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 THE OXFORD MANUALS 
 
 OF ENGLISH HISTORY 
 
 HUTTON 
 
This book is furnished for examination 
 by Charles Scribners Sons with their 
 compliments. The price is ^~^f^, subject 
 to^aper cent, discount for introduction. 
 
Wow in Course of Publication. 
 
 THE OXFORD MANUALS 
 
 OF ENGLISH HISTORY. 
 
 Edited by C. W. C. OMAN, m.a., f.s.a. 
 
 Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 
 
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 Edited by C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., F.S.A. 
 
 KING AND BARONAGE 
 
 (A.D. 1 135— 1327) 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. HUTTON, B.D. 
 
 FELLOW AND TUTOR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE 
 EXAMINER IN THE HONOUR SCHOOL OF MODERN HISTORY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1896 
 
A^ 
 
 \ 
 
 ^^ 
 
 % 
 
GENERAL PREFACE. 
 
 There are so many School Histories of England al- 
 ready in existence, that it may perhaps seem presump- 
 tuous on the part of the authors of this series to add 
 six volumes more to the number. But they have their 
 defence : the " Oxford Manuals of English History " 
 are intended to serve a particular purpose. There 
 are several good general histories already in use, and 
 there are a considerable number of scattered ^ epochs * 
 or ' periods '. But there seems still to be room for a 
 set of books which shall combine the virtues of both 
 these classes. Schools often wish to take up only a 
 certain portion of the history of England, and find 
 one of the large general histories too bulky for their 
 use. On the other hand, if they employ one of the 
 isolated ^ epochs ' to which allusion has been made, 
 they find in most cases that there is no succeeding 
 work on the same scale and lines from which the 
 scholar can continue his study and pass on to the 
 next period, without a break in the continuity of his 
 knowledge. 
 
 The object of the present series is to provide a set - 
 of historical manuals of a convenient size, and at a 
 very moderate price. Each part is complete in itself, 
 but as the volumes will be carefully fitted on to each 
 other, so that the whole form together a single con- 
 tinuous history of England, it will be possible to use 
 any two or more of them in successive terms or years 
 at the option of the instructor. They are kept care- 
 
 282148 
 
fully to the same scale, and the editor has done his 
 best to put before the various authors the necessity 
 of a uniform method of treatment. 
 
 The volumes presuppose a desire in the scholar 
 to know something of the social and constitutional 
 history of England, as well as of those purely polit- 
 ical events which were of old the sole staple of the 
 average school history. The scale of the series does 
 not permit the authors to enter into minute points 
 of detail. There is no space in a volume of 130 pages 
 for a discussion of the locality of Brunanburgh or of 
 the authorship of Junius. But due allowance being 
 made for historical perspective, it is hoped that every 
 event or movement of real importance will meet the 
 reader's eye. 
 
 All the volumes are written by resident members of 
 the University of Oxford, actively engaged in teaching 
 in the Final School of Modern History. It is gener- 
 ally allowed that history is at the present time taught 
 more systematically and with greater success in this 
 university than in any other seat of learning in the 
 British Isles, and the authors trust that their experi- 
 ence in working together in the Modern History 
 faculty, and their knowledge of the methods of in- 
 struction in it, may be made useful to a larger public 
 by means of this series of manuals. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chap. 
 
 I. Feudal Anarchy, 1135-1154, 
 
 Page 
 
 7 
 
 II. The Reign of Henry II., 1154-1189, - - 15 
 
 III. The Reign of Richard I., 1189-1199, - - 39 
 
 IV. The Reign of John, 1199-1216, - - - - 48 
 V. The Reign of Henry III., 1216-1272, - - 59 
 
 VI. The Reign of Edward I., 1272-1307, - - 80 
 
 VII. The Reign of Edward II., 1307-1327, - - 97 
 
 VIII. England under the House of Anjou, 1154-1327, 104 
 
 Index, 113 
 
 Map of Henry II. 's Dominions, 
 
 Map of England under the House of Anjou, 
 
 Map of Wales under Edward I., 
 
 Table of the Family of Henry II., 
 
 Table of the Kindred of Henry HI., - 
 
 Table of the Scots Succession, - - - 
 
 - 18 
 
 - 74 
 
 - 84 
 
 - 38 
 
 - 65 
 
 - 91 
 
KING AND BARONAGE 
 
 (l 135— 1328 A.D.). 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 FEUDAL ANARCHY, 1135-1154. 
 
 With the reign of Henry I. the immediate results of 
 the Norman Conquest appeared to have been worked 
 out. The new race of English kings had Jesuits of 
 taken their place among the great powers of the Norman 
 Europe in right of their island kingship no ^°'^^"®^*- 
 less than of their continental lands. The church as well 
 as the state of England had become less insular. For 
 good or ill the pope's hand was felt in the land even 
 while his claims were checked and resisted. Society, in- 
 fluenced both by church and baronage, felt the change, 
 and literature reflected it. Language was changing under 
 the new relation with foreigners, and art was rapidly grow- 
 ing into vigorous life under the wider horizon. The old 
 English law had passed away, or been transformed into a 
 new thing, in which the feudal customs of the Normans 
 were predominant. Lastly, the men who lived on Eng- 
 lish soil were a different, and a mixed, race. 
 
 Such was the England which Henry L left behind him. 
 There was much of change in the old England, but there 
 was not yet much of union. The English folk had learnt 
 to look to church and king to aid them against their new 
 masters the barons, who were still half enemies. The 
 barons were not yet content to lie down under the iron 
 rule of a king w^ho taught them that fixed feudal service 
 was included in a still wider demand, the universal obli- 
 
8 ' * * the' HOUSE. OF ANJOU. 
 
 gatiOii bf aJlegiance iTom every man that trod the English 
 soil to the king that sat upon the English throne. While 
 he lived, the stern Henry (as the English Chronicle itself 
 records) made peace for man and beast. " Stark man he 
 was, and there was great awe of him. The highways were 
 safe while he ruled, and the island was not vexed with 
 war. Whoso followed his business and bare his burden, 
 be it gold or silver, no man durst say unto him aught but 
 good." In words such as these could the English re- 
 member him who gave them peace. Now he had, so his 
 foreign counsellor the Archbishop of Rouen hoped, the 
 peace he had loved in his lifetime. But England plunged 
 again into the distractions of civil war. "There was 
 soon", says the Chronicle, "tribulation in the land, for 
 every man that could soon robbed another." 
 
 Henry I. died at Rouen on the night of December i, 
 1 135. Of his lawful children only his daughter Matilda 
 The Empress survivcd him. She had been wife to the 
 Matilda. Empcror Henry V., and was now married to 
 
 Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, the heir of the traditional rivals 
 of the Norman house. From this union sprang the great 
 house of Anjou, which was to have so vast an influence 
 on English history. The counts who ruled over the little 
 state in central Gaul on the banks of the lower Loire and 
 the Maine, — the borderland between France, Aquitaine 
 and Brittany, — had long been a stalwart, stark, and sturdy 
 race, whom their neighbours had learnt to fear. Fulk 
 the Black, Geoffrey Martel, and Fulk V. were great men, 
 who raised a small state into prominence; but there was 
 a grim impressiveness about the race that seemed to come 
 from another source. Legends rose which traced the 
 line back to a count who had married a spouse of un- 
 earthly origin. "What wonder if we lack the natural 
 affections of mankind — we who come from the devil and 
 must needs go back to him!" So Richard L is recorded 
 to have said. 
 
 Geoffrey, the young Count of Anjou, was the son of Fulk 
 v., and had married the widowed Empress Matilda when 
 he was but a lad of fifteen. Five years later, on March 5, 
 
THE TWO CLAIMANTS. 9 
 
 1 1 33, the son was born who was to become the first of the 
 Angevin house in England, and to inherit all the fierce 
 tenacity and the strong resolution of the families from 
 which he was sprung. It seemed then to the great Henry 
 I. that his throne would happily pass to his daughter and 
 her son; and to make the succession still surer, he made 
 his lords and bishops swear fealty to the empress, and 
 "also to her little son, whom he appointed to be king 
 after him". But no sooner was he dead than the oath 
 was forgotten. The magnates, Norman and half English, 
 cared not for Matilda, who had only spent two years in 
 England since she was eight years old; and her husband 
 was the hereditary foe of the barons who traced their 
 descent from the great vassals of the Conqueror. Thus 
 it was that when Henry died, the barons in England and 
 in Normandy vowed that no one of the false race of the 
 Angevins should be their king. They held themselves 
 as mighty as any such southern lord, and both in the 
 island they had conquered and in their own land they 
 rejected the dead king's daughter and her handsome 
 spouse. "We will not have a foreigner to reign over us"; 
 so they spoke of the Count Geoffrey. 
 
 There was another claimant to the throne, who, if he 
 was no more Norman than Matilda, yet would not bring 
 the Normans under an alien house. The Stephen of 
 conqueror's daughter Adela had married the Biois. 
 Count of Blois, a house at rivalry with Anjou but not 
 unfriendly to the Normans. Their third son Stephen 
 had been brought up at the court of his uncle, King 
 Henry. He was a bold, hearty man, with the instincts, 
 it seemed, of a baron rather than a king. From him 
 the barons in England could look for at least something 
 of the independence which they still chafed at losing. 
 England, it was said, had never been ruled by a woman, 
 and now a strong man, the great Conqueror's own grand- 
 son, stood for the throne. No wonder the barons were 
 unmindful of their oaths. The church followed the lead 
 of the claimant's brother Henry, who was bishop of the 
 royal city of Winchester. But a stronger voice than 
 
lO THE FIGHT FOR THE CROWN. 
 
 either was found at the moment in the citizens of Lon- 
 don. They met Stephen with acclamations, and in their 
 folkmoot, which King Henry had recognized as possess- 
 ing wide powers over the great city, they, speaking in 
 His corona- the name of the people of the land, chose 
 tion. hini to be lord and king. "Elected by clergy 
 
 and people", as he himself phrased it. King Stephen was 
 crowned on S. Stephen's Day, 1135. 
 
 For the time it seemed as if the new reign might be 
 peaceful as the last. Even Robert of Gloucester, the 
 natural son of Henry I., submitted to the king, and Nor- 
 mandy followed the English example. Stephen issued 
 charters promising good government, the freedom of the 
 church, the suppression of wrongs wrought by greedy 
 officials, the surrender of the forests which the late king 
 had made. He soon crushed a rising in Normandy; he 
 made his power felt against unruly barons at Exeter and at 
 Norwich ; and he brought David, King of Scots, Matilda's 
 uncle, to agree to a truce. 
 
 So passed the years 11 36 and 1137. In 1138 the 
 scene suddenly changed, and war was begun which was 
 The fight for o^ly to end when the new king himself was 
 the crown. j^^ar his death. Stephen's own imprudence, 
 even more than his dangerous enemies, brought about 
 his woeful fall. Early in the year Robert of Gloucester 
 renounced his allegiance. The king seized some of his 
 lands, but was unable to capture his strong castle of 
 Bristol. The King of Scots, with a wild horde of half- 
 savage soldiers, overran the northern shires. Then the 
 church stood forth to defend the peace of her children; 
 and the good Thurstan, Archbishop of York, who had 
 been to the people of his vast diocese a great and liberal 
 ruler, called together the fyrd (the host of the people) to 
 withstand the foe. The two armies met on the moor of 
 Northallerton. The English folk took with them the 
 banners of their own native saints, S. Cuthbert of Dur- 
 ham and S. Wilfrid of Ripon, as well as S. Peter of York 
 and S. John of Beverley — together with the king's stan- 
 dard. After a fierce fight the invaders fled back towards 
 
THE SEIZURE OF THE BISHOPS. II 
 
 Carlisle. Thus, on August 22, 11 38, was won the Eng- 
 lish people's victory for their Norman king, to which was 
 given the name of the Battle of the Standard. Yet at no 
 very long time after, Stephen ceded Cumberland and 
 Northumberland to the Scottish king to buy off his further 
 attacks. They were to be held as an earldom dependent 
 on the English crown. 
 
 But the danger was not yet over. There were risings 
 all over England, which the king could with difficulty put 
 down. The barons began to fortify great The seizure of 
 castles, and the king foolishly to grant them ^^^ bishops, 
 new privileges, to endow them with crown rights, to give 
 them shares in the fines levied in the law courts, and to 
 encourage their independence just where he should have 
 curbed their power. The great churchmen took alarm. 
 Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, and his family were men 
 whom Henry I. had raised from mere poor clerks to be 
 the founders of an administration, the organizers and 
 agents of a great system of justice and finance. In their 
 hands lay the secrets of government, the rules by which 
 the king acted, the knowledge of the ways in which he 
 made his power felt in distant shires. When Roger of* 
 Salisbury, who was justiciar, his son Roger, who was 
 chancellor, and his nephews, Nigel, Bishop of Ely, the 
 treasurer, and Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, had given 
 their support to the new king, they had secured to him 
 the smooth working of the administrative machinery 
 which had been in their hands for thirty years. They 
 were haughty and ostentatious; they had great castles and 
 large armed forces; but they were men of business, and to 
 anger them was an act of suicidal folly. Yet Stephen in 
 June 1 138 arrested the justiciar, the chancellor, and the 
 Bishop of Lincoln, and deprived the Bishop of Ely of his 
 see. From that moment the government was at an end, 
 for there were none to administer affairs, and the clergy 
 as well as the officials were turned against the king. 
 
 War now broke out in earnest. On September 30, 
 II 39, the Empress Matilda landed at Portsmouth with 
 her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester. The battles 
 
12 THE EVIL DAYS OF CIVIL WAR. 
 
 fought were but a small part of the misery that ensued. 
 Everywhere the barons built castles and freed themselves 
 The Civil f^om royal control. " They put the wretched 
 ^ar- country-folk to sore toil with their castle build- 
 
 ing", says the English Chronicle; "and when the castles 
 were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. 
 Then they took all those that they deemed had any 
 goods, both by night and by day, men and women alike, 
 and put them in prison to get their gold and silver, and 
 tortured them with tortures unspeakable. . . . Many 
 thousands they slew with hunger. I cannot tell all the 
 horrors and all the tortures that they laid on wretched 
 men in this land; and it lasted full nineteen winters." 
 Then Stephen brought in foreign hired men to fight for 
 him, and they were without pity, and men "said openly 
 that Christ and His saints slept ". They spared neither 
 churches nor poor man's land, they cared for no law of 
 church or state. And the horrors of famine were added 
 to the horrors of war; a day's journey might be taken 
 The Horrors without Seeing a field that was tilled. " Corn 
 of the time. ^^^^ checsc and butter were dear, for there 
 was none in the land. Wretched men starved for hunger; 
 some went about asking alms who were once rich men; 
 some fled out of the land. Never was more wretchedness 
 in a land, and never did heathen men worse than these 
 did, for they forbore neither church nor churchyard, but 
 took all the goods that were therein, and then burned 
 church and all. ... If two or three men came riding to 
 a township, all fled from them thinking they were reavers 
 (marauders). The bishops and clerks were ever cursing 
 them (i.e. excommunicating them); but that was nought 
 to them, for they were all accursed, and forsworn and lost." 
 Thus the English chronicler bewails the miseries of his 
 time, and it is with such words that the earliest English 
 history in the English tongue, kept up through so many 
 centuries of peril and change, at last ends. 
 
 It was a time of unchecked feudal anarchy : every man 
 did that which was right in his own eyes — "nay", says a 
 chronicler, "that which was wrong also". The peaceful 
 
matilda's successes. 13 
 
 monks, who saw and recorded these horrors, bethought 
 them of the days when there was no king in Israel, and 
 of the fearful time when Jerusalem was compassed about 
 with armies. Through all the years of war the tide of 
 success fluctuated continually. ''The king was alternately 
 a prisoner and a conqueror, but was never able to restore 
 the administrative machinery; the empress had her turns 
 of good and evil fortune, but was never able to make 
 good her title to the crown." 
 
 Matilda dwelt first at Bristol, then at Gloucester, while 
 Earl Robert took the field against King Stephen, and was 
 joined by Ralph, Earl of Chester, with whom the king 
 had quarrelled. Stephen was besieging Lincoln Castle 
 early in 1141 when the two earls attacked him. A great 
 flood had overflowed the banks of the old Foss-dyke and 
 the little river Witham, and the city was protected by the 
 fordless stream. But the army of the * disinherited ' lords 
 whom Stephen had driven from their lands to bestow 
 them on his own men, under the bold leadership of Earl 
 Robert, plunged into the stream and swam across. A 
 fierce battle followed, and Stephen fought in the thickest 
 of the fray, till outnumbered and surrounded capture of 
 he yielded at last to Earl Robert himself. He Stephen, 
 was imprisoned in the Castle of Bristol. On February 2 
 Bishop Henry of Winchester, who had in vain tried to make 
 peace between the two parties, and who was the pope's legate 
 as well as a great churchman high in favour with monks 
 and clergy, now met the empress and made compact with 
 her (March 2, 1141). On April 8 she was elected Lady 
 of England and Normandy at Winchester, and took from 
 the treasury the royal crown. She went on to London, 
 where she began to oppress the citizens; but they rose 
 against her "like a swarm of bees", and she was soon 
 obliged to fly back to Winchester. There also she managed 
 to disgust her supporters. Bishop Henry of Winchester 
 took up the cause of his brother Stephen, whose wife, 
 Matilda of Boulogne, was aided by the Londoners. Ma- 
 tilda of Boulogne was a heroic woman, who gathered 
 troops, confirmed waverers, and had the patience which 
 
14 STEPHEN'S RECOVERY OF POWER. 
 
 the rivals so much lacked. In her Henry of Winchester 
 saw hope for the reunion of England and the restoration 
 of peace. He reversed all the excommunications he had 
 pronounced against Stephen's party, and pledged himself 
 to do all he could to restore Stephen. Having again 
 changed sides, he was proof against all attempts of Robert 
 or the empress to win him over ; and, with his adhesion, 
 the tide soon turned in favour of his brother. The em- 
 press was then besieged in Winchester, whence she fled 
 on September 14, 1141. Soon after this her strongest 
 supporter. Earl Robert of Gloucester, was taken prisoner. 
 On November i he was exchanged for Stephen, and the 
 war reopened under more equal terms. The empress 
 soon had to seek refuge in Oxford. Stephen pursued her 
 from Cirencester. He entered Oxford on September 26, 
 1 142, fired the town, and besieged the empress in the 
 strong Norman castle. For three months the siege con- 
 tinued, till on December 20, when the Thames was frozen 
 Flight of ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ground thickly covered with 
 Matilda from snow, the cmpress was let down from the 
 Ox ord. tower clad all in white, and escaped with four 
 
 knights on foot to Abingdon, whence she sought safety 
 at Wallingford and Gloucester. 
 
 For the next few years there was grievous misery, but 
 little close fighting. Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of 
 Essex, the worst of the barons, who had sold himself 
 alternately to both sides and fought chiefly on his own 
 account, died under the curse of the church while belea- 
 guering a tower belonging to the monastery of Ramsey. 
 The brave Earl Robert died too; and then the empress 
 retired to Normandy. 
 
