SECTION II: HISTORY (cont.)

Part 22: The Early Plantagenets: Henry II; Richard I; John.

Under the sons of the Conqueror England appears for the first time in her European character. Looking at her simply as a power, without regard to the nationality of her inhabitants, she now appears as an insular power making conquests on continental ground. William Rufus, placed on the throne by the English people in opposition to a Norman revolt, broke all his promises of good government, and ruled as one of the worst tyrants in our history. But it would be hard to show that he was an oppressor of Englishmen as Englishmen. His rule was rather a tyranny which pressed on all classes and all races, though the native English would doubtless be the class which felt it most bitterly. Godless and vicious beyond all parallel before or after, he was still a captain and a statesman, and no king better knew how to make use of every art to advance the power of his kingdom. He won a large part of Normandy by force of arms; and, when his brother Robert set forth on the crusade, he obtained the whole duchy under cover of a mortgage. Maine revolted and was won back; a purchase of Aquitaine was negotiated; Rufus was believed to have designs on the crown of France itself. A short war was waged between Rufus and Philip of France, a war which now begins to put on the character of a war between England and France, rather than that of a mere war between the duke of the Normans and his overlord at Paris. The wealth and strength of England now for the first time directly told in continental affairs. But the schemes of the Red King were cut short by the stroke of an arrow in the New Forest (2d August 1100). By an agreement between William and Robert, if either died childless, his brother was to succeed to his dominions. But at the death of Rufus, Robert was far away on the crusade, and the English nation had never paid much heed to any attempts to settle the succession of the crown before a vacancy. Henry, the youngest son of the Conqueror, the only one of his sons who was the son of a crowned king and born on English ground, was unanimously chosen and speedily crowned. An Englishman by birth, if not be descent, he further married a wife who had some English blood in her veins, and who, in the eyes of his subjects, passed for an Englishwoman. This was Edith, the daughter of Malcolm of Scotland, who at her marriage took the Norman name of Matilda. The English king and the English queen were mocked at by the Norman courtiers, who again conspired to bring in the Norman duke. Again a son of the Conqueror owed his crown to English loyalty. A second Norman invasion of England followed. Robert landed at Portsmouth, as his father had landed at Pevensey, but the policy of Henry found means to send him and his host away without fighting (1101). One of the usual agreements was made, an agreement which had little chance of being kept, by which again each brother was to succeed to the dominions of the other in case of the failure of direct heirs. But Robert was incapable of ruling his own dominions.; a party in Normandy invited the King of the English to save the duchy form anarchy. Two campaigns, ending in the great fight of Tincherai (1106), brought Normandy into the hands of Henry. Men at the time looked on the day of Tinchebrai as the reversal of the day of Senlac. Normandy was conquered by England, as England had before been conquered by Normandy. Such a view put forth only one side of the case; but from one side it was true.

During the rest of Henry’s reign there was perfect peace in England; but nearly the whole time was filled with continental wars. The warfare between France and England, of which there had been only a glimpse in the days of Rufus, now began in earnest. It is true that the wars of Henry were waged wholly for Norman and not at all for English interests, and Englishmen at home bitterly complained of the taxes which were wrung from them for war beyond sea. But it is none the less true that, in their European aspect, they were English wars and that they tended to give the England of the days before the Conquest. The later years of Henry were chiefly occupied in schemes of dynastic policy on the continent. His only legitimate son, the Aetheling William, to whom homage as his successor had been done both in Normandy, and in England was drowned in 1120. The king’s daughter Matilda had been married to the emperor Henry V. Strict alliance with Germany formed part of Henry’s policy, as it had formed part of the policy of Godwine and Harold; and the two Henries, emperor and king, joined in warfare against Lewis of France. On the death of the emperor, Matilda returned to England, and, by an act without precedent either in his kingdom, or in his duchy. Henry procured that homage should be done to his daughter as his successor. No more striking comment can be needed as to the growth of the new ideas of kingship. The crown was beginning to be so thoroughly looked on as a possession that it was deemed that it might pass to a woman. On the other hand, no settlement could be more opposed to modern notions of hereditary right. When homage was first done to Matilda, Robert’s son William, who, according to modern notions, was the direst heir of the Conqueror, was still living. In Normandy indeed he was his uncle’s enemy, and in England his claims seem never to have been heard of. But, in the lack of legitimate male heirs, the choice either of the king’s natural son Robert or of his sister’s son Stephen would have been much less opposed to earlier ideas, both English and Norman, that the succession of Matilda. The imperial widow was presently married to Geoffrey of Aniou, a marriage clearly designed with a view to the enlargement of the continental dominions of her father’s house.
King Henry died in 1135, leaving, as he deemed, the succession to his daughter and her young son Henry. As usual, an arrangement made before the vacancy was set aside, and the choice of England fall on Stephen. The case of the new king’s election was not unlike the older and more famous case of the election of Harold. In itself it was perfectly good. Against it stood the fact that Stephen had, with the rest of the chief men, sworn to the succession of Matilda. Stephen then was a perjurer as regarded his own soul; he was no usurper as regarded the nation. He was accepted without opposition, and King Henry’s son Robert did homage to him with the rest. But Stephen, a man of many winning personal qualities, was utterly unable to reign in those times. Rebellions broke out; Earl Robert asserted the rights of his sister in England, and Normandy was conquered by her husband Geoffrey. The empress landed in England (1139); she was chosen Lady (1141)—the name Queen was not used; but she was never crowned. A civil war, a time of utter anarchy and havoc raged, till (1153) another agreement of the usual kind was made between Stephen and Matilda’s son Henry, now duke of the Normans. He had been brought over to England as a child; he had taken his share in the wars; and it was now agreed that Stephen should keep the crown for life, and that Henry should succeed him. This time the agreement took effect. When Stephen died in the next year, Henry succeeded without opposition. Again a duke of the Normans succeeded to the crown of England; but Henry of Anjou, by birth-place Henry of Le Mans, was far more than duke of the Normans and king of the English. To the lands of his mother’s father he added the lands of his father, Anjou, Maine, and Tauraine; and a politic marriage gave him a greater dominion still. The designs of William Rufus upon the duchy of Aquitaine came to pass in another way. The great dominion of Southern Gaul, Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony, had passed to Eleanor the daughter of their last duke. She married Lewis, the heir of the crown of France, who almost immediately succeeded to the kingdom (1137). For a moment France and Aquitaine, Northern and Southern Gaul, the land of oil and the land of oc, were joined together. It might seem that a kingdom of France, in the modern sense, was about to begin. But the northern king and the southern duchess did not agree. A canonical objection to the marriage was conveniently found, and it was accordingly annulled. The divorced queen at once married the young duke of the Normans (1152). Her dominions came with her, and the prince who now succeeded to the crown of England already held the greatest power in Gaul, a power far greater than that of his normal lord at Paris. With that dominion he won the undying hatred of the lord whose wife with her splendid heritage had passed to him. The king of Paris was not yet to be master of Southern Gaul. He was to be again shut up in his inland dominion, while his mighty vassal held the mouths of the great rivers and the fairies cities of the land. As England under Cnut might seem to have become part of a Scandinavian empire, so under Henry she might seem to have become part of a Gaulish empire. The strictly Norman period of the English history comes to an end. Normandy and England have alike become parts of the dominions of a king who by female descent might be called either Norman or English, but who, both by birth and by general character, was neither Norman nor English. In ruling over a vast number of distinct states, widely differing in blood, language, and everything else, ruling over all without exclusively belonging to any, Henry II., king duke, and count of all the lands from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, was the forerunner of the emperor Charles V.

