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a
+Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. His envoys were already at Rome,
+pleading for a condemnation of the Charter. The after action of the
+Papacy shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English freedom.
+But he was indignant that a matter which might have been brought before
+his court of appeal as overlord should have been dealt with by armed
+revolt, and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal
+tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the king who submitted to
+his justice. He annulled the Great Charter by a bull in August, and at
+the close of the year excommunicated the barons.
+
+[Sidenote: Landing of Lewis]
+
+His suspension of Stephen Langton from the exercise of his office as
+Primate was a more fatal blow. Langton hurried to Rome, and his absence
+left the barons without a head at a moment when the very success of their
+efforts was dividing them. Their forces were already disorganized when
+autumn brought a host of foreign soldiers from over sea to the king's
+standard. After starving Rochester into submission John found himself
+strong enough to march ravaging through the Midland and Northern
+counties, while his mercenaries spread like locusts over the whole face
+of the land. From Berwick the king turned back triumphant to coop up his
+enemies in London while fresh Papal excommunications fell on the barons
+and the city. But the burghers set Innocent at defiance. "The ordering of
+secular matters appertaineth not to the Pope," they said, in words that
+seem like mutterings of the coming Lollardism; and at the advice of Simon
+Langton, the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out and mass was
+celebrated as before. Success however was impossible for the
+undisciplined militia of the country and the towns against the trained
+forces of the king, and despair drove the barons to listen to Fitz-Walter
+and the French party in their ranks, and to seek aid from over sea.
+Philip had long been waiting the opportunity for his revenge upon John.
+In the April of 1216 his son Lewis accepted the crown in spite of
+Innocent's excommunications, and landed soon after in Kent with a
+considerable force. As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries
+who constituted John's host refused to fight against the French sovereign
+and the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. Deserted by the
+bulk of his troops, the king was forced to fall rapidly back on the Welsh
+Marches, while his rival entered London and received the submission of
+the larger part of England. Only Dover held out obstinately against
+Lewis. By a series of rapid marches John succeeded in distracting the
+plans of the barons and in relieving Lincoln; then after a short stay at
+Lynn he crossed the Wash in a fresh movement to the north. In crossing
+however his army was surprised by the tide, and his baggage with the
+royal treasures washed away. Fever seized the baffled tyrant as he
+reached the Abbey of Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed by a
+gluttonous debauch, and on the 19th of October John breathed his last at
+Newark.
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
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