 For a while, from 1145, Stephen reigned without con- 
 trol. His brother, Henry of Winchester, stood by him, 
 The last and together they drove Theobald, Arch- 
 
 years, bishop of Canterbury, into exile. In 1147 
 
 many turbulent spirits left England to go on crusade. The 
 Earl of Chester was reduced to submission. But Theo- 
 bald returned, and he and the other bishops refused to 
 crown Stephen's son, Eustace, as joint king and heir to 
 
DEATH OF STEPHEN. 1 5 
 
 his father. Then came Henry, the empress's son, whom 
 his uncle, David King of Scots, supported, and the war 
 was renewed in England. At length, when Eustace died, 
 it was agreed between Stephen and the young Henry that 
 the king should hold the crown while he lived, and then 
 Henry should succeed him. Good peace was promised, 
 and the restoration of justice and good laws. The Peace of 
 This was done at Wallingford on November waiiingford. 
 6, 1 153. Henry for a while was Stephen's justiciar in 
 England. But the king died on October 25, 1154, and 
 then Henry of Anjou, the empress's son, came peaceably 
 to the throne. 
 
 So the "nineteen winters" ended. They taught men 
 to seek to be ruled rather than to do what was right in 
 their own eyes, and they made people and barons weary 
 of strife. So Henry II. was the first king since the Con- 
 quest who came to the throne in peace and without a 
 struggle. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE REIGN OF HENRY II. 1154-1189. 
 
 Besides its anarchy and bloodshed, the first feature that 
 strikes us about the reign of King Stephen is the strength 
 of the church. This strength was due to the ^, ^, , 
 
 , _ „ - o . , The Church 
 
 weakness of all other powers m the state, under 
 There was no administration and no justice. ^*^p^^"- 
 The rivals for the throne could not establish their power, 
 and the barons could only fight for their independence. 
 Thus men looked to the church for guidance. It was 
 Henry of Winchester who first held the balance between 
 the parties, and then gave to Stephen's side what strength 
 it acquired. It was Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 who more than any other man mediated peace between 
 Stephen and Henry, and so gave England a time of rest 
 and then a strong ruler. 
 
 While all was confusion elsewhere, the church courts 
 
l6 THE church's strength. 
 
 Still were in working, and there men could get justice, 
 when they could find it nowhere else. Thus gradually 
 many suits which belonged naturally to the state came to 
 be tried in church courts, and when Henry II. came to 
 the throne he found that the lay courts needed to be 
 restored from the foundation. 
 
 Church councils, too, had chosen between the claim- 
 ants to the throne, and each in turn had submitted to 
 legate and bishops and clergy. Nor was the church's 
 power to be seen only in politics and law. The reign of 
 Stephen was a period of revival in the religious life. 
 The growth During those nineteen years of strife, more 
 ofthemon- monasteries were built than in any other 
 astenes. period of the same length. The northern 
 
 shires, which had lain waste since the great harrying by 
 William the Conqueror, were now recolonized by bodies 
 of hardy ascetics, who chose out the desolate parts and 
 made them the homes of agriculture and industry. Twenty 
 houses were built in Yorkshire, nineteen in Lincolnshire, 
 and many more in the eastern and southern shires, while 
 Stephen was king. In them the stern rule which Henry 
 of Winchester favoured, and which the great S. Bernard 
 had done so much to revive, was observed. The chief 
 houses were of the Cistercian order, which had been 
 founded by an Englishman, Stephen Harding. A new 
 order, too, was in this reign founded in England itself by 
 an Englishman, Gilbert of Sempringham, which admitted 
 both sexes to separate houses, and which began the teach- 
 ing and training of women. Thus, while the barons' 
 castles were in building, there arose, too, says the chroni- 
 cler, " God's castles, in which there watch the servants of 
 the true anointed King, and where the young are exercised 
 in war against spiritual wickedness ". 
 
 The church then had spiritual as well as material 
 powers, and the church was the strongest estate with 
 which Henry of Anjou had to deal; but first he must 
 turn to the most pressing needs of his people. 
 
 Henry II. was born at Le Mans on March 5, 1133. 
 He had much of the spirit of his Angevin forefathers. 
 
 (M78) 
 
HENRY OF ANJOU. 1 7 
 
 He was passionate and hasty, cunning and relentless, 
 licentious and faithless. But still he was a wise man, 
 and in many ways a good if stern king. He Henry of 
 loved justice in others, though he did not ^"Jo"- 
 always do it himself. He knew law and statecraft as few 
 of his time knew them. He saw what the land needed, 
 and he knew how to give it. With all his faults he was, 
 for his day, a merciful man. And above all, he was a 
 hard and constant worker. 
 
 Henry was crowned on December 19, 1154, when he 
 was not yet twenty-one. From his earliest years he had 
 learnt how to fight for himself, and to snatch Henry's mar- 
 at every advantage. In 1151 Louis, the King "^s:e, 1151. 
 of the French, had divorced his wife Eleanor, who was 
 the Duchess of Aquitaine, and possessor of nearly all the 
 lands that lay between the Loire and the Pyrenees. 
 Henry at once married her, and thus, when he obtained 
 the English crown, held a far larger part of France than 
 did Louis its king. In the year of his marriage his father 
 died. Thus in 11 54 Henry found himself king of the 
 English, with an overlordship of Wales and Scotland, 
 Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and of Maine and 
 Touraine, and in the south Count of Poitou and Duke of 
 Aquitaine, a title which, under different rights, gave sway 
 over lands extending from the Creuse to the Adour, and 
 from Lyons to the Bay of Biscay. England under his 
 rule was part of a great continental empire. 
 
 Henry's father, Geoffrey, had been called Plantagenet, 
 because he used to wear a sprig of broom {planta genista) 
 in his cap, and the name has been given to his descen- 
 dants, who were so long in direct line to give kings to the 
 English. 
 
 Henry lost no time in setting about the work to which 
 he was called. In the charter he issued at his coronation 
 he made no mention of Stephen. He pro- Early reforms, 
 fessed from the first to be the heir of Henry I., "54-58. 
 and to intend the restoration of the firm government that 
 his grandfather had set up. His accession was welcomed 
 by the people and their chroniclers as the beginning of 
 
 ( M 78 ) B 
 
henry's early reforms. 19 
 
 a new age of peace and justice. First, he gave peace by 
 removing the causes of war. He drove out all the foreign 
 mercenaries who under Stephen had vexed the land with 
 their manifold cruelties. He forced all those who held 
 crown lands, or had seized royal towns, to yield them up 
 to him, and he made no account of the grants which 
 Stephen, in recklessness or in fear, had lavished away. 
 He restored the coinage to its proper weight. He set 
 the law courts to work anew, and himself assisted at their 
 sittings. Again sheriifs were appointed to do justice and 
 collect dues in the counties; again justices were sent 
 round to hear cases in the shire courts. And now at 
 length a harsh law of the Conqueror's was removed, and 
 by his Grand Assize Henry II. ordered that suits concern- 
 ing land should be decided not by wager of battle, but by 
 the inquest of twelve sworn freeholders who could witness 
 to the facts. 
 
 Henry was as fortunate abroad as at home. His brother 
 Geoffrey, who withstood him in Anjou, soon submitted, 
 and the King of Scots did homage and yielded up the earl- 
 doms of Northumberland and Cumberland. He was able 
 to obtain the help of men who had learnt how to govern 
 in the school of Henry I., and of others whom Archbishop 
 Theobald had trained to be learned clerks and men of 
 business. Chief among these was Thomas Becket, Arch- 
 deacon of Canterbury, who was in 11 54 appointed to the 
 office of chancellor, head of the king's clerks or secretaries, 
 a dignity reckoned second after the king in all his realms. 
 Robert, Earl of Leicester, was given the higher office of 
 justiciar, but soon the chancellor was found to be the 
 king's real adviser and chief friend. 
 
 Thomas Becket was the son of a Norman merchant 
 who had settled in London, and been port-reeve of the 
 city. He had himself been trained in a Thomas 
 knightly household, and also in a business Becket the 
 office, and had studied at Paris and Bologna. 
 He was learned in church law, and he had also a good 
 knowledge of practical affairs. Henry soon saw his great 
 ability, he admired his pure, unsullied life, and the two 
 
20 BECKET THE CHANCELLOR. 
 
 became friends and fellow-workers. "When business was 
 over," writes William Fitz-Stephen, Becket's friend who 
 stayed with him to the last hour in the cathedral at Can- 
 terbury, "they would play together like boys of an age; 
 in hall, in church, they sat together, or together they rode 
 out. . . . Sometimes the king rode on horseback into the 
 hall where the chancellor sat at meat; sometimes he came 
 bow in hand returning from hunting, or on his way to the 
 chase. Sometimes he would drink and depart when he had 
 seen the chancellor; sometimes jumping over the table he 
 would sit down and eat with him. Never in Christian 
 times were two men more of a mind or better friends." 
 Thomas was at the king's side when he began his great 
 legal reforms. He was sent, too, on an embassy to Paris 
 to arrange a marriage between King Louis's daughter 
 Margaret and Henry's eldest boy. Through this there 
 was peace for a while between England and France, but 
 in 1 159 Henry claimed Toulouse in right of his wife, and 
 The Toulouse this led to a ncw war. Here Becket served 
 war, 1159. [y^ ^j^g f^gi(j ^j|-j^ jQQ knights, and himself did 
 
 bold deeds. During this war Henry made his barons pay 
 a scufage, or tax on shields, instead of serving themselves 
 with their retainers, thus freeing himself from the untrained 
 feudal soldiery, who were often a danger rather than a 
 help, and using mercenary troops instead. The struggle 
 was not brought to any conclusion, because, when King 
 Louis opposed him, Henry would not fight against the 
 lord of whom he held feudally his lands in France. 
 
 On November 2, 11 60, Henry married his son to the 
 little Margaret and took possession of the Vexin, a district 
 on the Norman border which had been named for her 
 dowry. Louis had never intended that the wedding 
 should take place while his daughter was still a child, 
 and bitterly resented the trick by which he was made to 
 lose the land so early. War broke out, and continued 
 fitfully for many years, though the two kings, in spite 
 of their quarrels and fightings, agreed in recognizing 
 Alexander IH. as pope, when the emperor supported 
 another claimant who called himself Victor IV. Thus 
 
BECKET THE ARCHBISHOP. 21 
 
 Henry was constantly engaged in foreign complications. 
 Before long he was to have troubles in England as 
 well. 
 
 When Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, died, it 
 seemed to the king that he could have no better successor 
 than one who would act harmoniously with gg^ket 
 the crown in the work of church and state. Archbishop, 
 Accordingly, on May 24, 1162, Thomas ^^^^' 
 Becket was elected archbishop. He was then only a 
 deacon, though he held much church preferment. On 
 the Saturday after Whitsunday he was ordained priest, 
 and next day was consecrated archbishop. The festival 
 of Trinity Sunday was instituted by the new archbishop : 
 it has ever since been observed in England on that 
 day, and before long spread to the church abroad. 
 But it was soon seen that Thomas could no longer work 
 with the king as he had done. He resigned the chancel- 
 lorship and devoted himself to the work of his diocese, 
 reclaiming the property of his see, ministering to the poor 
 and sick, and purifying the church wherever he could. 
 He began to work as an ecclesiastical reformer. Un- 
 fortunately the king desired to work on different lines. 
 
 It seemed to Henry that the time had come to reduce 
 the power of the church. He soon found that he must 
 first break the power of the archbishop. 
 
 The two strong men first came into conflict at a 
 council at Woodstock, on July i, 1163. The Danegeld, 
 first levied by Ethelred the Redeless, as a bribe to keep off 
 the Danes, had since the Norman conquest been col- 
 lected by the sheriffs for the defence of the shires. Henry 
 demanded that the whole sum collected should be paid 
 direct into the royal treasury. Becket re- ^j^^ council 
 sisted this as an unjust exaction, and the atwood- 
 king was forced for the time to yield. The ^*°''^' "^^• 
 strife then turned to the main question at issue between 
 church and state, — the extent of the immunities of the 
 clergy. In a council held at Westminster in October 
 1 163 Henry claimed that all clergymen (the title in- 
 cluded those in ^ minor orders', and those who held many 
 
22 CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON. 
 
 offices which were not strictly clerical at all) when accused 
 of crime should first appear in the king's court, then be 
 sent for trial to the church court, and if there convicted 
 and degraded from their orders, should be finally sen- 
 tenced in the lay court. This seemed to the advocates 
 of church privilege to be giving two punishments for a 
 single offence; yet there were not wanting church lawyers 
 and bishops who took the king's side. But the archbishop 
 resisted, and the pope supported him. In January 1164, 
 a great council met at the royal manor of Clarendon, near 
 Salisbury. To this Henry presented what he declared to 
 be the customs of his grandfather Henry I. 
 
 By these it was decreed that all clerks should answer 
 in the king's court for civil offences, and that the church 
 The consti- should uot protcct them after conviction; 
 Clarendon, ^hat trials Concerning the lands and the 
 "64. ' patronage of the church should be heard in the 
 king's court; that no one might carry an appeal out of 
 England {i.e. to Rome) or leave the country without the 
 king's leave; that none of his tenants should be excommuni- 
 cated by the church courts without his permission; that 
 bishops were to be chosen in the king's chapel and by 
 his consent, and were to hold their lands as baronies, and 
 attend the king's courts as the other barons did; and that 
 serfs might not be ordained without their lord's consent. 
 To these famous "Constitutions of Clarendon" Becket 
 refused to consent. Nine months passed without either 
 yielding, and then the king resolved to crush the arch- 
 bishop. In a council at Northampton he caused Becket 
 to be accused concerning many new matters not relating 
 to church privilege. It was said that he had denied 
 justice to John, the marshal of the treasury, and that he 
 Exile 01 owed the king a large sum of money. The 
 Becket. barons gave sentence against him, and, with 
 indignant protests, and appeals to the pope to do him 
 justice, Thomas fled from the kingdom and sought refuge 
 in France. There he stayed for six years, first at Pontigny 
 and then — when the Cistercians were threatened with 
 Henry's wrath if they continued to shelter him — at Sens, 
 
MURDER OF BECKET. 23 
 
 in the territory of King Louis. During these years Henry 
 used every measure to terrify and wound him; the pope, 
 who was in great difficulties between the emperor and the 
 northern sovereigns, alternately supported and abandoned 
 him; and Louis alone stood his firm friend. All attempts 
 at pacification were fruitless, till Henry made a great 
 mistake. Following the example of the kings of the 
 French, who to make their dynasty secure had been 
 wont to cause their heirs to be crowned during their own 
 lifetime, Henry had his eldest son and namesake elected 
 king, and crowned by Roger, Archbishop of York, Becket's 
 lifelong foe. 
 
 Now the archbishops of Canterbury had always held 
 it their right to crown kings, and the pope supported 
 Becket in his vigorous protests and excommunications. 
 It seemed as if Henry II. himself would be laid under 
 curse. And so at last he yielded. At Fr^teval, on 
 July 20, 1 1 70, the old friends met and made peace. 
 Henry agreed to withdraw the Constitutions, and Thomas 
 made haste to return to Canterbury. But there was no 
 full peace yet. For the bishops who had been Becket's foes 
 refused to submit to his rule, or to take the oath to obey 
 the pope's decision, which he required of them before he 
 would absolve them from their excommunica- ^^^ return 
 tion. Those who had seized his property during and murder, 
 his absence still held out against him. The ^^' ^^' "''°' 
 bishops, with Roger of York at their head, crossed the 
 sea to complain to the king, and wrung from him the 
 hasty words, " I have nourished knaves that suffer me to 
 be thus tricked by a low clerk ". There w^ere those who 
 heard and were only too ready to avenge themselves and 
 others on the archbishop. Reginald Fitz-Urse, William 
 of Tracy, Hugh of Morville, and Richard the Breton 
 came at once to England, and on December 29, 1170, 
 murdered Becket in his own cathedral. He died boldly, 
 as he had lived. The knights demanded that he should 
 absolve the bishops and leave the kingdom. The 
 archbishop replied that the first by church law he could 
 not do, and the second he would not. He would die 
 
24 MURDER OF BECKET. 
 
 among his own people. He went to the cathedral for 
 vespers, and would not have the doors closed. The four 
 knights followed, and the monks around him fled, save 
 three only, his nearest friends. Again the knights de- 
 manded that he should do their bidding, and threatened 
 him with death if he refused. *' I am ready to die for 
 my Lord," he answered, "that in my blood the church 
 may obtain peace and freedom. But in God's name I 
 command you not to hurt my people, clerk or lay." A 
 few more sharp words and the knights struck him to the 
 ground. As he lay he commended his soul to God, and 
 a third wound slew him. With his death the cause for 
 which he fought was won. Miracles were believed to be 
 wrought at his tomb. The people reverenced him as a 
 martyr. It was impossible even for the strong king 
 Henry to resist the overwhelming force of the popular 
 horror. He himself, too, felt remorse and pity. For 
 Henry's sub- three days he would not eat or drink, and 
 mission. ke^t himself apart. Then he came forth, 
 
 prepared to undergo any humiliation and to make any 
 concession that might be necessary to re-establish his 
 own position as supreme ruler of his lands. The pope 
 required that he should wholly abandon the Constitutions, 
 and should make restitution to all whom he had wronged. 
 The king complied, and received the papal absolution. 
 Thus in May, 1172, Henry was at length free from the 
 danger and trouble that arose from his strife with the 
 great churchman. 
 
 The year of the quarrel with Becket had seen also 
 many other important events. First Henry had tried to 
 establish his power over Wales. In 1157, in 1162, and 
 again in 1165 he had made expeditions into Wales, each 
 Henry's of them unsucccssful. In the first Henry of 
 
 Welsh wars. Essex threw down the royal standard and 
 fled, and the royal army followed in confusion. Henry's 
 chief opponent was Rhys ap Gruflydd, a prince of South 
 Wales, who was joined at times by Owen Gwynnedd of 
 the North. The Welsh princes took every occasion to 
 harass the English king, and he was utterly unable to 
 
IRELAND AND ITS RULERS. 25 
 
 conquer them. Later in his reign, however, he made an 
 alliance which kept them at peace, and Welsh soldiers 
 served in his armies abroad. 
 