It was during the reigns of the two sons and the grandson of the Conqueror that the chief steps were taken towards the fusion of English and Normans into one people, or rather towards the change of Normans into Englishmen. At the accession of Rufus the distinction was in full force; at the accession of Henry I. is is clearly visible. In the course of Henry’s reign it so far died out that, though it was doubtless not forgotten, it was no longer marked by outward distinction. The name of Englishman now takes in all natives of England, of whether descent. A tale of a general conspiracy to kill all the Normans soon after the accession of Stephen proves, when it is examined, to mean, just as in the case of the massacre of St Brice, not a design to slay everyman of Norman descent in England, but merely a design to slay a particular body of Norman mercenary soldiers.1 Everything during these reigns tended to draw the two races more nearly together; nothing tended to draw the two races more nearly together; nothing tended to keep them apart. The brutal tyranny of Rufus wronged both raced alike; yet men of native English descent could rise even under him.2 The cold despotism of Henry at once benefited and offended both races alike. At one time of his reign we meet with a complaint that he would admit no Englishman to high office. When the complaint is tested, it is found that the exclusion extended to natives of England of both races, that the preference was a preference for absolute foreigners as such. The horrors of the anarchy in Stephen’s day fell on both races alike; the foreign mercenaries who laid waste the land were hateful to both alike. We may safely say that, at the time of the accession of Henry of Anjou, the man of Norman descent born in England had, altogether in feeling and largely in speech, become an Englishman.

None of these three reigns was a time of great legislative changes, but the reigns of Rufus and Henry were the time in which the new system of administration grew up. Under Rufus the doctrine of military tenures, and of the incidents consequent on such tenures, was put into systematic shape by his rapacious minister Randolf Flambard, whom he raised to the bishopric of Durham. This man is distinctly charged with having first subjected ecclesiastical property to these burthens, and there can be little doubt that it was he who laid them on lay property also. The evidence is this. Under the Conqueror we see the germs and beginnings of certain usages, but nothing more. At the accession of Henry they appear in a systematic shape as established usages, usages which Henry does not promise to abolish, though he does promise to reform the abuses of them. The feudal burthens were a logical deduction from the doctrine of military tenure. The land is held of the lord on condition of certain services being rendered. It passes from father to son; but in order that each successive tenant may strictly hold it as a grant from the lord, the heir must receive it again. For the new grant he must pay a relief, the price of the relevatio, the taking up again, of the estate which has lapsed to the lord. But it may be that the heir is from age or sex incompetent to discharge the services due to the lord. In the case of the minor heir, the lord takes the fief into his own hands till the heir is of age to discharge them. The heiress can never discharge them in person, she must discharge them through a husband. But the interests of the lord require that she shall marry only with his approval, lest she should carry the fief into the hands of an enemy. All these occasions were turned by the perverse ingenuity of Randolf Flambard into means for increasing the royal revenue. The wardships,—that is, the temporary possession of the minor’s estate,—might be granted or sold. So might the marriage of the heiress. The lord might either sell her and her estate for money, or else he might take money from the heiress herself for leave to marry according to her own inclinations. So with bishoprics and abbeys; Flambard found out that they too were held of the king by military service. During the vacancy of the benefice, there was no one to discharge the service; the king therefore took temporary possession of the ecclesiastical estate. And, as the new prelate could not be chosen without the royal consent, the king might prolong that temporary possession as long as he chose. All these inferences were logically drawn out and sternly carried into practice by the minister of Rufus. The utmost that Henry pledges himself to do was to reform the grosser oppressions of his brother’s reign, and to limit his exactions within some reasonable bounds. The claims themselves went on, to the oppression and sorrow of successive generations of heirs and heiresses, till, as regards lay tenures, the whole system was swept away by the famous Act of Charles II.

There is nothing to make us think that the innovations of Flambard were ever put forth in a legislative shape. At all events, no laws of William Rufus are extent. A book is extent which calls itself the Laws of Henry; but, like the codes called the law of Eadward and William, it is rather a private compilation or law-book. It has a certain value, as a witness to the state of the law in Henry I.’s time; but it must not be mistaken for a collection of real statutes put forth by that king. It is remarkable for the strongly English character of the jurisprudence described. There can be little doubt that the compiler purposely gave his work as English a character as he could; but there is as little doubt that Henry strove to give to his government, as far as he could, at least the appearance of English character. In his charter he grants to his people the law of King Eadward,—that is, the system of government which prevailed in Eadward’s reign—with his father’s amendments. And, both in the charter and in other documents of his reign, the time of King Eadward is constantly taken as the standard. Henry however kept the forests in his own hands, and preserved the stern forest law of his father. The reign of Henry is also memorable as the time of the earliest extant charters, both of the king and of other lords, granting new privileges to boroughs, often calling them into legal existence for the first time. Thus the citizens of London are exercised form various burthens of different kinds, and from the jurisdiction of any but their own courts. They have further the farm of all Middlesex—their subject district—and the appointment of their own sheriff. In the next trict—and the appointment of their own sheriff. In the next reign or rather anarchy, the citizens of London appear distinctly as a communion or commune.

Bit if this period was not marked by many formed changes in the law, the new administrative system grew stronger and stronger. If the reign of Rufus systematizes the military tenures, the reign of Henry systematized the exchequer and the great offices of state. A family of able ministers begins with Roger, chancellor, justiciar, and bishop of Salisbury, a family of the secularized churchmen of that day most of whom rose from the king’s service to high ecclesiastical office. Henry, a strict administrator of justice, looked no less narrowly after his own interests. Under him we get the earliest pipe-roll of the exchequer, and a wonderful document it is, showing how many and how strange were the sources of income which flowed into the heard of a Norman king.

There reigns are also of the highest moment in ecclesiastical history. We now see what the ecclesiastical effects of the Conquest really were. As we have seen, the tendency of the time was to make bishoprics the reward of temporal services, a practice which under Rufus easily sank into direct simony. Yet Rufus himself, in a fit of sickness and repentance, put a saint at the head of the English Church. After a vacancy of four years (1089-1093) Anselm succeeded Lanfranc in the see of Canterbury. Anselm was forced into the office, but at this stage he showed no objection whatever to the ancient English mode of investiture, by which the prelate received his staff from the king, and became his man. But, in such a reign as that of Rufus, the tendencies of such a man as Anselm could not fail to be Romewards. Rome might well seem to be the seat of law, as opposed to the unlaw of the reigning king. The quarrel began about the acknowledgement of a pope of disputed title, it went on about various matters, till Anselm crossed the sea to confer with Pope Urban. He remained in banishment till the death of Rufus, and learned at Bari and at Rome that the laws of England were evil, that no churchman ought to receive investiture from a lay lord or do homage to a lay lord for the lands of his church. He was recalled by Henry, and served him loyally during Robert’s invasion. But he refused to do homage or to consecrate the bishops whom the king had invested. A second absence from England (1103-1106) followed, till a compromise was made between the king and Pope Paschal. The king gave up the claim to invest with staff; but the prelate was to do homage to the king for his lands. Anselm then came back.





The controversy is a memorable one, not the least so because Henry and Anselm are an almost solitary example of a king and a bishop who could each maintain claims which he held to be right without loss of temper or breach of personal friendship. Anselm was a true saint. He was no mere stickler for ecclesiastical privileges, but a denouncer or moral evil. One of his canons again denounces the slave-trade, and indeed denounces slavery itself. Yet it is plain that through Anselm the power of the Roman see in England greatly advanced, and he laboured hard to forbid the English use which allowed marriage to the clergy. Under his successors the claims of Rome grew yet faster, and a succession of cannons were passed against the married clergy. Under the anarchy it is not wonderful if the ecclesiastical power grew; it was the only thing in the realm which kept any likeness of law. Ecclesiastical synods took upon themselves to judge the king; and the right of succession to the English crown was argued in a solemn pleading before the court of Rome. The doctrine of clerical exemptions grew; it was held that no clerk might be tried in a temporal court for any crime whatsoever. Nothing did greater damage to Stephen than his imprisoning two bishops, the famous Roger of Salisbury and his nephew Alexander of Lincoln. On the other land, the ecclesiastical courts continued to draw to themselves a large class of causes which concerned laymen. Nor was this in those days altogether without a good side. The bishops’ courts had a bad name for corruption, that is, for letting off offenders for money. But at least they were not bloody. As they could not inflict death, so neither could they inflict the horrible mutilations which were common even in the case of very trifling offences, in the courts of the king.

This period was also marked by the introduction of the Cistercian order into England. Houses of this order, a reform of the older Benedictine rule, never reached the wealth and importance of the Benedictine houses; but they have added a special feature to English scenery. The monks of this order habitually sought wild and lonely spots; the ruined abbey is most commonly Cistercian. At the same time, we see the first beginnings of the university system in England. Oxford, a flourishing borough, a strong military post, a favourite seat of national assemblies, and an occasional royal residence, now became fort eh first time a set of learning. The teaching of divinity began under Robert Pullein in the days of Henry; that of law began under Vacarius in the days of Stephen. This is really all that we know of the beginnings of that great university; but its growth must have been steady during the whole of this century; for at the beginning of the next the scholars of Oxford were a numerous and important body.

The relations of England to the rest of Britain are of considerable importance during this time. The marriage of Malcolm and Margaret had most important results on both centuries. The Scottish kings became in truth English kings, more truly English than the Normans and Angevins who reigned in England. Their culture was English; they dwelled mainly in the English or Anglicized parts of their dominions; strangers from England of both races were welcome at their court. This English influence began under Malcolm; after a period of struggle, it became fully established under David. Malcolm invaded England more than once both in the days of the Conqueror and in those of Rufus, and his last invasion saw also his death at Alnwick (November 14, 1093). This invasion was perhaps caused by an act of the king of the English which may well have been dangerous to Scotland. Rufus was the one king of his race who enlarged the actual Kingdom of England. He made Cumberland, meaning by that name the old diocese of Carlisle, an integral part of England; he peopled it with colonists from southern England, and he rebuilt or repaired the local capital, which became a strong fortress against Scotland. After Malcolm came a time of struggles between the Scottish and the new English party in Scotland, which was ended by Eadgar, the son of Malcomn and Margaret, being place on the throne by English help. Under this reign and those of Alexander and David (1097-1153) the relations between England and Scotland were close, and, as long as Henry of England lived, perfectly peaceful. In Stephen’s day David asserted the rights of his niece the empress; he twice invaded England; he suffered a great defeat in the battle of the Standard; but he obtained the cessation of the newly won land of Cumberland, and also of the earldom of Northumberland. Like Lothian at a former time, these lands were to be held as English earldoms. Their possession by the Scottish kings was short; but it doubtless tended, along with other things to make Lothian become more directly a part of the Scottish realm.

Along the Welsh frontier the power of England greatly advanced under the two Williams and under Henry. We may say, roughly speaking, that South Wales was conquered at this time. But the conquest amounted to little more than the settlement of Norman lords with a following of all nations, who kept up from their castles an endless warfare against the Welsh in their mountains. But one part of the land was settled in another way. The southern peninsula of Pembrokeshire, and seemingly the peninsula of Gower in Glamorgan, were under Henry (1111) planted with a Flemish colony, which may be fairly called the last of the Teutonic settlements in Britain. In the Flemish district of Pembrokeshire the Britons and their tongue vanished as utterly as they had done from Kent. Two of the chief towns, Pembroke and Tenby, keep Welsh names in a corrupt form; the rest of the local nomenclature preserves the names of the Flemish leaders.