 More important and more successful was the first 
 expedition to Ireland. For long the ' Emerald Isle ' had 
 been isolated from intercourse with England The conquest 
 and with Europe. In early days she had °^ Ireland, 
 stood foremost among Christian nations, and her mission- 
 aries had worked for the conversion of Britain and Cale- 
 donia, Germany and Gaul. But the fierce attacks of the 
 Norsemen had wrought terrible havoc in Ireland. From 
 the ninth century there were settlements of the Ostmen 
 (as they were called) at Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and 
 Dublin, and from these stations aid was given to the 
 Danish invaders of England. But the Northmen never 
 formed one nation with the Irish: they remained entirely 
 shut off from the Celtic kingdoms of Ulster, Connaught, 
 Leinster, and Munster, which still went on in their primitive 
 and patriarchal society under the nominal rule of one 
 Ard-Righ^ or chief monarch, who claimed to be descended 
 from an early hero-king. The northern settlements thus 
 did active harm to Ireland; they destroyed much of the 
 older civilization, and crushed out the hope of a strong 
 national life. With England the Irish Ostmen kept some 
 slight connection, and they even at times made some 
 form of submission. Edgar coined money in Dublin, 
 and the Irish coast towns carried on a brisk trade with the 
 English seaports of the west. From England the Irish 
 chieftains bought slaves, who continued to be kidnapped 
 in Bristol in spite of all that William the Conqueror 
 and Lanfranc, and the good bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, 
 could do to check the practice. 
 
 The time had now come to bring England and Ireland 
 more closely together. William the Conqueror had in- 
 tended an attack upon that country, and in church matters 
 at least some subjection to England had been recognized 
 by the Irish chieftains and by the Irish bishops. William 
 and Lanfranc had been to some extent known and obeyed 
 in Ireland. Henry was determined to make this sub- 
 
26 THE ENGLISH CONQUEST. 
 
 jection real. Soon after his accession he obtained from 
 Pope Adrian IV. (the only Englishman who has ever 
 been Bishop of Rome) a bull granting him, by a power 
 which the popes claimed over all islands, to have Ireland 
 for himself, " in order to subject its people to the rule of 
 law, and to root out therefrom the weeds of vice". It 
 was not till 1170 that Henry took advantage of this 
 grant. In 1166 Dermot, King of Leinster, came to him 
 for aid against other Irish princes, who had expelled him 
 from his realm. Henry allowed Richard of Clare, Earl of 
 Striguil (or Pembroke), to assist him. First there went 
 Maurice Fitz-Gerald and Robert Fitz-Stephen, who estab- 
 lished themselves at Wexford. Then came Earl Richard, 
 who took Waterford. Thence they marched to Dublin 
 and took it. From all these towns they had driven the 
 Norwegian Ostmen who ruled there. The attacks of the 
 Northmen and the Irish failed to dislodge the invaders; 
 and the Anglo-Norman knights soon held sway over Meath 
 and South Munster as well as the seaports. Henry 
 himself crossed to Ireland after the murder of Becket, 
 and kept Christmas 1171 at Dublin, w^hen all the Irish 
 kings save those of Ulster submitted to him. 
 
 The Irish bishops, who had long warned their people 
 against the slave-trade with Bristol, by which many 
 EngHsh folk were brought into captivity in Ireland, and 
 The English who regarded the invasion as a punishment 
 settlement. fQj. ^]-^g people's sins, accepted Henry, and in 
 a Synod at Cashel, at which he was present, agreed to 
 many wise measures of reform, and to bring their church 
 into conformity with the English. Henry returned to 
 England in April, 1172. Earl Richard now ruled in 
 Ireland, and Hugh de Lacy was the king's justiciar. In 
 1 185 the king sent over his youngest son John, whom he 
 wished to make lord of Ireland, but the prince's rash 
 folly prevented the plan from being successful. At the 
 end of Henry's reign Ulster had been conquered, and the 
 English pale (or boundary) included Meath, Leinster, and 
 part of Munster. English nobles settled and English 
 law was established, but the immigrants soon became as 
 
IRELAND UNDER HENRY II. 27 
 
 wild as the natives, and for centuries there was nothing 
 but confusion and continual war. 
 
 The conquest of Ireland is, however, interesting, as 
 showing the energy and daring of Henry and his men, 
 and the width of their schemes. EngUsh and Norman 
 bishops went to Ireland, and many adventurous spirits 
 sought there for excitement and experience in war. The 
 earlier conquerors were mostly men of South Wales, 
 barons who had settled in Pembrokeshire and Glamorgan 
 since the Norman conquest but could not i^eiand in 
 drive the Welsh from their inaccessible moun- the 12th cen- 
 tains. Among them was a famous writer, *"^^* 
 Gerald of Barri, who wrote two books about Ireland. He 
 spent a long life in asserting the independence of the 
 Welsh church from the see of Canterbury, and was three 
 times chosen Bishop of S. David's; but the English kings 
 would not allow him to take a post where he might have 
 been dangerous. In his 'Conquest' and * Topography' of 
 Ireland he draws an extraordinary picture of the savage 
 races who then inhabited the land. They were fierce and 
 utterly uncivilized, "living only on the produce of their 
 beasts, and living like beasts themselves ". They had no 
 agriculture and no manufactures, but excelled in poetry 
 and music; they were brave soldiers, but untrained, and 
 utterly merciless. It seemed to him that the North Irish 
 greatly differed from the men of the South. The former 
 were warlike and proud, the latter subtle and treacherous. 
 But never, he thought, would either be conquered till all 
 on this side Shannon was strongly fortified with castles, 
 and the English army was light armed like the Irish pre- 
 datory bands. 
 
 So Henry dealt with Ireland and Wales. He had also 
 to fight with the Scots. In 1173 William the Lion, King 
 of Scotland, agreed with the English king's enemies, and 
 in the spring of 1 1 74 he invaded England with ^he capture 
 a savage army, which committed barbarous of vvniiam 
 outrages in the northern shires. Henry was King of Scots, 
 himself hardset in France and could scarce "74- 
 hold his own. Again the officials and the folk of the north 
 
25 LEGAL REFORMS. 
 
 stood firm against attack. The king's justiciar, Ranulf of 
 Glanville, and the sheriffs and bailiffs of the north, called 
 together the fyrd a.nd met the Scots at Alnwick. There by 
 a happy stratagem they took William prisoner. Henry did 
 not lose the opportunity of bringing Scotland under his 
 overlordship. Already, early in his reign, he had taken 
 back Northumberland and Cumberland, which the Scots 
 kings had held as fiefs from the English crown. Now he 
 made Scotland itself a fief. On August lo, 1 1 75, at York, 
 William the Lion, his brother Earl David, and all his 
 barons and free tenants did homage to Henry H., and the 
 bishops swore obedience to the English church. Attempts 
 were made, by the pope's aid, to shake off this last subjec- 
 tion, but otherwise Henry kept a firm hold over Scotland 
 till his own death. 
 
 Meanwhile the great work of Henry's reign had been 
 going steadily on. He had begun his reforms in the law 
 while Becket was still his chancellor. He did not in- 
 terrupt them even amid the danger and stress of his long 
 quarrel with the church. 
 
 In 1 166 he issued the great act by which he set the law 
 again in thorough working order, and provided for its just 
 'ru A • f execution with many excellent reforms. By 
 
 The Assize of . r ^^ ^ 11 
 
 Clarendon, this " Assizc of Clarendon he restored the 
 ^^^' old jury of presentment (much the same as 
 
 our modern grand jury), by which criminals were to be 
 accused to the king's justices, who were ordered to go from 
 shire to shire at stated times to hear all important cases 
 in the county courts. Circuits were now settled, accord- 
 ing to which the judges moved, so that all parts, except 
 the great palatine earldoms of Durham and Chester, 
 which had their own judges, should be visited. The 
 barons who had courts of their own were not allowed to 
 judge uncontrolled by the king's justices, and the sheriffs 
 were ordered to see that everywhere the " frank-pledge " 
 (the institution of mutual responsibility for keeping the 
 peace) was maintained. The jury too, as in the Grand 
 Assize, was ordered to be used for the trial of many 
 matters which before had been settled by ordeal or wager 
 
REBELLION OF 1 1 73-74. 29 
 
 of battle. This Assize was the most important law of the 
 reign, for it organized a system of jurisdiction for the 
 whole land such as had never been known before, and 
 at the same time provided for its enforcement through 
 officials who were all immediately answerable to the king. 
 The effect of the new rule was certainly to make justice 
 more even and more strict, but at the same time it con- 
 siderably increased the power of the sheriffs and their 
 opportunities for raising large sums from the people. 
 Complaints rose on every side of the severity. The inquest 
 and of the peculation, of the king's officers, of sheriffs, 
 and in 11 70 he held an Inquest of Sheriffs^ by which, after 
 removing all the sheriffs from office, he directed that 
 special judges should inquire into all charges, by the oath 
 of those who knew the facts. The sheriffs appear to have 
 been acquitted, but they were not restored to their posts. 
 Instead of employing barons, who had great power in the 
 districts where they lived, Henry now appointed officers 
 of his own, who both as itinerant justices and as financial 
 officers had the fullest opportunities of knowing the law 
 and of understanding the king's will. By such measures 
 as these the king was prepared to resist the great storm 
 which fell upon him not long after Becket's murder. 
 
 As soon as the barons had come to see that these new 
 laws and this firm system of government, responsible 
 everywhere to the crown, meant that their power and the 
 independence they so cherished were being rapidly taken 
 from them, they concerted measures for a bold stand 
 against the growing supremacy of the king. Henry was 
 far from popular at the moment. Men never The rebellion 
 forgot the murder of S. Thomas, whom the °*" "73-1174. 
 Londoners especially reverenced as a townsman of their 
 own, whom the pope had canonized, and whom the people 
 everywhere regarded as a champion of liberty and religion. 
 They felt, too, the iron grip of the king everywhere. He 
 was constantly travelling among them, exacting his dues 
 and enduring no opposition or trickery, stern in his en- 
 forcement of the harsh forest laws, bitter and passionate 
 in his anger. The church thought him a grasping tyrant, 
 
30 REBELLION OF 1 1 73-74. 
 
 the people felt as yet rather the harshness than the justice 
 of his measures, and the barons were determined to shake 
 off the yoke that he had laid upon their necks. And in 
 all this his worst foes were those of his own household. 
 His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the great princess whom 
 he had married but ill-treated, urged her sons to rebel. 
 Henry, the eldest, whose coronation had cost his father 
 so much, found himself a king only in name. Richard, 
 the second, chafed under his father's rule, and found no 
 work to satisfy his ambition. Geoffrey, the third, had been 
 married to the heiress of Brittany, but only to find that 
 the king used the marriage merely to bring his wife's land 
 under his own sway. And all three resented the provision 
 which Henry would make for his youngest and best 
 beloved, John. 
 
 Early in 1173 the plot was ripe. The three sons fled 
 to the French king. Their mother, who sought to follow 
 them in man's dress, was stopped and cast into prison. 
 Louis Vn. gladly assisted the rebels. With them joined 
 the King of Scots, the Counts of Flanders, Boulogne, and 
 Blois, and many other great lords who owed a grudge to 
 the English king or the Angevin house. Revolt broke out 
 in April in Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, and Brittany — 
 and before long in England also. Henry showed all the 
 energy and courage of his masterful nature. He fought 
 in turn the French king and the foreign rebels, and con- 
 quered everywhere. Still the invaders pressed on to 
 Rouen, when Henry was called to England by the in- 
 vasion of the Scots. The English barons meanwhile had 
 broken out in insurrection. The Earl of Leicester and 
 his bold wife were ravaging East Anglia till the justiciar 
 Richard de Lucy and the constable Humfrey de Bohun 
 met them, and a sharp fight took place on October 16, 
 1 1 73, at Fornham, near Bury S. Edmunds, in which the 
 rebels were routed. But the revolt was not crushed. 
 Hugh Bigot, Earl of Norfolk, the Earl Ferrers, and Roger 
 of Mowbray still fought, and the Earl of Leicester's fol- 
 lowers held out. Gradually the king's men conquered. 
 Henry crossed to England and did penance, July 12, 
 
LAST FIGHT OF FEUDALISM. 3 1 
 
 1 1 74, at the shrine of S. Thomas the martyr; and at that 
 very hour, men said, the King of Scots was captured at 
 Alnwick. From that day all went well. Geoffrey, the 
 king's natural son, had reconquered Lincolnshire, and 
 the sheriffs and justices were boldly fighting in the mid- 
 lands. By August the king was able to return to Nor- 
 mandy and drive the French forces from the siege of 
 Rouen. Louis was ready to make peace, and Henry 
 agreed to make some provision for his elder sons. He 
 showed no personal bitterness. He spared his rebellious 
 vassals, but took possession of their castles. He did not 
 want their estates, he wanted only to deprive them of the 
 power to defy the royal authority. In this he succeeded, 
 for the people learned to look for safety to a strong king 
 who could hold the barons in awe. The war of 1173- 
 II 74 was really the last fight that the barons The last fight 
 made clearly and definitely for their feudal of feudalism, 
 independence. It was a war of principle and of poli- 
 tics rather than a personal strife. The people on the 
 whole, in spite of the discontent by which the barons had 
 looked to profit, stood by the crown. All the English 
 and Norman bishops (except the great Hugh de Puiset, 
 Bishop of Durham, and the treacherous Arnulf of Lisieux, 
 who hoped to profit by the success of the rebellion but 
 did not declare themselves in its favour) adhered to the 
 king. And Henry with his indomitable will and extra- 
 ordinary energy, surrounded by a ring of able ministers 
 and barons who had risen to power as officers of Henry 
 I., was more than a match for his ill-assorted opponents. 
 The danger was great for a time, but the coalition had 
 no real leader. The attack was directed against the strong 
 and systematized administration, and the government 
 conquered. 
 
 The result of this war enabled the king to press his 
 reforms still more closely upon the nation. In 11 76 he 
 issued the Assize of Northampton, a more ^^^ Assizes 
 stringent re-enactment of the Assize of Claren- 
 don, by which the punishments for criminals, and accused 
 persons for whose character no surety could be found, 
 
32 REBELLION OF 1 1 83. 
 
 were rendered more severe. He also instituted Assizes, 
 at which questions of ecclesiastical patronage, disposses- 
 sion, and disputed succession were to be decided by a 
 jury of neighbours (Assizes of Darrein Presentmetit^ Novel 
 Disseisin^ Mort d Ancester), In the same year he took 
 into his own hands all the castles in England and Nor- 
 mandy, and endeavoured to extend the policy to his other 
 possessions. The strongholds of the chief rebels were 
 dismantled, but the estates were restored to their owners 
 in spite of their treason. Henry placed his own castellans 
 in the castles, and gave charge to the itinerant justices to 
 inspect them in their circuits. In 1178 he appointed a 
 bench of five judges to hear appeals, with resort in the 
 last case to himself in full council. In 11 79 his faithful 
 justiciar, Richard de Lucy, who had served him for twenty- 
 five years, retired to a monastery, and the king altered the 
 circuits, and appointed Ranulf of Glanville to the vacant 
 post. In 1 181 he gave the chancellorship to his natural 
 son Geoffrey, who had so faithfully served him in the 
 war, and also caused him to be chosen Bishop of Lincoln. 
 In the same year the king issued the Assize of Arms, by 
 which he gave explicit directions for the arming of all the 
 freeholders, thus reviving and strengthening the national 
 militia which had done such good service in his reign. 
 Townfolk as well as yeomen he compelled to provide 
 themselves with arms, and the liability of each man was to 
 be estimated by juries. 
 
 In 1 183 he crushed another rebellion of his faithless 
 sons. The younger Llenry, again jealous of his brothers, 
 The rebellion made Open war upon Richard and Geoffrey, 
 of 1183. ^j^g qJ^ l^ii^g feared that the revolt would 
 
 spread, and imprisoned the chief barons who had pre- 
 viously revolted. Then he endeavoured to mediate be- 
 tween his sons, who were constantly taking new positions 
 of hostility to each other and to him. The trouble ended 
 for the time with the death of the young Henry in June. 
 After this the king gave no such great power to his sons. 
 He was able again to turn to England, and in 1 1 84 he 
 issued a new forest law, the Assize of Woodstock^ which 
 
HENRY AND PHILIP. 33 
 
 greatly increased the burden he had already laid upon 
 the freeholders. By this act every free tenant who lived 
 in a forest shire was compelled to attend the forest courts 
 as well as those of the county. The forest jurisdiction 
 was organized on a system parallel to that of the ordinary 
 local courts, and the forest law was constantly made more 
 severe, as the forest area was continually encroaching upon 
 the barons' lands. The king was determined that there 
 at least he would act entirely without control, and it is in 
 his forest customs alone that Henry appears in the light of 
 an arbitrary despot. 
 
 He was soon recalled to his foreign dominions. A 
 new danger was arising. His sons still continued to 
 quarrel — John now entering into the struggles. But 
 behind them was a more formidable opponent, Philip 
 Augustus, the astute and warlike King of the phiiip 
 French, who had succeeded his feeble father, Augustus. 
 Louis VII., in 1180. In his youth Henry had wisely 
 advised him and aided him when he seemed near to 
 destruction from his mighty vassals, but Philip had one 
 fixed aim, — to make his kingly po'wer supreme over all 
 the lands between the Channel and the Pyrenees, and 
 no scruples stood in his way. He aided, in open or in 
 secret, every insurrection; against Henry, and himself con- 
 stantly levied avowed or underhand war on him. In 1 186, 
 Geoffrey of Brittany rebelled, but soon after he died; and 
 peace was for a time patched up by the news of the cap- 
 ture of Jerusalem by the infidels, October 3, 1 188. Letters 
 imploring aid were sent by the popes and by the Mili- 
 tary Orders of the Temple and Hospital ; and the kings 
 were shamed into a peace by the appeal of their fellow- 
 Christians in the East. Both Henry and Philip took the 
 Cross, and Richard with more genuine intention vowed 
 to rescue the Holy City from Saladin. A great council 
 held at Geddington decreed that all men The caii to a 
 should give a tenth of their goods for the crusade. 
 Crusade. This was the first time that personal property 
 (movables) was taxed. 
 
 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, made a special 
 ( M 78 ) c 
 
34 THE LAST DAYS. 
 
 visit to Wales, preaching in the most remote valleys the 
 obligation of the Holy War, and at the same time exer- 
 cising his authority as metropolitan over the Welsh 
 church. 
 
 Before the expedition could start, war broke out again. 
 Richard quarrelled with the Count of Toulouse, and 
 Philip invaded the territory of Henry's vassals. Henry 
 in vain tried to make peace. Before long both comba- 
 tants turned on him. He had long kept Philip's sister 
 Alice, who had been pledged in marriage to Richard, and 
 he would not allow the marriage to be performed. Philip 
 saw that his enemy was growing weaker. The barons on 
 his foreign lands were gradually deserting him, and his 
 own health was breaking down. In January, 1189, Philip 
 and Richard invaded his territory and carried all before 
 them. Henry still held out, and obstinately refused the 
 The last tcrms they offered. Gradually the foes closed 
 
 rebellion. round him. Revolts broke out on every side. 
 The king was surprised in Le Mans, the city of his birth, 
 where he had often dwelt, and with great difficulty escaped 
 from the burning town. He fled towards Normandy, but 
 turned back again to Angers and then to Chinon. At 
 last he agreed to treat. He was deserted by all his 
 barons — even John, the youngest and best loved of his 
 children, went over to his foes — only his natural son, Geof- 
 frey the chancellor, stood by him. On July 4, 1189, he 
 met Philip and Richard on the plain of Colombieres, 
 near Tours. He was utterly broken down. He agreed to 
 recognize Richard as his heir and to give him his pro- 
 mised bride, to pay a large sum to Philip, and to leave 
 Le Mans and Tours as pledges in their hands. He could 
 scarce sit upon his horse, yet his fierce spirit refused to 
 show any sign of weakness before those who had wronged 
 and vanquished him. He was carried back to Chinon 
 when he had seen the list of rebels whom he had pro- 
 mised to forgive, and broken-hearted at his favourite son's 
 The death of dcscrtion he gave up all struggle for life. 
 Henry II. Only Geoffrey the chancellor stood by him 
 and heard his bitter moan, "Shame, shame on a conquered 
 
CHARACTER OF HENRY II. 35 
 
 king". On July 6, 1189, he died. He was buried at 
 Fontevrault, where his tomb still stands in the cloister of 
 the nunnery that he founded. 
 