With the accession of Henry of Anjou a new period begins. The purely English period has ended. The Norman period has ended also; England and Normandy are alike under the rule of the cosmopolitan prince from Le Mans. Englishmen tried to see a native king in the man who sprang through three generations of females from the son of Eadmund Ironside.1 And Henry was too wise to refuse to listen. Whatever he was, he was not Norman, and under him the last traces of distinction between men of English and of Norman birth in England altogether died out. Of all the kings between the Conqueror and Edward the First, he has the best right to the name of lawgiver. He is not the author of any formal code; but he is the author of a greater number of actual enactments than any king before him. His reign falls naturally into three parts. The first is taken up with the restoration of order after the anarchy. To this work the young prince of twenty-one, who had already won a name beyond the sea, gave himself with a good will. He was helped in the work by one of the clerical statesmen of the age, Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket of London, archdeacon of Canterbury and the king’s chancellor. Thomas is one of the great examples of the fusion of Normans and English. Born in London of Norman parents, he appears throughout his career as a passionate lover of his native land and his native city. He was a favourite with the English people, nor is there a word show that he deemed himself, or was deemed by them, to be other than their countryman in the fullest sense, to be other than their countryman in the fullest sense. King Henry and Chancellor Thomas worked hard for eight years to restore the rule of law. One great difficulty in their path was the new doctrine of the immunity of the clergy form secular jurisdiction. These years were a of comparative peace, broken chiefly by a war (1159) with Lewis of France for the succession of Toulouse. This war was, as we shall presently see, of great importance in a constitutional point of view; and in it the chancellor’s functions, ecclesiastical and civil, did not hinder him from showing himself in the third character of stout man-at-arms. At last, on the death of Archbishop. Theobald (1162), Henry committed the fatal mistake of raising his great minister to the see of Canterbury, and the further mistake. The step was in every way new; other bishoprics had been used as rewards for temporal services; the primacy had been reserved, if not always for saints, at least for men whose character was not prominently worldly Most archbishops had been monks. And though, both before and after the Conquest, archbishops of Canterbury had been rulers of the realm in more characters than one, no archbishop had ever held a post in the king’s service like that of chancellor. The see was forced upon Thomas; but, once archbishop, he put on the character of his new office in all its fullness. As a mere deacon holding secular office, he had been the king’s most trusty servants; now become priest, bishop, archbishop, he threw up his secular post, and became the champion of the ecclesiastical claims in their most extravagant shape. Quarrels soon arose between him and the king, quarrels which neither king nor primate carried on in the spirit of Anselm and Henry I. Thomas showed himself violent and provoking; Henry showed himself mean and spiteful. The first great quarrel arose out of the ecclesiastical claims; for Thomas, in his new position, tried to shelter even the most guilty churchman from any punishment at the hands of the temporal courts. The king caused a body ordinances, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, to be drawn up, which professed to state the law as it stood under Henry I. before the anarchy. They were certainly not, as the ecclesiastical party called them, innovations of his own; but it was only natural that they should seem innovations to the ecclesiastical party. There was to be no appeal to any power out of the realm without the king’s special leave. As a natural consequence, the clergy were not to leave the realm without the king’s licence. The ecclesiastical courts were no longer to shelter offenders against the laws of the land. Advowsons were declared to be lay fees. The baronial character of the estates of bishops and abbots was distinctly asserted, and on this followed, as a logical consequence, the rule that those estates should pass into the king’s hands during a vacancy. Elections of prelates were to be made in the king’s chapel, with his consent. Another provision was added, not wholly new, and which hardly touched the general question, but which still marks the growth of the new ideas. The villain was, in fact, only a little more than a codification of the practice of Henry I.; it was only a little less than a forestalling of the legislation of Henry VIII. It contained innovations on the practice of England before the Norman Conquest; but they were the innovations of Flambard, not of Henry himself. But the attempt was premature. Thomas, in a moment of weakness, assented to the Constitutions, and then withdrew his consent. Henry, thus far in the right, put himself in the wrong by raking up all kinds of forgotten and frivolous demands against the archbishop. Thomas fled from England and found shelter in France. It was the interest of Lewis to support any enemy of Henry a weary time of dispute and intrigue followed, in which Thomas was but feebly supported by the pope Alexander III. Henry sometimes threatened to acknowledge the imperial antipope; sometimes he forsook his own position; once, men said at the time, he went so far as himself to accept a legation from the pope. At last the first quarrel was patched up (1170).Thomas came back to England only to find a new and distinct ground of quarrel. The king had caused his eldest son Henry to be crowned by Roger archbishop of York, to the prejudice of the rights of the see of Canterbury. New excommunications, new disputes, followed. At last four knights in the king’s service, mistaking a few hasty words of their master, crossed from Normandy to England, and slew the archbishop in his own church.

Thomas really died for the rights of the church of Canterbury, not for any more general principle. But the second quarrel, as could not fail to happen, god mixed up in men’s minds with the first; and the murdered archbishop was looked on as a saint and as a martyr to the general privileges of the church. The dead martyr was a more dangerous enemy to the king than the living primate had been. We now enter on the third period of Henry’s reign, a time of nineteen years, in which, Henry had to struggle against foes on every side, but chiefly against foes that were of his own household. His overlord of France, his vassal of Scotland, his own nobles, his wife and his own children, were all arrayed against him. As far as England was concerned, Henry was successful against all. The rebellion of the earl’s and the Scottish invasion (1174) both failed. On the continent his fate was harder. The death of his eldest son, the rebellion of the youngest, the loss of the city of his birth, utterly broke down his spirit. At the age of fifty-six he died (1189) at Chinon, far away alike from England and from Normandy, a worn-out and broken-hearted man.

The great lawgiver was gone, and his dominions passed to his rebellious son Richard. This king has in popular belief become one of the heroes of England. That he should ever have been looked upon as such, that he should by strangers have been so looked upon even in his own time, shows how England had come to be looked on as the head and centre of the vast dominion of her kings. Personally Richard, though born on English ground, was the least English of all our kings. Invested from his earliest years with his mother’ Southern dominions, Richard of Poiton had little in him either of England or of Normandy: he was essentially the man of Southern Gaul. Twice in his reign he visited England; to be crowned on his first accession, to be crowned again after his German captivity. The rest of his time was spent in his crusade, and in various continental disputes which concerned England not at all, except so far as she had to pay for them. The mirror of chivalry was the meanest and most insatiable of all the spoilers of her wealth. For England, as a kingdom, all that he did was to betray her independence by a homage to the emperor, which formed a precedent for a more famous homage in the next reign. His reign is an important one in constitutional progress, but as sch it was the reign of his ministers and not of himself. One event towards the end of his reign has been often misunderstood. A commotion was raised in London (1196) by William the son of Osbert, known as William with the Long Beard, a fellow-crusader and seemingly a personal friend of the king’s. William professed to be the champion of the poor against the rich. Out of his a romantic story grew that he was the champion of the English against the Normans. The writers of his own time show that he was deemed a martyr by his followers and a traitor by his enemies; but they give no hint that he was the champion of one race against another. Nor do they give us any clue as to his own descent, English or Norman. There is not a word in any writer of the reign of Henry or Richard to make us think that the distinction between the two races was at all remembered in any hostile sense. Everything shows that all the inhabitants of the kingdom were fast drawing together, in opposition to men born out of the realm, whether in Normandy or anywhere else.





Richard died, as he had lived, far away from England and Normandy, in a petty quarrel with a Southern vassal (1199). Constitutional progress had gone on silently in his absence. In the next reign freedom had to be won openly a tyrant by force of arms. No period of our history, save those of the Conversion and the Conquest, is of greater importance than the seventeen years of John. A popular confusion has to be got rid of with regard to his accession at the death of Richard. John, the youngest son of Henry, was the only survivor of his brothers; but Geoffrey, the third son of Henry, had left a son Arthur. Richard seems at one time to have designated Arthur for his successor. But his last bequest was in favour of his brother; and, even, without that bequest, all English precedent was in favour of the brother rather than of the nephew. Arthur does not seem to have had a single partisan either in Normandy or in England. John was received as duke, chosen and crowned as king, without opposition. But on the continent generally the new doctrine of hereditary right had made much greater advanced than it had in England. Anjou acknowledged Arthur; and Philip of France was led by an obvious policy to receive his homage for all the continental dominions of his uncle. But Arthur and his followers were soon crushed by the king-duke (1202), and the disappearance of Arthur left little room for doubt that he had been put out of the way by his uncle. The king of the French called into being a new jurisprudence out of the romances of Charlemagne, and called on the twelve peers of France to sit in judgment of their felon brother. Sentence of forfeiture of all lands held of the French crown was pronounced against John. The sentence was carried out by an easy conquest of continental Normandy. The islands clove to their duke, and they have ever since remained possessions of the English crown, keeping their local independence and their ancient laws. On behalf of the duchy John did not strike a blow; but his southern dominions, and the final result was that, of all the continental possessions of Henry and Richard, Aquitaine alone remained to their successors. The relations of England to the continent were thus completely changed. Under Henry and Richard England had been only one, though the greatest, among the endless possession of her king. Now that Normandy, Maine, and Anjou became provinces of France. Aquitaine became distinctly a distant dependency of England. To the crown of France the gain was beyond words; the king was now a greater potentate than any of his vassals. He had won back those old possessions of the French duchy which had so long cut off its dukes and kings from the sea. To England the loss was the greatest of gains. It broke the last tie which bound any part of the inhabitants of England to any land beyond the four seas of England. If anything was still wanting to wipe our every trace of distinction between the descendants of those who a hundreds and forty years earlier had been the conquerors and the conquered, the French conquest of Normandy did the work. Every man in England was now an Englishman, and nothing but an Englishman. One question only has to be asked: why did Normandy, the old foe of France, submit so tamely to a French conquest? The reason seems plain. Normandy was a conquered land. With Henry I. the line of her national dukes had ended. If the French king was a stranger, he was not more a stranger than the king of England and count of Anjou. The duchy really lost nothing by passing from a state which might seem that of dependency, to become an integral portion, often a royal apanage, of a kingdom of its own speech. Aquitaine, or the other hand, foreign alike to England, Normandy, and France, found its account in cleaving to the more distant sovereign. The nobles were drawn to France by community of feeling in many ways; but the cities clave to the distant king, who was their ally and protector rather than their master.

The English nation was now united; the smaller mass of the conqueror had been received and assimilated by the greater mass of the conquered. Events now thickly press one upon another, and all; of them tended to draw all the sons of the soil closer, and closer together. John, like Richard, was born in England; but, like Richard, he was in feeling neither English nor Norman. He surrounded himself with foreign counselors and with foreign soldiers. He presently plunged into an ecclesiastical quarrel which showed the weak side of the ecclesiastical policy of the Conqueror. It needed William himself to carry out William’s system. A disputed election to the see of Canterbury gave Innocent III. an opportunity for putting in a nominee of his own, and his choice—it must have been unwittingly—fell on one of the foremost of English patriots, on the first of the noble band who defied pope and king alike on behalf of the freedom of England. The candidate of the king and the candidate of the monks both gave way to Stephen Langton. John had so utterly turned away from him all the hearts of his people that none stood by him, even when the pope took upon him to declare the king of the Neglish deposed from his crown, and to offer that crown to the king of Roman pontiff, as his brother had become the man of the Roman Caesar. Archbishop Stephen now came back to England. The laws of king Eadward were renewed. When John flew to arms, the barons and people of England, with the primate at their head, swore to bring back the ancient laws, the laws of Eadward, the laws of Henry. Those names are now heard for the last time. John was constrained (1215) to sign the Great Charter; and from that day Englishmen called for the observance of the Great Charter, as they had hitherto called for the laws of Eadward. By that charter resistance to the royal power was legalized; in the struglle that followed it was the king who was the rebel. John had hardly sealed the charter, when he sent to his overlord at Rome, and the pontiff took upon him to annul the recovered liberties and to denounce suspensions and excommunications against those who had won them. At the head of his foreign mercenaries, the king laid waste his own dominions. The barons in despair chose a new king, and offered the crown to Lewis of France. Such a choice seems to us yet more strange than the speedy submission of Normandy to Lewis’s father. That the step was most unwise was presently proved; but as the time it was intelligible alike to Normans and to Englishmen. If Lewis was a stranger, so was John. Personally Lewis promised far better than John, nor was it easy to find any other available candidate. If not Lewis himself, yet his wife, came by female descent of the royal stock; and the only likely competitor, the emperor Otto, was at once closely allied with his uncle John and had shown that he could not keep the kingdoms which he had already. But, even before John died, men began to feel that, in inviting a French king, they had invited a French conquest. In a few months (1216) the death of John cut the knot; all English feeling turned to the side of his young and innocent son. He was indeed a minor, but a minor was better than a stranger. Henry III. succeeded as a national king, and a burst of national feeling drove the French out of the land. A long and weary time followed, in which the freedom of England was slowly growing up, till, fifty years later, the time came when it had to be again asserted on the field of battle.