 It was a pitiful end to the life of a great king. Even 
 his wise acts had raised up bitter enemies, who fell on 
 him in his weakness; and his own bad life had robbed 
 him of many who might have been his friends. He 
 depended always on his own unaided powers, and when 
 those failed he could but fall and die. Yet 
 men knew even then that they had lost the 
 greatest of European monarchs. Foreigner though he 
 was, and short the time he had spent on English soil, he 
 had done more for England than any of her kings iiad 
 ever done before. He had built up a firm central ad- 
 ministration, through which order and justice — tardy it 
 might be and rough, but still far beyond what the land 
 had previously enjoyed — were spread over the most distant 
 shires. He had built up a Curia (king's court), in which 
 the great officers of state and the barons whom he trusted 
 advised him. He had made firm and definite the system 
 of the exchequer, the great financial centre where his 
 clerks received the dues from the sheriffs, and managed 
 all the business which sprang from the measures which 
 so greatly increased the king's revenue and the work of 
 his financial agents. In all this, as a lawgiver, a financier, 
 a diplomatist, a statesman, he was assisted by trained men, 
 some lay, but mostly clerics, whom he had chosen and 
 tested, and through whom the administration he had so 
 skilfully designed worked smoothly and sharply as he 
 willed. In spite of his vast possessions, and the constant 
 call of foreign war and rebellion, he was 
 known in England as few kings had been 
 before his day. He travelled everywhere. He was at 
 S. David's, at Canterbur)\ at Wirxhester, in the North, 
 and on the Southern coast, and those who had to seek 
 him for business toiled after him painfully, and often in 
 vain. Feared though he was, yet men bold like himself, 
 whatever their rank, came to trust him and know that 
 they could find justice at his hands. Round him he 
 
36 henry's great ministers. 
 
 gathered able men, wise clerks, lawyers, scholars, states- 
 men, whose fame spread over Europe. 
 
 The influence of such a king was felt far beyond his 
 own court. The monasteries again began to take up the 
 work of scholars, and to revive the art of historical writing 
 which had suffered under the anarchy of Stephen. There 
 grew up, too, in some of the towns, great schools like those 
 abroad, and Oxford began to rival Paris and Bologna. 
 Thither even under Stephen came great teachers like 
 Robert Pullan and Vacarius, and Gerald of Barri found 
 there "the most famous and learned of English clerks". 
 He took thither his book on the topography of Ireland, 
 and read it for three days before different audiences. 
 " On the first day he received and entertained at his 
 lodgings all the poor of the town; on the next day all the 
 doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils 
 as were of fame and note; on the third day the rest of 
 the scholars, all the knights, townsmen, and many bur- 
 gesses." Thus through the patronage of the king, and 
 the influence of his international relations on the church 
 and the scholars of his day, there was growing up in Eng- 
 land a real interest in literature. 
 
 But Henry's courtiers, scholars though many of them 
 were, were first of all men of practical ability, and men 
 who would work hard in the task of ruling a great empire. 
 
 His justices were men who could shine in many fields. 
 They were historians, such as Roger of Hoveden and 
 . . Richard Fitz-Neal, diplomatists, such as John 
 * of Oxford, as well as great legists, like Ranulf 
 of Glanville; while Gerald of Barri, of whom we have spoken 
 above, and Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, were men 
 who could have made their mark in literature in any age. 
 Besides these there were many great scholars, such as John 
 of Salisbury, separated for a time from the king by the 
 Becket quarrel, but afterwards entering again into his 
 friendship. John of Salisbury, who became Bishop of 
 Chartres, was the most learned and able writer of the 
 time; but the great English chroniclers, Ralph of Dissay, 
 Gervase of Canterbury, William of Newburgh, and others, 
 
henry's great fame. 37 
 
 were also men who had wide knowledge and real literary 
 power. The court of Henry II. was in fact a learned 
 court, and the king was always surrounded by men of 
 power and reputation. 
 
 It is no wonder, then, that the great king was renowned 
 throughout Europe. His continental position brought 
 him into relation with the great powers, and j^j^ ^^^^ 
 he was soon recognized as " the flower of the throughout 
 princes of the world". With the great ^"'°p^- 
 Emperor Frederick I. he was constantly negotiating, and 
 a marriage was planned for Richard with one of his 
 daughters. He was also brought into close connection 
 with German affairs by the marriage of his daughter 
 Matilda with Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, and heir 
 of the enormous possessions of the Welfs. When his 
 son-in-law was driven from Germany he took refuge in 
 England, and at last, by Henry's mediation, was restored 
 to some of his lands. With all the Spanish kingdoms 
 Henry was at one time or other connected. Aragon 
 aided him in his Toulouse war, his daughter Eleanor 
 married a Castilian king, and the Kings of Navarre and 
 Castile submitted their disputes to his arbitration. The 
 pope listened to his words with respect, and did his 
 utmost to keep in his good graces. The Italian cities 
 and the princes who held the passes of the Alps were in 
 league with him. The Norman kingdom of Sicily was 
 his ally. From its court he took his clever financier 
 Thomas Brown, to whom he gave a special seat in his 
 Exchequer, and Englishmen also held office in Sicily. 
 William the Good, the Sicilian king, married Henry's 
 daughter Johanna, and when he died left him the Sicilian 
 crown. The Scandinavian monarchs sought his alliance, 
 and the little counts of the French borders gladly owned 
 his sway. Last and greatest honour of all, in 1185, 
 Heraclios, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, with the Master 
 of the Hospital, brought him the keys of the Holy City, of 
 the Tower of David, and of the Holy Sepulchre. He alone 
 of European monarchs seemed great enough to revive the 
 Crusading kingdom and stem the torrent of Barbarian 
 
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RICHARD CCEUR-DE-LION. 39 
 
 attack. It was a great moment, for the crown of Jerusalem 
 seemed to the men of those days almost an unearthly 
 gift. Henry refused it. He thought, it may be, quite as 
 much of his people as himself. But to the chroniclers of 
 the time it seemed as if he had ^made the great refusal', 
 and his misfortunes closed around him from that hour. 
 After four years of strife and disaster he passed away, 
 leaving behind him a name which will ever stand high 
 among the makers of English greatness. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE REIGN OF RICHARD I., 1189-1199. 
 
 Richard I. was in many ways unlike his father. He 
 was more fickle, more chivalrous, impetuous, warm- 
 hearted. He was a man of Poitou rather Richard i.»s 
 than an Angevin. He had the hot, hasty character, 
 passions of his fathers, but he had also the poetic senti- 
 mental tastes of the southern lands. He would sin in 
 hot blood and repent with tears; he was fickle and 
 impulsive rather than treacherous, and never would he 
 harden his heart and turn his face to the wall like the 
 stern old king whom he had hurried to his grave. It 
 was with a burst of sorrow that he met his father's body; 
 it was with bitter tears that again and again he confessed 
 his sins, and vowed to give up his old bad life. He was 
 generous and forgiving, and he was strong and bold 
 beyond the strongest of his time. Besides this he was 
 not deficient in statesmanship. If he did not plan like 
 his father, he knew at least how to let his father's system 
 work. But his most conspicuous quality was his military 
 genius. He was, for the times, a great general and a great 
 engineer. And he could plan too as well as fight. 
 
 Richard I. was born at Oxford in 1157. Thus he was 
 a man of thirty-two when he succeeded to the vast terri- 
 tories of his father and his mother. He had had some 
 
.|.0 PREPARATIONS FOR THE CRUSADE. 
 
 training in government. Since 1 1 7 1 he had been nomi- 
 nally Duke of Aquitaine, and his father had in later years 
 allowed him more independence than he had given to 
 his other sons. He came to the throne with his mind 
 His peaceful full of the Crusadc. It appealed to him in 
 accession. j|.g romantic, generous aspect, and seemed to 
 offer also a cure for the remorse which overwhelmed him 
 for his cruel treatment of his father. He gave himself up 
 at once to planning the expedition, and to providing for 
 the safety of England during his absence. All his lands at 
 once owned him as lord; there was no rebellion, for all 
 men seemed to think only of the danger of the Holy Land. 
 He could make what terms he pleased with his vassals. 
 Not want of power, but want of money was the difficulty 
 he had to face. At his first council he therefore sold all 
 The settle- ^^^^ ^^ could. To the Scottish king he gave 
 ment before back for moncy the rights of homage that 
 Henry H. had exacted in 11 74. To three of 
 the bishops he sold sheriffdoms : chief among them was 
 the old Hugh de Puiset, the great Bishop of Durham, who 
 by buying both the earldom and the sheriffdom of North- 
 umberland became all-powerful in the northern shires. 
 He was thus supreme, under the king, in all civil affairs 
 over the district from the Tees to the Tweed. The strength 
 of such a man as Hugh de Puiset might easily be a danger 
 to the crown itself. He was himself descended from 
 William the Conqueror. He had now for thirty-six years 
 held the great bishopric and palatine earldom of Durham, 
 which stood as a broad borderland between the English 
 and Scots. He had steered carefully between the rival 
 kings. In 11 74 he had seemed to be leaning towards 
 William the Lion, but Henry 11. had not found it neces- 
 sary to punish him. He had retained his practical 
 independence throughout the rest of the reign, and the 
 discretion which had kept him clear of all share in the 
 Becket quarrel was not likely to desert him now. But he 
 was a formidable rival to the new justiciar. 
 
 Richard was not content with recognizing the power 
 of the Bishop of Durham. Remorseful perhaps for his 
 
WILLIAM LONGCHAMP. 4I 
 
 refusal, while his father still lived, to allow any provision 
 to be made for his brother John, or hoping to buy his 
 gratitude by the greatness of his generosity, he gave him 
 vast possessions in England and abroad, and placed 
 them outside the control of the ordinary law. He filled 
 up the vacant bishoprics, and promised York to his half- 
 brother Geoffrey, but forbade him to land in England for 
 three years. He changed all the sheriffs, and at the head 
 of the government he placed a man of his own, William 
 Longchamp, whom he had made Bishop of Ely. 
 
 Then he prepared to depart. He thought he had taken 
 with him the most dangerous spirits, and had bribed to 
 quietness those whom he left behind. He t^. ^ „„„«.„ 
 
 1 1 1 r 1 1 • • • 1 ^"^ govern- 
 
 had left the admmistration to new men, but ment of 
 they at least understood its working, and ^°"schamp. 
 had paid too highly for their posts to be willing to risk 
 their loss. Yet he had really left behind sufficient causes 
 of danger to upset a government more strongly based. 
 His brothers had each a grievance : John, that he was not 
 named his heir; Geoffrey, that he was not trusted to return 
 to England. And Longchamp, though an honest, loyal 
 servant, was an upstart whom the barons despised, and 
 who had all the arrogance and rashness of one who has 
 rapidly made his own fortune. Richard did not leave 
 England entirely at peace. The first months of his reign 
 were marked by a fierce attack on the Jews, who were 
 the great usurers of the time, and whom the kings pro- 
 tected because they used them as bankers, coiners, tax- 
 collectors, and money-lenders. Henry 11. had granted 
 special privileges to the Jews; they dwelt apart in quar- 
 ters of their own ; but the popular hatred was in no way 
 quenched by their isolation, and barons and people took 
 every opportunity of washing out their debts ^ 
 in the blood of their creditors. The occasion 
 of a Crusade naturally aroused fanaticism ; and the Jews 
 were never remarkable for meekness. Massacres at 
 several of the towns marked the beginning of 1190, and 
 at York the Jews in despair leapt with their wives and 
 children into the flames of the burning castle, rather than 
 
42 THE DIFFICULTIES OF LONGCHAMP. 
 
 fall alive into the hands of their persecutors. The crimi- 
 nals were severely punished, but the lot of the Jews became 
 worse from that day till their expulsion by Edward I. 
 
 Richard sailed in April, 1190, from Dartmouth. He 
 did not return till 11 94. Longchamp had a difficult part 
 to play. He saw at once the danger of the great power 
 that had been placed in the hands of men who bore no 
 great love to the absent king. He did what he could to 
 confine the bishops to their ecclesiastical functions, but 
 Hugh of Durham, though he submitted for a while, was 
 in the end too strong for him; and John never ceased to 
 plot against the throne. The privileges granted to both, 
 and to their friends, rendered them practically indepen- 
 dent of the royal power; and only in the east and south- 
 east could Longchamp rule unchecked. 
 
 His first act was to punish the rioters at York, and his 
 next to overawe the Bishop of Durham. He was now 
 papal legate, and so claimed to rule in church as well as 
 state. But his arrogance, his train of a thousand horse- 
 Troubies in men, his rash treatment of the barons, soon 
 England. raised a storm against him. In February, 
 1 191, Queen Eleanor, who might have preserved peace, 
 left England to join the king in Sicily. In the same 
 month John returned. A few months afterwards Geoffrey, 
 now consecrated to York, landed at Dover. Longchamp 
 rashly had him arrested. Church and barons alike resented 
 the act. Then Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, 
 produced a commission from the king giving him autho- 
 rity as justiciar. John won over the Londoners by recog- 
 nizing their liberties, and Longchamp fell almost without 
 a struggle. John was recognized as regent, and London 
 now obtained recognition as a communa^ the summit of 
 municipal liberties, such as some French cities already 
 enjoyed. By the formal act of the regent and barons, privi- 
 leges which, it maybe, had already been practically enjoyed, 
 were now fully secured. The chroniclers regarded the 
 growth of the great city with alarm. It is " a swelling of 
 the people, the king's fear, the priesthood's terror", said one. 
 
 The dismissal of Longchamp was really a constitutional 
 
RICHARD'S VOYAGE. 43 
 
 revolution. While it showed the claim of the barons to 
 control the king's ministers, it proved also Fail of 
 that they had now learnt that the central Longchamp. 
 authority might be used for their own ends to better 
 effect than if it were simply overthrown, as was designed 
 in 1 173. It was a precedent which was to be followed 
 later by the barons who compelled John to sign the Great 
 Charter, by those who set up the oligarchy of 1258, and 
 those who slew Piers Gaveston and WilUam de la Pole. 
 
 For the next two years the well-meaning archbishop, 
 Walter of Coutances, tried to keep down the intriguing 
 barons and the treacherous John. But at length it ap- 
 peared as if all was in vain. Richard it was known had 
 left Palestine, but had been lost to view on the way home; 
 it was now reported that he was in prison in Austria. John 
 at once claimed the crown, saying that his brother was 
 dead. Only Queen Eleanor and Walter of Coutances 
 kept him at bay. 
 
 We may now turn back to follow the fortunes of the 
 king. Richard embarked at Marseilles on August 7, 1 190, 
 and reached Messina on September 23. The winter was 
 spent in quarrels with his partner in the Crusade, the 
 French king, Philip, and in attempts to secure the dowry 
 of his sister, the w^idowed Queen Johanna of Sicily. 
 Finally Philip agreed to release Richard from marrying 
 his sister, Alice, to whom he had been so long pledged, 
 and Queen Eleanor arrived bringing with her Richard in 
 Berengaria, daughter of Sancho VI., King of Siciiy. 
 Navarre, whom Richard desired to espouse. The Eng- 
 lish then sailed for Cyprus, and on April 10 Richard mar- 
 ried Berengaria at Limasol. He deposed the tyrant Isaac 
 Komnenos of Cyprus for ill-treating shipwrecked English 
 sailors, and established a government of his own. Then 
 he sailed for Palestine, and landed at Acre on June 8. 
 Philip of France was there before him. Both kings fell 
 ill, but at length were able to capture the town. Philip 
 at once returned to France, but Richard pressed on to 
 deliver the Holy Eand from the infidels. He began 
 negotiations with the great Sultan Saladin for the cession 
 
44 THE CRUSADE. 
 
 of Jerusalem, but the Saracens were not yet cowed and 
 the conferences were of no avail. Then he turned to 
 barbarities which disgraced his cause, slaying hostages as 
 Richard in Saladin slew his. On August 20 he began 
 Palestine. j^jg march southward along the coast, scatter- 
 ing the enemy as he went, but opposed and harassed at 
 every step. On August 30 he arrived at Caesarea. Thence 
 he went to Joppa, fighting and winning a great battle at 
 Arsouf on the way, and after long delay finally reached 
 Ramleh. At the end of the year he arrived within thirteen 
 miles of Jerusalem. There the army stayed, beset on all 
 sides by Saladin, and suffering terribly from lack of sup- 
 plies and from the intense cold. In the middle of January 
 they began a retreat; they little knew that Jerusalem 
 could then easily have been stormed. Richard next 
 turned to rebuild the great Crusading fortress of Ascalon, 
 working with his own hand, giving lavishly of his own 
 money, and encouraging all by his words and his ex- 
 ample. But he could give no unity to the distracted 
 counsels of the Crusaders. Guy of Lusignan, and Con- 
 rad of Montferrat, who both claimed the crown of Jeru- 
 salem, fought against each other till the latter was assas- 
 sinated, April 27, 1 192. Saladin again dared the invaders 
 to battle. Richard went about capturing fortresses and 
 doing deeds of extraordinary prowess, but got no nearer 
 to his goal. In the summer the army again advanced on 
 Jerusalem, but went no farther than before. It is said 
 that in the pursuit after a chance fray, Richard saw the 
 Holy City from far off. But deserted by his allies, he 
 was compelled to return, and sick at heart he at last made 
 His reputa- a trucc with Saladin, and prepared to return 
 tion. home. Richard's exploits in Syria were not 
 
 forgotten. His heroism at the relief of Joppa, where he 
 drove his ship on shore and led the attack upon the 
 masses of the enemy, his personal combats, his utter fear- 
 lessness, his strength, and the chivalrous deeds that won 
 the affection even of the Muslim foe, made the name of 
 the Lion-Heart long remembered in the land he had tried 
 to rescue from the infidel. 
 
CAPTURE OF RICHARD. 45 
 
 His return was a series of romantic adventures and 
 misfortunes. He was shipwrecked, separated from his 
 companions, and compelled to make his way „. 
 