No time is richer than this in legal history. The whole reign of Henry II. Was a reign of legislation, and the work was not interrupted even during the time of the great struggle with the archbishop. In the year before the promotion of Thomas to the primacy, king and chancellor had dealt one direct blow at all feudal ideas. In the war of Toulouse the scutage was first devised; a money payment was accepted instead of personal military service. The money was of course spent in hiring mercenaries; and it was largely by the help of mercenaries that Henry subdued his rebels in England. But later in his reign, by the Assize of arms (1181), he enjoined that every free Englishman should be ready to serve with the weapons belonging to his rank. Other incidental notices show us that much legislation was done while Henry still had Thomas to his minister. But the ordinances of which the text is preserved belong to a later time. The reign of Henry is rich in charters to boroughs, several of which are early enough in his reign to bear the signature of chancellor Thomas. And a reference in the Constitutions of Clarendon shows that, thus early in his reign, Henry had begun that great step towards the development of jury trial which is one of the special marks of his reign. By the work of Henry and his chancellor the system of recognition was organized, by which sworn men gave a verdict, but as yet a verdict given from their own knowledge. The great legal writer of Henry’s reign, the justiciar Randolf of Glanville, speaks of the recognition as a special gift of Henry to his people. And enlarges on its superiority to the wager of battle. All this comes within the chancellorship of Thomas; and we shall do the chancellor great injustice, if we think wholly of his later ecclesiastical character, and forget his services in the days when he was the chief minister of one of our greatest kings. Of the extant ordinances of Henry’s reign, the oldest after the charter issued at his coronation are the Constitutions of Clarendon themselves (1164). The Assize of Clarendon—a wholly distinct document (1166)—and the Inquest of Sheriffs (1170) came during the time of the quarrel with Thomas. On these, after the death of Thomas, follows in 1176 the Assize of Northampton, in 1181 the Assize of Arms, and in 1184 the Assize of the Forest. All these bear witness to Henry’s care, even when he was most occupied with other matters, to preserve the peace of the land, and to enable all his subjects to have justice done to them in the king’s name. And in all, the mode of inquisition by the oath of twelve lawful men grows at each step. The Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton have a special reference to one of Henry’s great measures, that by which the visitation of the country by itinerant judges going regular circuits was finally established. It was not an invention of his own; the visits of the king’s judges had begun to take a regular shape under Henry I. But it was Henry II. Who organized the whole system afresh after the anarchy. It was he who finally established the specially English principle that justice should be administered in different parts of the kingdom by judges not belonging to the particular district, but immediately commissioned by the king. When the king’s judges came and received the inquisitions of the local jurors, though the complete modern ideal of a judge and jury had not been reached, yet something had been reached which could grow into that ideal without any one moment of change so great as the changes wrought by Henry himself. By him the jury was applied to all manner of purposes. The Assize of Arms was distinctly a return to the old military system. It gave a new life to the fryd, the ancient militia, which had never gone out of use, but which had been overshadowed by feudal levies on the one hand, and by the use of mercenaries on the other. Each man was to have the arms which befitted the amount of his property. It was by a jury that the liability of each man to be ranked in such or such a class was to be fixed. Even in the Assize of the Forest, an ordinance framed to protect the most exceptional and most oppressive of all the royal rights, the popular element comes in. Sworn knights are appointed in each shire to protect those rights. Lastly, when in 1188 the tithe was levied for the defence of Eastern Christendom against Saladin, the liability of each man to the impost was assessed by a local jury. In all these ways the appeal to the oath of lawful men, as opposed to any other from of finding out truth, was strengthened by every step in the legislation of Henry.

Meanwhile the administrative system which had been growing up ever since then Conquest took firm root under Henry. We have a contemporary picture of it, drawn by one of Henry’s own officials, in the Dialogus de Scaccario. This was the work of Richard, treasurer of the exchequer and bishop of London, one of the family of officials founded by Roger of Salisbury. Alongside of this, we have our first strictly legal treatise, as distinguished from private compilations and codes, in the work of the great justiciar Randolf of Glanville. In short, we may say that under Henry the legal system of England took a shape which it has practically kept ever since. The endless changes of the last seven hundred years are rather special amendments of Henry’s work than anything which can be said to start altogether afresh from a new point. Strictly constitutional advance rather belongs to the reigns of Henry’s sons than to that of Henry himself. Nor is this wonderful. Constitutional advance commonly means then lessening of the royal power, and acts which lessen the royal power do not often issue from the free will of kings. In Henry’s time, above all a time when law and order had to be restored after the reign of anarchy, the momentary need was rather to strengthen the royal power than to lessen it. Legal reforms are often, as in this case, the free gift of wise kings; constitutional reforms commonly to be wrested from weak or wicked kings. But the legal reforms on Henry supplied an element which largely entered into the constitutional reforms of the next stage. Out of Henry’s favourite institution of recognition on oath grew, not only trial by jury, but also the House of Commons.

By the time of Henry II. The force of circumstances, especially the working of the practice of summons, had gradually changed the ancient assembly of the whole nation into a mere gathering of the great men of the realm. The work which had now to be done, and which, in the space of about a hundred years, was gradually done by a number of instruments, conscious and unconscious, was to call into being a second and more popular assembly alongside of the assembly which had lost its popular character. To use language which belongs to a somewhat later time than that with which we are now dealing, the House of Lords already existed; the House of Commons had to be called into being alongside of it. The details of this great process of constitutional growth must be drawn out by the strictly constitutional historian. All that can be done here is to call attention to the main lines of the process and to its more remarkable landmarks. And it may be well from the very beginning to give the warning that the two Houses of the English Parliament did not arise out of any theoretical preference for two houses over one or three. The number was fixed, like everything else in English history, by what we are apt to call circumstances or accidents. Our whole parliamentary system was eminently one which was not made, but grew. Thus, for instance, it was only gradually established that the barons should be personally summoned to the same house as the bishops and earls, while the knights should appear only by their representatives along with the smaller freeholders and the burgesses of the towns. It is in the reign of Richard I. that we begin to see the first faint glimmerings of parliamentary representation. The one object of the absentee king was to screw all the money that he could out of the kingdom for which he cared not. The object of his wise ministers, of Archbishop Hubert among the first, was to gain the greatest amount of money for their master with the least amount of oppression towards the nation. Under Hubert’s administration, chosen bodies of knights or other lawful men, acting in characters which become more and more distinctly representative, were summoned for every kind of purpose. How far they were nominated, how far freely elected, is not always clear. It seems most likely that in one stage they were nominated by the sheriff in the county court, while at later stage they were chosen by the county court itself. In other words, the principle of representation was first established, and then, the next stage naturally was first established, and then the next stage naturally was that the representatives should be freely chosen. Summoned bodies of knights appear in characters which are the forerunners of grand jurors and of justices of the peace. They appear also in knights oft eh shire which were soon to come. A chosen body of knights have to assess the imposts on each shire. From assessing the taxes the next stage was to vote or to refuse them. In 1213 the sheriffs are called on to summon four discreet men from each shire, to come and speak with the king about the affairs of the realm. When we have reached this stage, we have come very near to a parliament, name and thing.

The reign of John, in short, is marked by common consent as the time from which Englishmen date the birth of their national freedom in its later form. From his day men no longer asked for the observance of the laws of Eadward, which was deemed to be nothing else than the laws of Eadward in a new shape. By that charter all the great principles of constitutional government were affirmed. They were so fully as to be in advance of the age; only a few years later men shrank from affirming them again with so clear a voice. Stephen Langton doubtless saw further than other men of his day; but, if in one or two points he claimed more than his generation was ready for, the great mass of his legislation took root at once, and so prepared men for the final acceptance of all a generation or two later. The Charter id the first solemn act of the united settlers had become naturalized Englishmen. Of distinction of race or law there is not a word. The one distinction drawn is that between freeman and villain, and even nothing new, except the temporary provisions for its own enforcement, provisions which give a legal sanction to the natural right of resisting a king who rebels against the law. Novel abuses are to be redressed; new means of redressing them are supplied; but the old law of England, the law of Eadward, the law of Henry, stands firm. But it is with the strictly constitutional provisions of the Charter that we are here most concerned. Representation was already fast growing up; but it had hardly yet reached such a stage that it could be ordained in legal form. But rules are laid down out of which, even if it had not begun already, representation in the strictest sense could not fail shortly to arise. The distinction which had been growing up ever since the Conquest, and indeed before, between the Witan and the Landsitting men now received a legal sanction. The practice of summons makes the distinction. Certain great men, prelates, earls, and greater barons, are to receive the personal summons. The rest of the king’s tenants-in-chief are to be summoned only in a body. Here we have almost come to a separation of Lords and Commons. But in modern ideas those names imply two distinct houses; and it was not yet settled, it had not yet come into men’s minds to consider, whether the national council should consist of one house or a dozen. But it is decreed in so many words that the acts of those who came would bind those who stayed away. On such a provision representation, and not only representation but election of the representatives, follows almost as a matter of course. The mass stay away; a few appear, specially commissioned to act in the name of the rest. The Charter mentions only the king’s tenants-in-chief; so far had things been marred and feudalized by the influence of the Conquest. But as the lection could only be made in the ancient county court, every freeholder at least, if not every freeman, won back his ancient right. If he could not come himself to cry Yea or Nay, he at least had a voice in choosing those who could do so with greater effect.

The point in which the legislation of the Charter seems to have in advance of the age was with regard to the power of the purse. The old threefold burthen, the trinoda necessitas, seems, in the new feudalized state of things, to have given way to the three cases in which the lord might lawfully call on his man for an aid. These were his own ransom from captivity, the knighting of his eldest son and the marriage of his eldest daughter. This right is allowed to the king; but he could call for money in other case, unless it was voted to him by the national council. This was the old law, and in quite recent times both Thomas of London and St Hugh, the Burgundian bishop of Lincoln, had, in full assembly, withstood exactions on the part of Henry and Richard. But, though both ancient law and modern precedent were for the clause, men were not ready for the direct assertion of its principle. The clause was left out at the later confirmations of the Charter, and the right was not again fully established till the end of the century. The provisions which were temporary were not the least important. Twenty-five barons were appointed to carry them out, and, to show the advance of municipal rights among them was the mayor of London. If the king broke his oath, they were to call the whole commons of the kingdom to their help, and to constrain the rebel king by force. When John again rebelled his barons and people drew the sword against him, and they were but carrying out the letter of the law.

The main principles of constitutional government had thus been established; the old freedom had been won back in a new shape. England was England again. But the European position of England had altogether changed. The final outcome of Norman and Angevin rule in England had been to make England an European and a continental power, holding two Gaulish dependencies, the duchy of Aquitaine and the insular Normandy. But the vast extension of the Angevin dominiosn before they were thus cut short had brought England into connection with most parts of Europe. The daughters of Henry II., like the daughters of Eadward the Unconqured, were married to princes in distant lands, in Castile, Sicily, and Saxony. This last marriage, that of Matilda with Henry the Lion, gave the old connexion between England and Germany a special direction. During the dispute with the archbishop, Henry was more than once tempted to forsake the obedience of Alexander III., and to accept the pontiffs who were successively set up by the emperor Frederick. But the Saxon marriage caused kings whose internal policy was distinctly Ghibeline to appear in foreign lands as the allies of the Guelf. Otto IV., the son of Henry the Lion and Matilda, was constantly at the court of his uncles, and he received from them earldoms and promises of Kingdoms. It was in alliance with him that Englishman, German, and Fleming stood side by side when all three were overcome by the French king at Bouvines. In other parts of the empire, we find Henry seeking a wife for his son John in Savoy, and bringing a saint from Grenoble to rule at Witham and at Lincoln. But more than all, England , as a power, began at this period to take a direct share in the crusades. Individual Englishmen of both races had fought in earlier crusades, and had entered the service of the eastern emperors. But Henry himself took the vow of a crusader, ad Richard carried that vow into effect. In foreign lands the Portevin count appeared as an English king, and his followers, of whatever race or speech, were looked on as Englishmen. The fame of England was thus spread through all lands; yet it was in the reigns of Richard and John that the crown of England was humbled as it never was before or since. Richard became the man of the emperor for his kingdom; John became the man of the pope. That he also offered to become the man of the Almohabe Commander of the Faithful reads almost like a piece of satire; but the evidence on which the story rests cannot be lightly cast aside.

Within the island world of Britain the power of England rose for a moment under Henry II. to a greater height than it had even risen at any earlier time. Or we might say that another island world, less only than Britain itself, was brought into relation with the world of Britain, as the world of Britain was brought into relation with the world of Europe. The first Angevin king of England became the first English lord of Ireland. The connexion between the two islands had been growing close for a long time. Shadowy tales are told of a dominion exercised by Eadgar and by Cnut on the eastern shore of Ireland. It is more certain that, under the two Williams and under Henry I., first the Danish settlers, and then the Irish themselves, entered into spiritual relations with the see of Canterbury which could hardly fail to grow into temporal relations with the crown of England. One Irish king was, if not the vassal, at least the attached friend, of Henry I. One of the first acts of Henry II. was to obtain a bull from the one English pope, Hadrian IV., granting him the dominion of the island of Ireland. But the conquest of the new realm was begun only by private adventurers in 1169. For one moment, in 1171, the conquest seemed to be a reality. The Irish princes became the men of Henry, who presently granted the kingdom of Ireland to his son John. But in truth all that was done was to begin that long and dreary tale of half-conquest and local warfare which gave Ireland five centuries of greater wretchedness than England had endured in the first five years of Norman dominion. As id from a feeling how unreal the claim was, the kingly styled granted of John was dropped by John himself; and, till the reign of Henry VIII., the king of England took from his precarious Irish dominion no higher title than Lord.