 ^ r^ • J- • r|M 1 -^ His capture. 
 
 across Germany m disguise. Ihen he was 
 seized by Leopold, Duke of Austria, whose enmity he 
 had incurred during the Crusade, as he passed through 
 Vienna in December, 1192. In the following March he 
 was given up to the Emperor Henry VI., and for more 
 than a year he lay in prison. 
 
 When Walter of Coutances heard of the king's capture 
 he sent two envoys to negotiate for his release. An im- 
 mense ransom was demanded, 150,000 marks (;^i 00,000), 
 more than twice as large a sum as the revenue in the last 
 year of Henry II. But the justiciar made clever dis- 
 tribution of the demand, and the people nobly „. 
 
 xlis ransom. 
 
 answered to the call. Every man, clerk or 
 lay, gave a fourth of his income and a fourth of the value 
 of his movables. A heavy scutage was exacted from the 
 knights, and the wool of the Cistercians and the Gilbertines 
 and many of the precious vessels of the churches were 
 seized. Richard was now allowed considerable freedom. 
 He called his mother and the justiciar to him, and so 
 Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, took the rule of the 
 land. He had been trained under Henry II., and was a 
 loyal man and a great administrator. 
 
 Richard, with his wise mother beside him, soon made 
 terms with the emperor. He received from him the 
 kingdom of Aries, a possession which the emperors had 
 always great difficulty in obtaining, and which was but a 
 barren honour to the English king. But before he re- 
 . leased him the emperor made him own himself his 'man ', 
 and thus bring England, so long counted as outside the 
 empire, under the overlordship of the German Caesar. 
 He was set free on February 4, 1194. The news that he 
 was at liberty made John and Philip tremble. They had 
 tried by every means in their power to induce the emperor 
 to keep him in prison, and now they feared the vengeance 
 that their baseness deserved. 
 
 The English people had bravely made up the ransom, 
 
46 GOVERNMENT OF HUBERT WALTER. 
 
 and they welcomed Richard as a national hero. He 
 landed on the 13th of March, and at once in a great 
 His last visit council of barons declared the lands of John 
 to England. ^^^ j^jg ^^^ forfeit for his treason — and then 
 levied a new tax on all plough land (carucage), sold offices, 
 and fined those who had withstood him, so as to gather an 
 army to meet Philip in the field. He stayed only two 
 months in England, but left the land at peace. He was 
 generous and forgiving, and took again into favour those 
 who, like his brother Geoffrey, had broken their oaths to 
 maintain the peace by absence or by submission to the 
 royal officers. He left England on May 12, and never 
 returned. 
 
 Hubert Walter, now Archbishop of Canterbury as well 
 as justiciar and the pope's legate, ruled well if sternly till 
 the king's death. The justices in 11 94 received special 
 instruction to make exact inquiry into all the dues of the 
 crown, and the constitution of the grand-jury (or jury of 
 The govern- presentment) was defined. The sheriffs were 
 Hubert forbidden to be justices in their own coun- 
 
 Waiter. tics, and new officials, called coroners, to be 
 
 elected in the county court, were appointed to limit their 
 judicial power. In 1195 all men above the age of 
 fifteen were required to take oath not to be thieves or 
 robbers or receivers of such, and knights were assigned to 
 keep the peace. In the same year there was a riot in 
 London. The new 'commune' or corporation, which 
 was the representative of the great merchants in their 
 guild, had pressed hardly on the poorer citizens, who worked 
 at the handicrafts and had no share in the rule of the 
 great city. One of the aldermen, William Fitz-Osbert — 
 ''William with the long beard" men called him — an old 
 Crusader and a friend of the poor, took up their cause, 
 and demanded that the taxes should be assessed pro- 
 portionately, not paid ' by poll '. A tumult arose, and 
 the king's justiciar had to interfere. William's followers 
 took up arms, but he was seized and executed. The 
 people called him a martyr. In 1 198 the king demanded 
 the service of his barons for war in Normandy, but 
 
WAR WITH FRANCE. 47 
 
 S. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, a holy man whom Henry II. 
 had loved and promoted, declared that his lands owed no 
 service outside England, and his opposition caused the 
 withdrawal of the demand. This, like Becket's stand at 
 Woodstock in 1163, was an important step in the asser- 
 tion of the barons' and church's right to refuse the royal 
 demands for money. In the same year a tax of five 
 shillings was levied on every hundred acres of land, and 
 to assess it justly a new inquiry, like that of Domesday, 
 was made, to obtain an exact list of all the landholding 
 classes. Hubert Walter now resigned his office of 
 justiciar, and Geoffrey Fitz-Peter succeeded him. He was 
 stern in enforcing the demands for money which the king 
 still continued to make. 
 
 Richard, when he crossed to Normandy in 1194, found 
 little difficulty in bringing John to his knees, or after a 
 few battles and sieges in making Philip agree to a truce. 
 His generosity made him forgive when others Richard's 
 would have punished. But it was impossible defence of 
 to have a final peace with France. Philip °'""^^" y- 
 would not be satisfied till he had made himself the true 
 sovereign of his land, nor Richard till he was secure from 
 French attacks. In 1197 Richard obtained the alliance 
 of the courts of Flanders and Champagne and of the 
 Bretons, who recognized his nephew Arthur, Geoffrey's 
 son, as their duke. In the same year he planned and 
 built his great castle, Chateau Gaillard, on a bend of the 
 Seine above Rouen, to defend his capital. It was the 
 badge of Richard's sovereignty of the north. " I would 
 take it if its walls were of iron ", said Philip. " I would 
 hold it ", replied Richard, "were its walls of butter." The 
 war with France ended in a truce, and Richard turned 
 to quell a revolt among the Poitevins. While he was 
 besieging the Castle of Chaluz, where he heard that great 
 treasure-trove was being kept from him as lord, he was 
 struck by an arrow from the walls. The castle was taken, 
 but Richard's wound proved mortal. He __. ... 
 
 • ^ 11 "^s death. 
 
 called before him the man whose arrow had 
 
 pierced his breast, and said, ''What harm have I done 
 
48 DEATH OF RICHARD. 
 
 you that you should kill me?" "You slew my father 
 and my two brothers with your own hands," was the 
 answer, "and me too you w^ould have killed. Revenge 
 yourself as you will, for I will bear all torments since I 
 know I have rid the world of one who has done so much 
 ill." But Richard said, " I forgive thee my death ", and 
 ordered him to be released. The lion-hearted king died 
 on April 7, 1199. He had named John as his heir. He 
 was buried near his father at Fontevrault. Though he had 
 lived rashly he died penitent. A year before his death he 
 had turned from his evil ways, and promised to give up 
 his ^ three daughters \ as a priest called them, Pride, and 
 Covetousness, and Evil-living. "The first I give to the 
 Templars," he said, "the second to the Grey Monks 
 (Cistercians), the third to some of my bishops." If he 
 was more of a knight-errant than a king, and much more 
 of a foreigner than an Englishman, he was born on 
 English soil, and he made the EngHsh name renowned in 
 Europe and in the far East. "A very strong man," he 
 was, says a great writer, " who knew at last his own need 
 of mercy." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE REIGN OF JOHN, 1199-1216. 
 
 His generous brother's last words had given John a 
 claim to the homage of the barons. The young Arthur, 
 his brother Geoffrey's son, dwelt with his mother Con- 
 stance in Brittany, where she had tried to keep up the 
 local independence and refused to follow the rule of the 
 The election Angcvin housc. But no one spoke for Arthur, 
 of John. ^^f^ England recognized John as his brother's 
 
 heir. On Ascension Day he w^as crowned at Westminster, 
 when it is said that Archbishop Hubert Walter solemnly 
 repeated the old constitutional formula that the English 
 crown was elective, and said that the new king was chosen 
 because he was the strongest of the royal house. Thus 
 
KING JOHN. 49 
 
 it was claimed that the new feudal idea of hereditary 
 right did not affect the crown. The French kings, in 
 crowning their sons in their lifetime, had tried to pro- 
 vide for their succession, and had so gradually established 
 the rule. But in England it was not so, and men saw 
 that John owed his crown to election and not to his in- 
 herent right. At his crowning John made the three 
 ancient promises — to protect the church, to do justice to 
 all men, and to make good laws. Never were oaths more 
 readily made and more lightly broken. He was treacher- 
 ous beyond any of his house, who had never held very 
 fast by their honour or their creed — and in this he stood 
 in marked contrast to Richard, who, in his later years at 
 least, had learnt something of the chivalry which belonged 
 to the true knight. In the indulgence of his His 
 passions John was utterly unrestrained. He character, 
 had not his brother's bravery or his father's wisdom. He 
 was mean as well as cruel, and could neither keep a friend 
 nor withstand a foe. Gerald of Barri, who had been his 
 tutor, and from the first had noted the vices of his char- 
 acter, came at length to declare him the worst of all the 
 tyrants of history. "Hell itself", said another, "is de- 
 filed by the presence of John." He was, in fact, the 
 worst of his race. For centuries the house of Anjou had 
 borne a terrible name. Men said they came of a race of 
 devils, and strange legends grew up about the origin of 
 their line. In John all the vices of the house, through 
 the centuries of its ruthless course, seemed to unite. Yet 
 he was indolent even in his viciousness, and readily 
 passed from the extreme of recklessness to the depth of 
 apathy. Men had hated and feared his forefathers — him 
 they hated and despised. 
 
 When he had let his great heritage slip from him, an 
 indignant poet of the South cried out upon his slackness : 
 " I will make a sharp-edged verse, which I will send to 
 the English king, to cover him with shame, which he 
 ought to feel when he remembers his fathers, and thinks 
 how he has left Touraine and Poitou to the King Philip. 
 All Guienne mourns for Richard, who spared no treasure 
 
 ( M 78 ) D 
 
so WAR WITH ARTHUR. 
 
 in its defence. But this man has no feeling. He loves 
 jousts and huntings, to have hounds and hawks, to drag 
 on a life without honour, and see himself plundered with- 
 out resistance." 
 
 Yet John began with every good prospect. The firm 
 administration of his father still endured, and was worked 
 The peaceful ^Y ^^^ Capable and honest. His aged mother, 
 beginning of who kncw the politics of Europe and had all 
 IS reign. ^^^ ^j^^jj ^^ ^ great diplomatist, was ready to 
 serve him, as she had served Richard, with all her strength 
 and all her wit. Philip of France, though he might be 
 his most dangerous foe, had hitherto been his pledged 
 friend. William, the Scottish king, came to him and did 
 homage. Ireland and Wales were undisturbed. He 
 made a formal peace with France, and gave his niece 
 Blanche of Castile in marriage to Louis, King Philip's 
 son. It seemed as if John was secure, and Arthur had 
 no friends. 
 
 But within the year all was changed, and changed 
 through John's folly. He had married Hawisa, the 
 His heiress of the rich earldom of Gloucester, and 
 
 marriage. through her had been a great English baron 
 before he was king. Now he divorced her, and took 
 Isabel of Angouleme, who was pledged to Hugh, Count 
 of La Marche. Hugh, though he was John's vassal, 
 carried his grievance to King Philip, and the complaints 
 of Constance of Brittany, joining with his wrongs, induced 
 the French monarch to make war on John, alleging as his 
 casus belli Arthur's rights to his late uncle's dominions, 
 and the robbery of Hugh's promised bride. 
 
 In 1 202 the war broke out in Poitou. Arthur was 
 joined by many rebellious barons. Philip had summoned 
 John to answer in his court to the charges that his vassals, 
 made against him, and when he would not come declared 
 his lands forfeited. For a while there was great danger. 
 Queen Eleanor was nearly captured by Arthur in the 
 castle of Mirabel ; but John by a rapid march and a clever 
 night-onset, freed his mother and took Arthur prisoner. 
 Within a year, in April, 1203, Arthur died in prison, slain, 
 
LOSS OF NORMANDY. 5 1 
 
 men said, by John's own hand. From this moment the 
 Norman barons, having no other claimant to Murder of 
 put forward, when they wished to avenge Arthur, 
 their grievances on the Angevin ruler, turned to France; 
 and everywhere men began to abandon John, whom they 
 regarded as a murderer. Philip summoned him to stand 
 his trial, but he would not come, and sentence of for- 
 feiture of all his French fiefs was pronounced. The barons 
 rose and the French army poured into Normandy, but 
 John sat carelessly feasting at Rouen, and did not raise a 
 hand to defend himself For a year Chateau Loss of 
 Gaillard held out, but at last it yielded when Normandy, 
 all its stores were spent. It had gallantly withstood the 
 whole military power of the French crown. John himself 
 had seemed for a while to be exerting himself for its relief. 
 He sent a flotilla of small ships, manned, it was said, by 
 * pirates', up the Seine to break the blockade, while at 
 the same time William the Marshal led three hundred 
 knights along the left bank of the river. But a delay 
 occurred which ruined the plan, and Philip took advan- 
 tage of the failure to draw still nearer to the castle. John 
 left his gallant men to their fate, but they still held out 
 month after month. At last, on March 6, 1204, a breach 
 was made in the wall, and the French captured the great 
 fortress that had been so gallantly defended. 
 
 On March 21 Queen Eleanor died. John stayed in 
 England, and by the summer all his lands in north and 
 central France had slipt from him. All the Norman 
 duchy was lost except the Channel Islands, which England 
 holds to-day as the sole remnant of the heritage of William 
 the Conqueror. All Anjou, Touraine, Maine, were gone 
 too, and the overlordship of Brittany. Of all the French 
 lands which his father had ruled, John retained only part 
 of his mother's duchy of Aquitaine. And all was lost by 
 mere sloth, for there was still much to have held the great 
 Angevin Empire together. The Norman barons were 
 really much more closely linked to England than to 
 France; many of them had estates on both sides of the 
 Channel, and all had traditional feuds with their French 
 
52 THE ENGLISH BARONS. 
 
 neighbours. The Norman towns, too, were better off 
 under the English kings, and all the sentiments of past 
 history for three centuries taught hostility to the house of 
 Capet. 
 
 The loss of Normandy had great effects on English 
 history. Our kings were now driven to reside more in 
 The English their island realm, and thus were brought 
 barons. morc Constantly with their virtues and their 
 
 crimes before the English people, who soon came to call 
 them, as they had never done before, to account for their 
 deeds. A national feeling, too, began to rise, a hatred of 
 foreigners, which began with a hatred of the foreign court, 
 and might be, as the king ruled well or ill, against him or 
 in his favour. And as this feeling rose, the nation began 
 also to realize its own unity. Norman and English were 
 already so mixed in race that men could no longer distin- 
 guish the men of either blood ; now this fact became 
 evident in the action of the baronial party. The barons, 
 half English in blood, came to see that they were all 
 English in duties, in claims, and in feeling. They began 
 to ask, as the folk had asked under the stern rule of the 
 Normans, for the good laws of the old English kings. 
 
 In 1 205 died the able Archbishop Hubert Walter, who 
 had kept the king at peace with the church. In 1206 
 John made a slight effort to win back his foreign lands; 
 but he easily agreed to a truce by which he gave up all 
 his northern heritage. He seemed to have lost all sense 
 of his position. When he heard of his great minister's 
 death, he said, " Now for the first time I am truly king 
 of England". It was true in a sense in which he did not 
 mean it. The administration which his father had set up, 
 and through which the Angevins' rule over England had 
 so long been carried on, had now at last broken down. 
 The faithful servants of the great king were dead, and 
 most of those trained in their school had passed away. 
 John, it seemed, must be his own minister. 
 
 Left now to face his English subjects, John soon began 
 to meet the consequences of his folly and his crimes. 
 His first quarrel was with the church. The monks of 
 
THE INTERDICT. 53 
 
 Canterbury chose their sub-prior Reginald to succeed 
 Hubert as archbishop, without taking the king's pleasure, 
 and sent him off to Rome to receive the pope's ^j^^ election 
 sanction. John, however, had determined to Canter- 
 that a minister of his own. John de Gray, "^^' 
 Bishop of Norwich, should be primate, and forced the 
 monks in a new election to choose him. The bishops of 
 the province of Canterbury also claimed to elect, and all 
 parties appealed to Rome. The great Pope Innocent III. 
 would confirm none of these claims. He declared both 
 elections void, and then the Canterbury monks at Rome, 
 who had full power to act for all their fellows, chose under 
 his direction a great scholar and a cardinal, then at Rome, 
 Stephen Langton, the Englishman of all others most 
 worthy of the place. He was consecrated by the pope 
 himself, June 17, 1207. 
 
 John would have been wise if he had accepted what 
 had been done; but he refused to receive Langton, and 
 stood out against the pope's warnings. Innocent was a 
 man of high principle and of strong will, astute and in- 
 genious, and unflinching in doing what he believed to be 
 his duty. It was not likely that he would yield to a man 
 such as John. On March 23, 1208, he laid England 
 under an interdict. By this the churches ^h i t d* 
 were closed, though prayers might be said 
 and sermons preached in the churchyards. The Sacra- 
 ments of Marriage, Extreme Unction, and the Eucharist 
 were forbidden — though many monasteries were exempt 
 from this general rule. Burials were not allowed in 
 churchyards, and baptism might only be performed in 
 private. This was felt then to be a severe affliction to the 
 whole land, — though at the present day some Protestant 
 bodies voluntarily restrict their worship within much the 
 same limits. John treated the Interdict with contempt, 
 and seized the lands and goods of the clergy who obeyed 
 it. He thus was able to refrain from taxation, and the 
 baronage as yet showed no sign of opposition to his will. 
 But he did not know the man with whom he had to deal. 
 Innocent threatened that he would excommunicate him 
 
54 JOHN BECOMES THE POPE'S MAN. 
 
 for his defiance. Still he persisted, and he drove most 
 of the bishops from the land. He continued to rob the 
 clergy, and to rob and persecute the Jews; he made his 
 barons give him hostages for their loyalty, and then he 
 made the King of Scots do homage anew. In 12 lo he 
 went to Ireland, and brought to submission the warring 
 parties of the English pale. But at last the pope's ven- 
 geance fell. When John had again refused to receive 
 the archbishop, Pandulf, the pope's special envoy, warned 
 him in presence of the earls and barons of England of 
 the consequence of his act, and of the further excom- 
 munication that would follow. "What more?" asked 
 the king scornfully. "We have absolved", said Pandulf, 
 " every earl, baron, knight, freeman, and every clerk and 
 layman, and every Christian man in all your land, from 
 their fealty and homage to you." The pope, a few 
 months later, gave to Philip of France a commission to 
 execute this sentence of deposition. 
 