On the Welsh frontier the endless warfare went on; but this cannot be called a period of conquest. The armies of Henry II. suffered at least one defeat at the hands of the Britons; and the contemporary writer John of Salisbury ventures to regret that England had not in his day a leader like Harold to guard her frontier. Under John we find the first connexion by marriage between the ruling houses of England and Wales. A natural daughter of John was married to the Welsh prince Llywelyn. From this time the position of the Welsh prince changes, and they begin to play a certain part in the internal affairs of England. On the Scottish frontier Henry II. took back the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland, which had been yielded to David and his son. Presently the share taken by William the Lion in the revolt of the English barons was avenged in 1174 by his defeat and captivity, and by his acknowledgement of a supremacy of an altogether new kind on the part of the English overlord. For the first time, Scottish lords, as well as Scottish kings, did homage to Henry; and, for the first time also, Scottish castles were placed in his hands. But when the chivalrous Richard was selling everything, he sold back these newly acquired rights. The relations in which the kingdom of Scotland, the earldom of Lothian, and the territorial fief of what we may now best distinguished as Scottish Cumberland, stood to the English crown fell back to their former state, to form materials for a great controversy a hundred later.

With regard to language, this period is one in which the use of Latin becomes universal in all public documents. There are still a few English writs of the early days of Henry II., and the first known French document comes from the hand of Stephen Langton in the year of the Great Charter. The truth is that the men of this time were so familiar with the use of all three languages, English , French, and Latin, that it is rarely indeed that any writer thinks it needful to mention which of the three a man spoke at any particular moment. But it is clear that, by the end of the 12th century, English was understood and spoken by all classes. It is equally clear that a fashion now set in in favour of French merely as a fashion. Richard was altogether non-resident, and could have had little influence on such matters. But John, and after him Henry III., kept a foreign court in England. Though born in the land, they were far more strangers than Henry II., had been. Thus, at the very moment when French had lost its position as the natural speech of one class of the inhabitants of England, it came to the front again as a mere courtly speech, foreign to all. In short, in regard to language, as in regard to matters of fashion generally, the Norman period was succeeded by a French period. But neither French nor English was at this time the tongue of solid literature, as distinguished from writings which are merely popular or merely courtly. Such writings were severally English and French. But all the learned writings of a learned age were in Latin. Neither in English nor in French is there any original English history of his time, unless we except the rhyming chronicles of Wace and Benôlt de Sainte More, which are writings essentially Norman, though incidentally bearing on English matters. Our Latin materials for the history of this time are abundant. We have the so-called Benedict of Peterborough; we have Roger of Howden and Gervase of Canterbury; we have Ralph de Diceto and the critical William of Newburgh. The quarrel between Henry and Thomas gave rise to an endless crop of letters, lives, and documents of all kinds. The expedition of Richard I. finds its palce among the histories of the crusades. And, while history was thus abundant, legend was not wanting. The actual life of Geoffrey of Monmouth belongs to the days of Henry I. and Stephen; but it was in the second half of the century that his writings began to have a lasting influence. His wild fables of Arthur and earlier British kings seem at the outside to have preserved a few distorted scraps of genuine West-Welsh history. But they gave birth to a vast legendary literature, Latin, French, and English, which has done more perhaps than any other one cause to make Englishmen forget that they were Englishmen. And, beside history and legend, there was also at this time no lack of Latin literature of a more general kind, such as the writings of John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, and the often misunderstood Walter Map or Mapes. Among many others these may pass as some of the chief; but the literature of this age, of all classes, in overflowing. Many of these writers were real scholars, well versed in both sacred and profane learning. In Giraldus we see something higher still. He was vain, spiteful, and careless of truth. But, as we see in William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh the beginnings of historical criticism, so in Girladus we see the first approached to something like scientific observation alike in language and in natural history.
In the history of art this age is one of the greatest turning-points. It is the time of transition between the round and the pointed arch, between the Romanesque and the so-called Gothic style. The richer and lighter Norman style of Salisbury was through the reign of Henry II. gradually getting still richer and still lighter. The pointed arch, first introduced in the vaults, then in the main arcades, gradually spread itself into every part of the buildings. The change in the form of the arch was at first unaccompanied by any change in detail; the Romanesque ornaments continued in use. Gradually they were changed for a system of ornament which better suited the new constructive forms. By the first years of the thirteenth century, the change was complete, a style all but peculiar to England, quite peculiar to England and Normandy, a style marked by the use of untraceried lancets as windows, combined with the use of purely Gothic detail, was fully developed. The stages of the change may perhaps be best studied in the churches of Canterbury and Lincoln. Along with the development of architecture, there was an even more remarkable development of sculpture. The carvers of the eleventh century and of the first half of the twelfth could hardly represent the human figure; and when they attempted foliage, as in capitals, it was rude and inartistic. The later years of the twelfth century produced capitals almost rivaling the old Corinthian types. The next generation struck out more original, but equally perfect, forms of beauty. The sculpture, strictly so called, of the thirteenth century, if it never shook itself free from a certain amount of conventional stiffness, if its artists had neither the modern artist’s anatomical science nor the old Greek’s familiarity with the human figure, was at least a vast advance on works of the times immediately before them. English sculpture indeed leaped in the thirteenth century to a point of excellence which it found hard to keep.


Footnotes

FOOTNOTES (page. 302)
(1) See History of the Norman Conquest, vol. c. p. 281.)
(2) The career of the crusader Robert the son of Godwine, whose history will be found in William of Malmesbury and in the Scottish writer John Fordan, who represents Turgot, is a case in point. So at the accession of Henry I. there were several Englishmen holding abbeys, one of whom, Godric of Peterborough, had been chosen by the monks, who paid William Rufus a large sum for leave to elect freely.

FOOTNOTES (page. 304)
(1) See especially the dedication of the Genealogia Rehum by Aethelred of Rievaux to Henry II. The king’s pedigree is there traced up to Adam, without any reference to his Angevin father or to his Norman grandfather.


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