 John passed from defiance to the extremity of terror. 
 One Peter of Wakefield had prophesied that by Ascen- 
 john's sur- ^^^^ ^^V ^^ should havc lost his crown, and 
 render of his everything seemed to point to the fulfilment 
 crown, 1213. ^^ ^j^^ prophecy. The terrors of excommuni- 
 cation, too, were not without effect. John knew that he 
 could not depend upon his own men, and he knew, too, 
 the strength and the astuteness of the great king Philip. 
 On all sides there were signs of discontent, though many 
 of the barons still stood by him. But his own heart 
 failed, and on May 13, 12 13, he made complete sub- 
 mission to the pope, agreed to recall all the bishops, and 
 surrendered his kingdom to receive it again as a fief of 
 the Roman See, with the yearly tribute of 1000 marks. 
 No submission so abject was ever made by an English 
 king. Yet at the moment it seemed to promise John a 
 complete triumph over his foes. He was in league with 
 the Emperor Otto (who was the son of his sister Matilda), 
 and with the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne, against 
 Philip of France. His ships, under his natural brother, 
 William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, destroyed the 
 
STEPHEN LANGTON. 55 
 
 French fleet, and he himself prepared for a great expedi- 
 tion against France. Stephen Langton came to England 
 as Archbishop of Canterbury, and released the king from 
 his excommunication. But now the barons refused to 
 move. They had come to see that they had no interest 
 in the king's foreign wars, and they began, too, to call for 
 the old law and the justice of Henry I. John tried in 
 vain to coerce the stout barons of the North, and mean- 
 while in a council at S. Albans on August 4, 12 13, where, 
 besides the barons, there were present men from all the 
 townships on the royal demesne, Geoffrey The demands 
 Fitz-Peter, the justiciar, himself one of the of the barons, 
 ministers of Henry II., undertook that the laws of Henry 
 I. should be restored. It was clear that the whole land 
 felt its concern in the great question between king and 
 baronage. A council was summoned to meet at Oxford, 
 at which not only the feudal tenants were to be present, 
 but also four discreet men from each shire. Thus the 
 custom of representation which had long obtained in 
 the shire court, to which there came four men and the 
 reeve from each township, was now extended to the 
 national council itself. At the same time Stephen Lang- 
 ton gathered a council at S. Paul's, and took the chief 
 barons apart, saying, " Ye know how, when I absolved the 
 king, I made him swear that he would destroy evil rule, 
 and cause the good laws of King Edward to be observed. 
 There is now found a charter of King Henry the First, by 
 which you can, if you will, restore the lost liberties of the 
 land." So they demanded that John should rule on the 
 lines of that great declaration of the king's justice, the 
 Coronation Charter of his great-grandfather. Discontent 
 had forced a voice and a basis for its demands. The jus- 
 ticiar might have kept the peace, but he died in October, 
 and then John found himself face to face with the barons, 
 who knew their own strength and their aims. 
 
 There was, however, a pause. John crossed to Poitou 
 in February, 12 14. On July 27 some of the English, 
 under the Earl of Salisbury, with the emperor's troops 
 and the Flemings, were utterly defeated at Bouvines, near 
 
56 MAGNA CARTA. 
 
 the French northern frontier, and the Count of Flanders 
 and the Earl of Salisbury were taken. It was a crushing 
 The battle of blow. The great alliance was broken up, 
 Bouvines. ^^^^ ^5 John was also defeated in Poitou, 
 Philip was able to force a truce upon him, and remained 
 not only supreme in France, but the greatest of European 
 monarchs. 
 
 The news of this defeat emboldened the English barons 
 to demand the redress of their grievances. The arch- 
 bishop was now their leader, and when John returned he 
 dared not reject their request. He tried to separate them 
 by promising to the church freedom of election to all 
 bishoprics and abbeys (which no other king save Stephen 
 had allowed), and then appealed to the pope to help him. 
 Innocent took his side, but the archbishop and the 
 barons presented 'Articles' of their demands, in which 
 they sought for justice in all matters where they had been 
 wronged, and for a due observance of the laws, and re- 
 straint of the royal officers. John in a passion refused. 
 The barons at once got together an army, and made 
 Robert Fitz- Walter their head as "marshal of the host 
 of God and holy church". They had with them the 
 citizens of London, whom the king had oppressed, and 
 the people and the church also recognized in them the 
 champions of the liberties of the whole land. John found 
 it impossible to resist. On June 15, at Runnymede on 
 the Thames, near Windsor, he met the barons and signed 
 Magna Carta, the great charter of the liberties of Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The charter was a statement of the rights of all classes. 
 The church was allowed her freedom to elect, and all 
 Magna Other lawful rights. The rights of the king 
 
 Carta. Qy^j- j^jg tenants, and of the barons over their 
 
 men, were restricted. No scutage or other like tax was 
 to be levied save by the consent of the great council of 
 bishops and barons. The rights of London were assured. 
 The Court of Common Pleas (ordinary suits between 
 subjects) was no longer to follow the king, but to be held 
 in a fixed place. The king's foreign mercenaries were to 
 
MAGNA CARTA. 57 
 
 be banished. And the great principles of liberty were 
 asserted in words which became famous. No free man 
 was to be taken, imprisoned, deprived of his land, 
 banished, or in any way hurt, save by the judgment of 
 his peers (equals) or the law of the land. No man was 
 to be fined save according to the measure of his offence, 
 and so as to leave him his means of earning his living. 
 And to no man, the king promised, would he sell, delay, 
 or deny justice. 
 
 Twenty-five barons were chosen to see that this charter 
 was carried out, and were allowed to make war on the 
 king (save only that they might not seize his person, or 
 that of his wife and children) if he did not keep his word. 
 Thus all that Henry II. had done to strengthen the royal 
 power was undone; and the English kings had now to 
 give account to a people whose rights were known and 
 admitted by the laws. 
 
 Yet there was little if anything that was definitely new 
 in Magna Carta. It was of a piece with all past recog- 
 nitions of right. It followed the old Enp-lisH lawQ anH 
 the charter of Henry J . The Church of England had 
 always been considered free; the barons had always been 
 protected by the legal rights of their feudal position; the 
 villeins had always had their means of earning a living 
 outside the claims of the royal tax-gatherers. But these 
 rights were such as a strong king could ignore, and not 
 till John's day had there arisen an united party of all classes 
 that could make the king do right. The great council of 
 the realm gained little in theory that it had not possessed 
 before: kings had always taken its consent when they 
 came to lay taxes on the nation. And the barons had 
 had their right of summons rarely if ever contested. The 
 charter indeed was very much more of a restatement tharu- — v 
 an alteration of English law and custom. But its real j 
 importance lay in the fact that it gave a rallying cry to f \ 
 all those who for the future should oppose misrule in a \ <■ 
 king. Men appealed for many centuries to the Great ) 
 Charter of Liberties of King John. ^ 
 
 But all this was not apparent at first. The charter 
 
58 DEATH OF JOHN. 
 
 seemed only the starting-point for new strife. King and 
 baron had sworn to it, but oaths were as easily broken as 
 they w^ere made. John never intended to keep his word. 
 He at once asked the pope to absolve him from it, and 
 prepared, by hiring more foreign troops, to fight when the 
 barons should discover his treachery. The pope hastily 
 declared the charter illegal, summoned Langton to Rome, 
 and excommunicated the barons. Then both parties pre- 
 The invasion pared for war. John harried the north, and 
 of England, attached Alexander, the young King of Scots, 
 who had occupied Northumberland. The barons chose 
 the Earl of Essex (who had married John's divorced wife) 
 for their leader, and asked Louis of France, King Philip's 
 son, who had married John's niece, to take the English 
 crown. Till the French landed John carried all before 
 him; only London resisted his attack. When Louis 
 landed. May 21, 12 16, the barons rallied round him; 
 even the Earl of SaHsbury deserted his brother, and all 
 men seemed to look to the French prince as their only 
 saviour from the tyranny and treachery of the king. 
 Louis was everywhere successful. In three months he 
 was master of the south-west and north of England. Only 
 a few of the castles held out for the king, Dover and 
 Windsor, Newark, Nottingham, Lincoln, and Barnard 
 Castle; and Alexander, King of Scots, marched down 
 from the north and did homage to Louis at Canterbury. 
 Meanwhile John moved here and there, burning and 
 slaughtering, but was gradually driven north. As he 
 was turning again to meet his foes his baggage was swept 
 away by the sudden incoming of a high tide, as he 
 passed by the Wash, and at Swineshead he was seized 
 with illness, which men said was due to poison. He 
 The death of ^^^.ched Newark on October 1 6, and there 
 John, October he died three days later, commending his 
 19, 1216. j-^^j^ g^j^ ^^ ^YiQ care of the new pope, 
 
 Honorius HL He w^as buried in Worcester Cathedral. 
 No man, even among his own trusted servants, regretted 
 him. England had never been ruled by so bad a man, 
 or so bad a king. There was a general feeling of thank- 
 
THE REGENCY. 59 
 
 fulness and relief when the news of his sudden death 
 spread over the land. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE REIGN OF HENRY HI. (1216-1272). 
 
 John had left five young children; of these two were 
 boys. The elder, Henry, was just nine years old when 
 his father died, and his brother Richard was two years 
 younger. It was well for England that the heir of the 
 evil king was an innocent child. The strong party which 
 had invited Louis, and was pledged to support England at 
 him, and which would certainly have soon John's death, 
 overcome the mercenaries of John, had no liking for the 
 Frenchman save as a champion against the tyranny of 
 their hated sovereign. Louis had married Blanche, the 
 granddaughter of Henry II., and in default of a better 
 candidate he might have been accepted as king. But the 
 claim of a child had far more to recommend it. The barons 
 knew that they could hold the government themselves till 
 he was grown up, and they thought they could give a 
 direction to the policy of the crown which it would not be 
 easy afterwards to alter. The young Henry they had in 
 their own hands. Louis as king meant the great Philip 
 to reckon with, and it might be that England would be 
 again drawn at the chariot wheels of a foreign power. 
 The barons had learnt that they were Englishmen, and 
 were soon ready to claim England for the English. On 
 October 28, 12 16, the young Henry was crowned at 
 Gloucester. The pope's legate Gualo, Peter des Roches, 
 Bishop of Winchester (whom John had made justiciar 
 after the death of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter), William, Earl of 
 Pembroke, the Marshal, and some faithful The crowning 
 barons, stood by him. They wisely showed °^ Henry iii. 
 that they intended to rule as the nation willed, by re- 
 issuing the Great Charter, leaving out, however, the articles 
 
Go LINCOLN FAIR. 
 
 which provided that taxation should only be granted by 
 the great council. 
 
 Louis on the other hand showed signs that he intended 
 to rule England as a French province, and when he went 
 back to France to gather more troops, many of the English 
 who had before followed him went over to the side of Henry 
 III. The new pope, Honorius III., took up very strongly 
 The Fair ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ young king, as a vassal of 
 of Lincoln, Rome, and recognized the Great Charter, 
 Apni 18,1217. ^yj^j(.}^ Innocent III. had condemned; so on 
 April 18, 12 1 7, the legate excommunicated Louis and the 
 barons who supported him. On May 20, William the 
 Marshal totally defeated the French party at Lincoln. 
 All day long the fight raged in the narrow streets of the 
 old hill town, and the conquerors plundered where they 
 could, so that " they each returned to their lords as rich 
 men", and the battle was called ^Lincoln Fair'. 
 
 Louis now found himself in a hard strait. He sought 
 more help from France, but the fleet was scattered by the 
 ships of the loyal Cinque Ports, under Hubert de Burgh 
 (now justiciar), in the Dover Straits, on August 24, and 
 Louis himself was besieged in London by William the 
 Marshal. On September 1 1 a treaty was made by which 
 Louis agreed to leave England on being absolved by the 
 church, and Henry promised to forgive the rebel barons 
 Henr III ^^^ ^^ obscrvc Magna Carta. So the young 
 King without king was left without rival, and for two years 
 a nva . morc the land throve under the wise rule of 
 
 William the Marshal. The charter was issued anew, 
 with provisions against grants of lands to monks, for the 
 abolition of feudal services, and for the regular holding 
 of the local courts. A new Forest Charter was also given, 
 in which the harsh rules of Henry 11. and John were 
 withdrawn. 
 
 Next the king's wise minister banished from the kingdom 
 the mercenaries whom King John had employed. At the 
 beginning of 12 18 many of the barons went on crusade, 
 among them Robert Fitz- Walter, who had led the lords 
 who won the charter. Archbishop Stephen Langton 
 
HENRY III. 6l 
 
 had returned from Italy, and added his prudent coun- 
 sels to those of Pandulf, who was now legate. In 
 12 19 the good Earl Marshal died; and Hubert de 
 Hubert de Burgh was chief ruler of the land, ingfand^for 
 He was not popular among the barons, who the English, 
 regarded him as an upstart ; but he was a strong man, and 
 gradually he brought the land to peace and quiet. In 
 1224 he at last managed to obtain the banishment of 
 Falkes de Breaute, a ruffian whom John had employed, 
 and who had made himself rich and powerful since his 
 master had died. Langton became pope's legate, and 
 Peter des Roches and the other foreigners became gradu- 
 ally less prominent. 
 
 In 1227 Henry declared himself of age, and from this 
 time the influence of his personal character began to be 
 seen. He was very unlike his father. He The character 
 was a brave knight, and a pious Christian, of Henry in. 
 gentle, courteous, and kindly. Yet he was far from being 
 a great man, and he had many faults. He was vain and 
 changeable; he had none of his grandfather's wisdom 
 and some of his father's falseness. He meant well, but he 
 did ill; and his long reign of fifty-six years was one of the 
 weakest if not the worst in English history. But, never- 
 theless, in his own day he seemed at times a magnificent 
 figure. England in his day kept something of the great 
 position she had held under the Conqueror, Henry I., 
 Henry II., and Richard I. Henry III. "filled in Europe 
 a position created for him perhaps by the labours of his 
 grandfather and uncle, brought into prominence by the 
 failure and fall of Frederick II. [the Roman Emperor], 
 and made influential by his close connection with the 
 other sovereigns of Christendom ; but out of all proportion 
 to his ability. He was magnificent, liberal, a patron of 
 art, and a benefactor of foreigners. His reputation for 
 wealth laid him open to the extortions of all the needy in 
 Europe; his patronage of them left him poor; and his 
 poverty brought out his meanness and deceit at home.'^ 
 It is easier indeed to draw a clear picture of Henry III. 
 than of many of our early kings. His reign, even more 
 
62 THE CHRONICLERS. 
 
 than that of Henry II., was an age of great chroniclers, 
 and his court was honourably noted for its patronage of 
 learned men. Matthew Paris, a monk of S. Albans 
 The chroni- (^ ^95~^2 59), was the best Latin writer of the 
 ciers of his ccntury. He was often employed abroad on 
 ^^* diplomatic missions, received constant infor- 
 
 mation from the court, and had access to many state 
 documents. He was a traveller, a courtier, and a politi- 
 cian as well as a monk, and he was admitted to a close 
 intimacy with the king and his brother Richard. From 
 his lively pages we obtain a clear notion of the part which 
 the clergy played in the politics of the time, and are able 
 to understand how the king's character struck the men of 
 his own day. Matthew Paris is never afraid of expressing 
 a severe judgment on Henry's weakness, or of hinting 
 broadly at his lack of honourable stedfastness. Besides 
 Matthew Paris we have Adam of Marsh, a learned Francis- 
 can, who was honoured both by king and queen, and was 
 the trusted counsellor of Simon de Montfort; he who was 
 equally at home at the court and in literature, or " serving 
 the wretched and the vile, and performing the prime and 
 essential duties of a friar". Thomas of Wykes, Robert 
 of Gloucester, William of Rishanger, were other writers 
 of eminence who have left vivid pictures of the England 
 of Henry III., and Robert Grosseteste (i 175-1253), 
 Bishop of Lincoln, in his letters has expressed with un- 
 mistakable force and truth the feeling of Englishmen 
 with regard to the great political and religious crisis in 
 which he was engaged. It was an age of great chroniclers, 
 of men who were no longer content to give a bare record 
 of facts, but who judged public events for themselves, 
 and boldly criticised the times and the men. It was 
 an age, too, of great kings, and the Henry III. whom 
 the contemporary historians picture for us was little worthy 
 to stand beside Louis the Saint of France, or Innocent 
 IV. and Gregory IX., astute and powerful popes, or Al- 
 fonso the Learned of Castile, or Frederick II., the Vonder 
 of the world '. 
 
 The young king, when he declared he would be his own 
 
BEGINNING OF TROUBLES. 63 
 
 minister, did not cease to employ Hubert de Burgh. Till 
 1232 the wise minister prevented the worst effects of the 
 king's rashness and suspicions. In 1228 Henry fought 
 in Wales, in 1230 he crossed to Brittany, and thence 
 passed to Gascony, and his men under the young Richard 
 the Marshal (to whom the king had given his sister 
 Eleanor in marriage) obtained some success against Louis 
 IX. of France. But the French wars were a constant 
 drain on England; and Gascony, over which the king's 
 brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was set to rule, was 
 hard to govern, and again and again was in ^j^^ begin- 
 revolt against the English. Added to this the ning of 
 popes, who had so wisely kept England for *^°" ^^* 
 Henry while he was a minor, now made repeated demands 
 for money to help them in their wars in Italy. Henry 
 was not the man to overcome these difficulties. In 1232 
 he dismissed Hubert de Burgh, declaring him a traitor, 
 and gave England into the hands of the Poitevin Peter 
 des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and the foreigners 
 who surrounded him. All the good ministers of the 
 king's early years were now dead. Stephen Langton had 
 been succeeded as archbishop by Edmund Rich, a pious 
 scholar, but a man unequal to advise in a stormy time. 
 Henry foolishly offended all those who wished for a just 
 and firm government, and Richard the Marshal, the 
 leader of the barons, was driven into open revolt and 
 leagued with the princes of Wales. Henry was defeated 
 when he tried to crush the revolt. Earl Richard tried to 
 raise Ireland, but was treacherously assassinated. Before 
 this the king had been forced to learn how ill he was 
 being counselled, and he dismissed Bishop Peter and 
 made peace with his barons. 
 
 A new period began with the king's marriage in 11 36. 
 His sisters had already made alliances which might prove 
 of political import. Eleanor's wedding was ^he king's / 
 the pledge of friendship with the constitutional marriage, \^ 
 baronage. Joan had married Alexander II., ^^^ ' 
 King of Scots. In 1235 Isabel married the Emperor 
 Frederick II. In the next year Henry himself married 
 
64 POPE AND KING. 
 
 Eleanor, daughter of Raymond IV., Count of Provence, 
 whose sisters were or became the wives of Louis IX. of 
 France, of his brother Charles of Anjou, and of Richard, 
 Earl of Cornwall. With these foreign connections foreigners 
 poured into England; and the national feeling, already 
 aroused by the papal demands, and the needs of the 
 king's continental lands, grew steadily in intensity, de- 
 manding that England should support only its own folk. 
 The king was already becoming overwhelmed by financial 
 difficulties. Year after year he was asking his council for 
 more money, and year after year the pope's demands also 
 increased. Men everywhere spoke of the waste and pro- 
 digality of the court, and protested against the avarice of 
 Rome and the corruption of the pope's officials. The 
 burden pressed most heavily on the clergy. A song of 
 the time says: 
 
 Free and held in high esteem the clergy used to be, 
 None were cherished more, or loved more heartily. 
 Enslaved now, betrayed, brought low, 
 
 They are abased sore 
 By those from whom their help should come : 
 
 I dare no more. 
 King and pope, alike in this, to one purpose hold, 
 How to make the clergy yield their silver and their gold. 
 This is the sum. The Pope of Rome 
 
 Yields too much to the king; 
 To aid his crown, the tithes lays down 
 
 To his liking. 
 
 Clergy and barons alike protested. Archbishop Edmund 
 warned Henry against allowing a papal legate to land. 
 Earl Richard '' Earl Richard of Cornwall, the king's brother," 
 of Cornwall, gays Matthcw Paris, " was the first to call the 
 king to account. He sharply rebuked him for the great 
 desolation that he had made in the realm, and because day 
 after day on new-fangled and captious pretexts he spoiled 
 his own barons of their goods, and thoughtlessly bestowed 
 all he could scrape together on the enemies of the kingdom, 
 who were plotting both against him and his realm. 
 
 Year by year Henry added to the discontent. In 1238 
 his sister Eleanor, now left a widow by her husband's 
 
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66 EARL SIMON DE MONTFORT. 
 
 murder in Ireland, was married to Simon de Montfort, 
 Earl of Leicester, son of the famous crusader of the same 
 name, who had put down the Albigenses of Southern 
 France. Simon the younger had been confirmed by the 
 favour of the king as Earl of Leicester, as heir to his 
 mother, the daughter of Henry II.'s justiciar, and was 
 high in favour at court for his chivalrous character and 
 handsome person. 
 
 The marriage excited general indignation. It was 
 thought that Earl Simon was but another greedy foreigner, 
 Simon de and that the king was giving himself more and 
 Ea°rfor*' more into their hands. Earl Richard of Corn- 
 Leicester, wall became leader of the malcontents. " At 
 that time", says Matthew Paris, "sure hopes were enter- 
 tained that Earl Richard would free the land from the 
 wretched slavery it experienced at the hands of Romans 
 and other foreigners; and every one, from boys to old 
 men, heaped constant blessings on his name." But it 
 needed years of misrule before the church and barons 
 should be strong enough to reform the government, and 
 meanwhile matters went from bad to worse. In the 
 church the pope's demands grew year by year. In 1237 
 The Pope's Came a legate Otto, who demanded a fifth of 
 demands on all the clcrgy's goods for a war against the 
 England. Emperor Frederick 11. His arrogance of- 
 fended everyone, and led to a tumult at Oxford, where 
 the scholars of the new-founded schools, or university, 
 set upon him and drove him from the town. 
 
 In 1240 Earl Richard and Earl Simon went on crusade, 
 that they might not '^ behold the evils of the nation and 
 the desolation of the realm", and shortly after Arch- 
 bishop Edmund left England in despair, because the pope 
 had ordered him to provide for three hundred Romans in 
 the first church benefices that fell vacant. He died in the 
 same year at Pontigny, where he had sought refuge like 
 S. Thomas before him. He was canonized in 1246. 
 
 The pope's constant demands were not received without 
 protest. The rectors of Berkshire declared that they would 
 not give for the war against the emperor, because he 
 
ROBERT GROSSETESTE. 67 
 
 had not been condemned by the judgment of the church; 
 because as all churches had their separate patrimony the 
 English church ought in no wise to be taxed by or pay 
 tribute to Rome; because the pope had no dominion 
 or proprietorship over England, and because such de- 
 mands were a robbery of the poor and an attack upon 
 the just rights of the English patrons. The protest 
 represented the great mass of English feeling. 
 
 In 1 241 the king had caused his wife's uncle, Boniface 
 of Savoy, to be elected Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1242 
 the pope sent " a new extortioner, Martin by name ". In 
 1244 even the king protested against the papal demands, 
 and when he found that the revenues held by Italians in 
 England amounted to 60,000 marks, more than the 
 revenue of the crown, "was very angry, and began to 
 detest the insatiate greed of the Roman court ". Yet the 
 abuse was not checked. Seven years later Grosseteste 
 declared that the pope's nominees had revenues within 
 the realm three times as great as the royal income. 
 
 The English Parliament, as the great council had now 
 come to be called, sent a formal protest to the pope, 
 which was read at the Council of Lyons, but the Pope 
 Innocent IV. took no heed. Year after year the exaction 
 continued, and the new archbishop Boniface was more 
 active in asserting his own rights than in protecting those 
 of the church. One great bishop alone stood Robert 
 out. Robert Grosseteste, who had been Grosseteste. 
 rector of the new order of friars of S. Francis, and who 
 was a devout and holy man, of great wisdom and 
 honesty, had been elected Bishop of Lincoln in 1235. He 
 reformed his own vast diocese, with the aid of the friars, 
 and was especially stern in enforcing the obedience of 
 the monks to their rules. Men called him the " destroyer 
 of the monks", but all knew his true spiritual earnestness. 
 He was a friend of Earl Simon, to whom men were be- 
 ginning to look as the leader of the party that sought 
 reform. He talked with him, and with his friend Adam 
 of Marsh, of government, and was the tutor of his son. 
 But while Simon was preparing to seek a reform of the 
 
68 THE WAR IN GASCONY. 
 
 State, Grosseteste was fighting for a reform of the church. 
 He ceaselessly opposed the pope's attempts to tax Eng- 
 land for his own benefit, and protested in person before 
 Innocent IV. against the corruption and avarice of his 
 court. At last, in 1253, the pope demanded that he 
 should give the next vacant prebend in his cathedral to his 
 nephew, a boy, an Italian, not in holy orders, and quite 
 without any intention of coming to England. Grosseteste 
 absolutely refused, in a letter declaring that such a demand 
 was made for destruction, and was utterly incompatible 
 with the holiness of the apostolic see. He died shortly 
 afterwards, protesting with his last breath against the evils 
 of the time. The pope's demands had now taken a new 
 form. In 1252 Innocent IV. offered to Richard of Corn- 
 wall the kingdom of Sicily, of which he declared that 
 Frederick 11. was rightly deprived. In 1255 Henry 
 accepted it for his son Edmund. But the barons refused 
 to provide men or money to win a kingdom from a 
 Christian monarch, or to gain a heritage outside the land, 
 for the king's son. 
 
 While Henry was thus falling more and more under 
 the control of the popes, and thus bringing about a crisis 
 The revolt in in the relations between himself and his 
 Gascony. barons, his foreign dominions were a con- 
 stant drain on his resources, and his hold over them was 
 slowly being relaxed. • Gascony was ruled at one time by 
 Richard of Cornwall, at another by Simon de Montfort. 
 Neither could subdue the turbulent barons. Simon be- 
 came engaged in money transactions which induced him 
 to pledge the king's credit without asking his consent. The 
 discovery of this, as well as the constant complaints of 
 the Gascons against his hard hand, made an irreconcil- 
 able breach between him and Henry. The king himself 
 made three expeditions to France, but in spite of some 
 temporary successes was always in the end worsted. War 
 Battle of ^^^^ Louis IX. was a constant feature of this 
 Taiiiebourg, period of the reign; but the campaigns were 
 ^^^^' mostly unimportant, and the English took 
 
 only the faintest interest in it. In 1242 there was a great 
 
THE BARONS AND PARLIAMENT. 69 
 
 battle at Taillebourg, in which Henry narrowly escaped 
 capture. In 1253 Henry spent a year in Gascony, but 
 achieved nothing. It was indeed only through the gener- 
 osity of the French king that he retained his foreign lands 
 at all. 
 
 Meanwhile the feeling of the barons was being more and 
 more clearly expressed. In 1237 and 1242 the great coun- 
 cil seriously warned the king of the evils which The Barons 
 he was bringing upon the country. In 1244 protest, 
 twelve barons were chosen to treat with Henry when he 
 again demanded money. Simon de Montfort and Richard 
 of Cornwall stood together among the twelve, and de- 
 manded that the king's advisers should be elected by the 
 council, and should be compelled to see to the execution 
 of reforms. In 1248, 1249, 1255 the demands were re- 
 peated. 
 
 All that seemed gained was a renewal of the charters, 
 the Great Charter, and the Charter of the Forest. But 
 they were no better observed. Yet all the time the 
 barons were growing in power, and they were training an 
 instrument which should serve them when the time came 
 to act decisively. The old great council, in which sat 
 the bishops and greater abbots, and all the king's tenants 
 in chief, was gradually learning to make itself the mouth- 
 piece of the popular feeling, and to claim the right to 
 execute the popular will. The king was ob- ^^^ begin - 
 liged to grant concessions, which implied that nings of 
 
 •^ 4.U' ^u 4.- Parliament. 
 
 It was somethmg more than a mere meetmg 
 
 of his vassals, called together to hear his will, and to tell 
 
 him in what way they would provide for obeying it. 
 
 In 1254, when he was himself in Gascony, there were 
 summoned to the council, which was to be asked to grant 
 supplies for the war, not only the feudal tenants of the 
 crown but two knights from each shire elected by the 
 county court. Thus the local courts were brought into 
 connection with the great council, and the great council 
 assumed something of the appearance of a national and 
 representative body. The council, too, began to be called 
 a Parliament, ' a place where men talked '. There began 
 
70 PETITION OF THE BARONS. 
 
 to be real discussions — not merely the dumb acceptance 
 of the king's commands. It needed but one final folly of 
 the king's to make the council stand forth to demand in 
 the name of all classes the ending of the misrule and 
 disorder. 
 
 In 1257 the time came. The king now stood alone. 
 Richard of Cornwall after his marriage with the queen's 
 sister had ceased to care about English reform, and had 
 gone over sea. Some of the German electors had now 
 chosen him as King of the Romans, and, eager to push 
 his claim to be emperor, he ceased his old constitutional 
 protests. Sir Edward, the king's son, had not yet turned 
 to serious things, but was fighting on the Welsh border, 
 The ^^^ leagued with the Mortimers, who ruled in 
 
 foreigners in the Marcbes, against the princes of the native 
 ng an . Welsh. The foreigners whom Henry had 
 brought to England, his wife's kindred and the Lusignans, 
 his half-brothers (for his mother, Isabel of Angouleme, 
 had married her old lover after John's death), were not 
 the men to whom Englishmen would listen when once 
 they had taken in hand to set the kingdom right. In 
 1258, at a meeting of the Great Council of Parliament, 
 Richard of Clare, Earl of Gloucester, almost the only 
 survivor of the houses of the great earls who had been so 
 plentiful a century back, declared that the time had come 
 to redress the grievances under which all classes groaned. 
 The clergy were taxed to pay for the war on behalf of the 
 young Edmund, called King of Sicily, and Henry was 
 pledged to pay for the pope's campaigning. On May 2, 
 1258, the king agreed that a commission of twenty-four 
 barons should be appointed to draw up a scheme of re- 
 form. On June 11, at Oxford, a long list of grievances 
 was presented. It was the result of long and anxious dis- 
 The Petition cussion by the barons in the council among 
 of the Barons, themselvcs, and with the friars preachers; and 
 before it was finally produced, all who framed it, " giving 
 their right hand to one another as a pledge of faith, swore 
 they would not fail to prosecute their design through loss 
 of lands or money, nor through favour to themselves and 
 
THE MAD PARLIAMENT. 7 1 
 
 their relations". And "after renewing their league and 
 reiterating their oath, they confirmed the design which 
 they had conceived, that neither for life, death, or hold- 
 ings, for hatred or for love, or for any cause whatever, 
 would they be bent or weakened in their intent to regain 
 praiseworthy laws, and to cleanse from foreigners this 
 kingdom, which is the native land of men of noble birth 
 and of their ancestors ". So excited was the feeling that 
 men called it the Mad Parliament. The chief articles 
 of the Petition of the Barons were those which demanded : 
 (i) redress of the illegal extension of the law of wardship, 
 by which the king took the land of minors and compelled 
 them, whether male or female, to marry whom he would; 
 (2) that the king's castles should be held by natives — not 
 foreigners; (3) that the forest laws and the king's en- 
 croachments on the barons' forests might be modified; 
 
 (4) that the king's dues might not be unlawfully extended ; 
 
 (5) that the Jews and the new Christian bankers and 
 money-lenders, the * Caursins ' or men of Cahors, might 
 be restrained. 
 
 The barons' leaders were Richard, Earl of Gloucester, 
 Simon, Earl of Leicester (who now stood forward as the 
 foe of foreigners and friend of the barons), and Walter of 
 Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester. Henry soon saw that 
 it was useless to struggle, and accepted the Provisions of 
 Oxford (June 1258). A commission of twenty-four was 
 appointed; the justiciar, chancellor, and other officers 
 were sworn to obey them. And then the king's The Provisions 
 council was chosen anew, and it was ordered of Oxford, 1258. 
 that the state of the church should be amended and the 
 king's household reformed, and that parliaments be held 
 twice a year. The Londoners joyfully welcomed these 
 declarations, and many of the foreigners, foreseeing what 
 would be their fate, fled at once from the land. In a solemn 
 scene the provisions were confirmed by the king and all 
 the great men. " The bishops stood with lighted tapers 
 in their hands," says Robert of Gloucester, an Oxford 
 monk, who was very likely himself present, "and the king 
 and the other high men of the land likewise, and the 
 
72 PROVISIONS OF WESTMINSTER. 
 
 bishops cursed all those who should undo these laws, and 
 then the king and others said Amen, and threw down 
 their tapers to confirm the curse." 
 
 But it was clear enough that this would not mend all 
 wrongs. Henry was eager to be released, and the barons 
 were alarmed " at the fickleness and inscrutable duplicity 
 of the king ". He saw that Simon de Montfort was now 
 his rival, and he knew not what his design might be. One 
 day they met in a storm, when Henry took refuge where 
 the earl was dwelling. " What do you fear?" said Simon; 
 "the storm is now passed." Henry sternly answered, 
 "The thunder and lightning do I greatly fear; but thee, 
 by the eyes of God, I fear more than all the thunder and 
 lightning in the universe ". 
 
 In January, 1259, King Richard returned from Ger- 
 many, and was compelled to take oath to obey the Pro- 
 visions. Later in the year Henry and Simon went to 
 France, and all claims on Normandy and Anjou were 
 yielded up to Louis IX. in return for confirmation of the 
 Limousin, Perigord, and Querci, and a sum of money. 
 
 Already the barons were beginning to quarrel among 
 themselves, and on October 13, 1259, Edward, the king's 
 son, with the bachelery (knights, or small feudal 
 sionsof^^' tenants, not barons) of England, demanded 
 Westminster, ^h^t the twenty-four should put forth some 
 of the reforms they had promised. This 
 request could not be refused, and accordingly the Pro- 
 visions of Westminster were issued. These restricted 
 the powers of the sheriffs, and forbade the grant of land to 
 churches without leave of the donor's lord, but were mostly 
 concerned with matters of feudal interest, and showed 
 that the barons, unlike those who won Magna Carta, 
 were not caring for the people or the church. Thus few 
 changes were made; only the government was not the 
 king's, but Earl Simon's. Richard of Clare, Earl of 
 Gloucester, who had thus far acted as de Montfort's 
 helper, died in 1262. 
 
 In 1 26 1 the king fortified himself in the Tower of 
 London, and it was so hard to make peace between him 
 
THE RULE OF SIMON. 73 
 
 and Simon that it was agreed to submit their differences, 
 and the rights as to the Provisions, to the arbitration of 
 the wise and holy Louis IX. of France. The pope had 
 absolved Henry from his oath to the Provisions, but Sir 
 Edward and King Richard stood firm to their words. 
 The next years were years of great disorder. Henry was 
 away for months in France, and Edward was making war 
 on the Welsh. The Londoners hated and despised the 
 Queen Eleanor, and their attacks on his mother at last 
 made Edward ready to join in fighting the barons. War 
 began at Gloucester in 1263; but on January 23, 1264, 
 King Louis issued his award, called the Mise The Mise of 
 of Amiens, By this all the disputed points Amiens, 1264. 
 were given in the king's favour. He was declared free 
 to choose whom he would as ministers. The Provisions 
 were annulled, but the Great Charter and the Charter of 
 the Forest were confirmed. 
 
 Simon would not submit, though he had vowed to 
 accept the decision. He was at this time fighting on 
 behalf of the Welsh princes against the lords of the 
 Marches. He seemed eager only to make "a great power 
 for himself. He had boldly won the battle for reform, 
 but when it was won his character seemed to change. 
 He would hear of nothing now but his own supremacy. 
 His party did not begin well. Early in 1264, being in 
 need of money, they slew nearly four hundred Jews who 
 dwelt in peace in London, " little thinking (as the Chris- ' 
 tian chronicler says, who looked with horror on the crime), 
 that harm would happen unto them ". Great sums were 
 seized from the richest Jews, and of this much was taken 
 by Earl Simon, "so that", says the chronicler who favoured 
 the royal party, " he might not be free from the guilt of 
 robbery and murder". 
 
 It was the Londoners, indeed, who made peace im- 
 possible. Negotiations they broke up, and they con- 
 tinued to insult both king and queen. War London 
 broke out in the spring. The king was at and the 
 first successful. He took Northampton and ^^^^"s- 
 Nottingham, and Edward took Tutbury, the castle of one 
 
74 
 
 ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVINS. 
 
THE BATTLE OF LEWES. 75 
 
 of the barons, Earl Ferrers of Derby. Then the armies 
 marched southwards, and after fighting at Rochester and 
 Tunbridge, met early in May at Lewes. Simon made 
 offers of peace, telling Henry he wished to free him from 
 his foes; but Henry knew of no other foes than those in 
 Simon's army, and on May 14 they joined battle. Sir 
 Edward routed the Londoners, and avenged their insults 
 to his mother; but Earl Simon defeated the The battle of 
 rest of the royal army, and both Henry, ^ewes. 
 King of England, and Richard, King of the Romans, 
 were captured. Then Henry was compelled to make the 
 Mise of Lewes, by which he vowed to obey the Charter, 
 to employ only Englishmen, to submit to a new arbitration, 
 and to give his son Edward, and his brother's son Henry, 
 as hostages. 
 
 Then a parliament appointed three counsellors. Earl 
 Simon, the Bishop of Chichester, and the young Earl 
 Gilbert of Gloucester, to nominate nine who should be a 
 permanent council, without whom the king might not act. 
 
 At the end of the year a summons was issued for 
 another parliament. To this the bishops and abbots 
 were called, and five earls and eighteen barons, and also, 
 for the first time in English history, not only two knights 
 from each shire, but also two burghers from such of the 
 towns as Earl Simon thought loyal to him. Thus a great 
 step was taken, following that of 1254, towards bringing 
 the people of the shire-courts into touch with the govern- 
 ment of the land. 
 
 But Earl Simon, says the chronicler who favoured him, 
 "was not content with keeping the king a captive" — 
 which indeed was contrary to Magna Carta — " but took 
 the royal castles in his own power, disposing of the whole 
 realm according to his will. And his chief offence was 
 that he claimed the entire possession of the revenues of 
 the kingdom, the ransom of the captives, and other pro- 
 fits, which, according to the convention, ought to have 
 been equally divided between him and Earl Gilbert." His 
 sons, too, quarrelled with EarJ Gilbert. Then Edward, who 
 had been in charge of Henry, Earl Simon's son, managed 
 
^6 THE BATTLE OF EVESHAM. 
 
 to escape by pretence of a riding match, and gathered 
 troops in the Welsh marches. Edward defeated the earl's 
 The battle of ^^"' Simon, at Kcnilworth, and on August 4, 
 Evesham, 1 265, surroundcd the earl's army in Eves- 
 ^^^^' ham town. Simon marched out of the 
 
 streets and up the hill towards Edward's forces, and a 
 hot fight ensued. The king, whom Simon had always 
 led about with him, was dragged into the fight by the 
 barons, and was in great danger, as he was disguised. 
 He could only call out " I am Henry, the old king of 
 England", and "Do not strike me, I am too old to fight". 
 At last, when his helmet fell off, he was recognized and 
 saved by his son's troops. The day went ill for the 
 barons. Hemmed in on all sides they fought gallantly 
 but hopelessly, and Earl Simon fell dead in the thick of 
 the fray. For the next two years some of the barons held 
 out, but they were at last overcome, and by an agreement 
 at Kenilworth (one of the Montfort's castles), October, 
 1266, the charters w^ere confirmed, and the barons ad- 
 mitted to peace on payment of a fine. 
 
 Finally a parliament at Marlborough confirmed most 
 of the reforms that had been made during the years of 
 strife. 
 
 For long years men mourned the great Earl Simon. 
 In spite of his cruelty and his ambition he had seemed 
 Simon de to many to be fighting for the good of church 
 Montfort. ^j^^j State, and the government that he gave 
 was better than the king's misrule. We cannot say what 
 he had planned to do in the end, whether he would 
 have given up all the power he had won to a parliament 
 or even to the other barons. Certain^ly he never gave 
 up the control of the king or the country to other hands. 
 But the people loved him, and the friars mourned his 
 loss in many a poem and tale. His sons were evil men, 
 and two of them sacrilegiously slew young Henry of Ger- 
 many, King Richard's son, as he was at prayer in the 
 cathedral of Viterbo, as a retaliation for their father's 
 death. 
 
 The last years of the old King Henry's reign were 
 
DEATH OF HENRY III. ^^ 
 
 peaceable. His son Edward led many gallant knights 
 with him to a Crusade in 1270. While he was at Acre in 
 1 27 1, the treacherous Emir of Jaffa sent a The crusade 
 messenger, who stabbed him with a poisoned of sir Ed- 
 dagger: He was near dying, but the skill of ^^*"*^- 
 an English surgeon, who cut out the poisoned flesh, saved 
 his life. Soon after he was called home by news of his 
 father's illness. He left the Holy Land to the mercies 
 of the Saracens, and before the end of the century the 
 last citadel of the Christian kingdom was taken. 
 
 Edward heard on his way home of his father's death. 
 Henry expired on November 6, 1272, and Edward was 
 everywhere peaceably accepted as his sue- The death of 
 cessor. He did not hurry home, for he and ^^nry in. 
 his good wife, Eleanor of Castile (whom he had married 
 in 1254), were royally entertained by the Pope, the Bur- 
 gundians, the Flemings, and the French king. He 
 landed in England on August 2, 1274. 
 
 England had changed greatly since Henry HI. became 
 king. Men had grown more to feel the national unity, and 
 the barons had cast off all lingering attachment to their 
 Norman lands. The great council had been growing into 
 an assembly that talked and acted in earnest. The law 
 courts had been developed, and the King's Bench (for 
 suits in which the crown was concerned), the Common 
 Pleas (for suits between subjects), the Exchequer (for 
 revenue cases), and the Chancery (for suits which could 
 not be brought before the other courts) were all in work- 
 ing. England had changed in many ways, changes in 
 but most of all perhaps in the growth of a English life, 
 new and powerful religious feeling through the coming of 
 the Friars. 
 
 As the towns grew and trade developed, as the popu- 
 lation increased, and men of all classes had a wider out- 
 look, the church became unable to meet all the demands 
 upon her for instruction in learning and righteousness. 
 The parish clergy were poor and ignorant; the monks, 
 who had done so much for England a century before, now 
 that their building was finished and their estates were laid 
 
78 THE COMING OF THE FRIARS. 
 
 out, came less and less in contact with the poor, except 
 in the country and in the heart of the largest towns. 
 There was need to minister to the thousands who 
 gathered on the outskirts of the cities, and settled outside 
 the walls free from the restrictions of the guilds. During 
 the century (115 0-1250) a large population had grown up 
 which was outside the care of the parish clergy, and very 
 often outside the law too — men w^ho left the country vil- 
 lages when they could, and wandered in search of work 
 or settled near the great centres of trade. Disease, too, 
 was rife among the poor folk, who were huddled together 
 within and without the walls of the towns; leprosy and 
 typhus and malignant fevers carried off many victims. 
 There was great need for physicians both of soul and 
 body. 
 
 The need was supplied by the heroic work of the Friars. 
 Two orders were founded early in the thirteenth century. 
 The coming They both Called themselves mendicants ; 
 of the Friars, they wcrc to havc no property, and to live 
 1220-1224. wholly on alms. The Franciscans were 
 founded by S. Francis of Assisi, who gave up all he had, 
 called Poverty his 'bride', and brought together poor 
 brothers to revive the work of Christ on earth. Their 
 work was to minister to the poor, the vile, and the sick. 
 The Dominicans, founded by S. Dominic, a Spanish canon, 
 were intended to preach, and thus to awake the masses to 
 a sense of higher things. The Dominicans, who came to 
 England in 1220, were called Black Friars; the Franciscans, 
 who came four years later, were Grey Friars. Others 
 followed, orders founded in imitation of them — the White 
 Friars (or Carmelites) and the Austin Friars. The work 
 of these men was quite different from that of the monks. 
 They went everywhere, entering the parishes of clergy 
 who were negligent, and the districts which no priest 
 served, and preaching, teaching, tending the sick and 
 ministering to the dying. At first the Franciscans were 
 pledged to avoid all secular learning; but it became im- 
 possible to avoid entering into the intellectual work of 
 the day, and in a few years they and the Preachers be- 
 
THE WORK OF THE FRIARS. 79 
 
 came the leaders of thought at Oxford and Cambridge as 
 well as in the foreign schools. Grosseteste Their good 
 was the first rector (or head) of the Fran- '^°^^- 
 ciscans in England, and Adam of Marsh was among the 
 brethren. Devoted as they were from the first to the 
 towns, where the keenest life congregated, they soon came 
 to influence the nation very deeply in politics and in 
 social life as well as in religion. Men came everywhere 
 to live more simply, to be more charitable and friendly to 
 each other, to think less of the distinction of class and 
 clan and more of relieving the sufferings of the sick and 
 poor. Hospitals were built and endowed, great nobles 
 made rules of simple life for their households, men and 
 women in high place joined themselves to the order 
 without leaving their work in the world, but pledged to 
 lives of self-denial and charity. Medicine began to be 
 carefully studied, and the natural sciences. In religion 
 the change was still more marked. Instead of being 
 content with a hasty hearing of mass, the people, rich and 
 poor, came to hear sermons, to attend religious ceremonies, 
 and to devote time and labour to work for each other. 
 A sterner life began to prevail among the clergy. The 
 bishops took care to see that the monks kept the rules of 
 their order, and the clergy, who had often been silently 
 allowed to marry, in spite of the custom and orders of the 
 church abroad, were ordered to put away their wives. 
 The parish priests were ordered to "lead the people to 
 devoutly and attentively hear the sermons of the friars of 
 both orders, and to confess to them"; and soon the 
 bishops come to say that the face of the land was changed, 
 that a new standard of duty was raised up among all 
 classes, and that "to them that dwell in the valley of the 
 shadow of death hath the light shined ". Going in and 
 out continually among the people, and themselves poor 
 as the poorest, and often of humble birth, the friars came 
 to know and to express the feelings of the people about 
 the government and the chief men of the day. The 
 Oxford scholars and the wandering friars wrote popular 
 songs bewailing the wrongs of the church and of the state, 
 
So EDWARD I. 
 
 and shrewdly glancing at the faults of king and barons 
 and pope and bishops. Thus the Franciscans and the 
 Dominicans threw all their strength into the struggle 
 against the misrule of Henry III., and helped greatly to 
 give to the reforming movement the success it obtained. 
 " While the great earl and the noble barons, with a few 
 of the bishops, led the fight against papal and royal 
 tyranny, and the historians of the great monastic houses 
 wrote the truths of the struggle for the eyes of the future, 
 the friars and the lesser clergy gave a voice to the popular 
 feeling, and showed what it was that the people, clerk 
 and lay, really needed, and how they regarded the great 
 issues and the great men." 
 
 Thus, with Edmund Rich and Robert Grosseteste and 
 Walter of Cantilupe to speak boldly on public grievances, 
 with great friars such as Bonaventure and Robert Kil- 
 wardby to be worthy of high office in the church, and 
 scholars such as Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and 
 Duns Scotus to guide the progress of thought, England 
 under Henry IH. did not lack leaders among church- 
 men. And in the state Edward I. himself succeeded to 
 the best traditions of the reformers of his father's day. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 THE REIGN OF EDWARD I. (1272-1307). 
 
 Edward I. was crowned, with his wife Eleanor, on 
 August 19, 1274. He was the first king whose succession 
 Edward's had been recognized, without question, from 
 training. |-j^g moment of his father's death, as due to 
 his hereditary right. He was better known, and perhaps 
 better loved, than the heir of any other king had been. 
 Cruel and hasty he had seemed in his youth when tne 
 Barons' war began, but men soon learnt to know him as 
 a true and honourable knight, who kept his word and did 
 justice, who was stern wuth wrongdoers, but willing always 
 
KING EDWARD'S AIMS. 8 1 
 
 to do right to the people and the state. Edward had had, 
 too, the training of a great king. He had fought within 
 and without the land — in Wales, in France, in Palestine. 
 He had seen men and cities. He knew the foreign 
 sovereigns, and he knew also the great barons and the 
 great clerks and lawyers of his own land. He was less of 
 a stranger than any of the kings who had gone before 
 him since the Conquest. He was born in Westminster, 
 and he lived the greater part of his life (which was a long 
 one for those times) among his EngHsh people. 
 
 When he came back to England to take into his own 
 hands the government of his people, he began his rule 
 with two aims, which he kept ever before his „. . 
 eyes. The first was to bring the whole island, ^ ^^^ ' 
 if it might be, under one sway — if not to be the only king 
 of it himself, yet to make his power as overlord a real 
 one, to be as the old EngHsh kings had been called — a 
 true ' Emperor of Britain '. His second aim was to give 
 his people a greater share than they had yet had in the 
 government of the land. The lessons of the last thirty 
 years had not been learnt in vain. He determined to 
 make the courts free to every subject of the realm, and 
 the council a parliament of all sorts and conditions of 
 men. For England his motto was "What touches all 
 should be approved by all" (^t/od omnes tangit ab 
 omnibus approbetur), for himself it was '' Keep troth " 
 (^pactum servo). It was these aims, and his lifelong 
 endeavours to carry them out in this spirit, that made 
 Edward I. the greatest of our kings. 
 
 In himself he was not only great, he was good. He 
 was of frugal, simple tastes, chaste, and truly religious. 
 He was above all things a warrior and a 
 sportsman. He loved the battle, and he 
 loved the chase. But he was by no means deficient 
 in book learning. Like all great kings he learned to 
 speak the tongues of the men with whom he had to deal. 
 He could talk English, Latin, and French, and perhaps 
 also Spanish. He followed his father in patronizing art. 
 He was himself a lawyer as w^ell as a statesman. The 
 
 (M78; P 
 
82 KING EDWARD'S CHARACTER. 
 
 defects of his character were his impetuosity and his 
 violence. He was rash, passionate, vindictive; and yet 
 he always believed himself to be following the right. He 
 could even descend to a trick, and yet he was always an 
 honest man. Stories are told of him which explain both 
 the terror and the love that he inspired. He was awful 
 in his wrath : once when he was rating a deputation of 
 clergy, the Dean of S. Paul's fell dead before him from 
 sheer fright. He was hasty in his anger: he swam a 
 stream and scaled a rock to punish a careless servant, 
 and he beat a clumsy squire with his own hands, and 
 then made him a present to atone for his violence. He 
 was a good hearty companion to poor and rich, and loved 
 his jest with the merriest of them. He was a devoted 
 husband and a loving father. And with all this, he was 
 one of the greatest men in an age of great men. As 
 statesman, lawyer, warrior, he could compare with the 
 mighty monarchs who ruled abroad in his day, and he 
 left, as few other kings have done, an ineffaceable mark 
 on the history of his own land. 
 
 Edward, after his coronation, turned at once to the 
 work of government. Robert Burnell, who had long been 
 his close friend, and was a great lawyer and 
 an able statesman, he made his chancellor, 
 and soon afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells. His 
 treasurer was John Kirkby, Bishop of Ely. He learnt 
 much from Francesco Accursi, a legist from Bologna. 
 Many other great lawyers surrounded him, and great 
 barons and bishops were among his ministers. Antony 
 Beck, Bishop of Durham, was a fit successor to such men 
 as Hugh de Puiset. He was a great bishop after the 
 fashion of those days, but he was also a soldier and a 
 politician. In his hands the northern shires, over which 
 he watched from his prince-bishopric, were safe. Henry 
 de Lacy Earl of Lincoln, was truest among the great lay 
 men, and served his master stedfastly in war and peace. 
 Besides the Earl of Lincoln there were other great earls 
 who stood around the king. Gilbert de Clare, Earl of 
 Gloucester, had won his spurs in the Barons' war He 
 
THE WELSH WARS. 83 
 
 married a cousin of the king, and when she died the 
 king gave him his own daughter Joan, who had been 
 born at Acre during the Crusade. The king's brother, 
 Edmund, who had never won the Sicilian crown, was 
 Earl of Lancaster, Leicester, and Derby. Humphrey de 
 Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of 
 Norfolk, were to live to lead the opposition to the king at 
 the great crisis of his reign. Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, 
 was the king's cousin, and stood by him closely as long as 
 he lived. Edward used the great earls as counsellors and 
 generals, but he was careful to guard against their political 
 influence becoming dangerous to himself. He strove 
 where he could to attach the earls to himself by marriage 
 alliances, or on failure of heirs to absorb their heritages 
 into the crown lands. So it fell out that under his son 
 their number was much diminished, and men said that 
 Bannockburn was lost because there were but five or six 
 earls to bring help to the king. 
 
 Edward's first work was in Wales. He knew of old 
 how the Welsh princes fought with the Lords Marchers, 
 and how every trouble in England was only too The Welsh 
 faithfully reflected on the borders. Llewellyn, princes. 
 Prince of North Wales, was not long in awakening the 
 new king's wrath. He was called on to do homage. He 
 refused. In 1273, 1274, 1275 he would not come. In 
 1 276 and 1277 Edward made war upon him, and Llewellyn 
 was driven into the fastnesses of Snowdon. At length 
 he submitted, and was allowed to marry Eleanor de 
 Montfort, Earl Simon's daughter and the king's cousin. 
 But as a punishment the land between the Upper Dee 
 and the Conway was shorn from his principality. The 
 peace was not for long. In 1282 war broke out again. 
 Llewellyn was joined by his brother David, who before 
 had served with Edward. The king had tried to intro- 
 duce English law into those parts of Wales which were 
 his, and to teach the wild people through English 
 merchants, and the rule of great barons in strong castles. 
 Everywhere the English were hated, and it was easy to 
 stir up a revolt, south and north joining against the 
 
84 
 
 THE CONQUEST OF WALES. 
 
 English king. Edward was prompt to avenge. He 
 The Conquest gathered a great army, he got the church to 
 of Wales. excommunicate Llewellyn as a traitor, he 
 brought his council to Shrewsbury, and gave his whole 
 mind to the task of conquering Wales. He carried all 
 before him. The war was slow, but the success was 
 thorough. Llewellyn, refusing a pardon on condition 
 
 WALES 
 
 the time of 
 
 Edward L 
 
 (The Castles built by Edward I. 
 are underlined.) 
 
 that he would surrender his rights and receive an earldom 
 in Ireland, was slain in a chance fight near Builth. 
 David, who proclaimed himself prince after his brother's 
 death, was captured, and was tried before Parliament at 
 Shrewsbury. On October 3, 1283, he died a traitor's 
 death. From this dates the conquest of Wales. Edward 
 now set himself to make it firmly united to the English 
 kingdom. At Rhuddlan, in 1284, he issued the Statute 
 of Wales. By it the land newly annexed from Llewellyn 
 was divided into five shires — Carnarvon, Anglesey, 
 Merioneth, Cardigan, and Carmarthen, and everywhere 
 
REFORMS IN LAW. 85 
 
 courts like the English were established. Edward's son, 
 born at Carnarvon in 1284, was made, in 1301, Prince of 
 Wales. Still, however, the government of the borders was 
 left to the Lords Marchers, and Edward did not The statute 
 summon Welshmen to his EngUsh Parliament, °^ Wales, 
 or touch the ancient Welsh law. He united England 
 and Wales under one sway, and he tried to benefit the 
 principality by giving it a good government on English 
 lines, but he did no more. He gave, however, to Wales 
 towns and castles, such as Beaumaris, Bangor, Carnarvon, 
 Harlech, which should make permanent the English in- 
 fluence, and the Archbishop of Canterbury (Peckham) 
 took in hand the reformation and the instruction of the 
 Welsh church. Thus from Edward's conquest date 
 most of the fine towns, and castles, and churches of 
 Wales. 
 
 Thus ten years of the reign went by in the Welsh wars 
 and the Welsh settlement. Then Edward turned to the 
 legal reforms, for which he was so well prepared. He 
 was in some sense the first and he was certainly the 
 greatest of the English medieval legislators. The law 
 before his time was largely ancient custom, modified by 
 the enactments of different kings, most of which were 
 not intended to be of permanent force. Edward was 
 surrounded by trained lawyers. Already judges like 
 Glanville and Bracton had endeavoured to The great 
 compress into one book the essence of the lawyers, 
 many rules under which men lived, and which the judges 
 were to enforce. Under Edward this work was continued. 
 Britton succeeded Bracton, and it may be that the king 
 himself designed to make a code. However that may be, 
 he began by reforms which took the direction of a sub- 
 stantial addition to the law. 
 
 In 1275 h^ issued the First Statute of Westminster^ which 
 provided for the enforcement of peace and order. In 
 1276 there followed the Statute of RagetJian^ The laws of 
 a revision of the law of trespass. In 1278 Edward i. 
 the Statute of Gloucester restricted the power of the 
 barons and the jurisdiction of the local courts. To carry 
 
86 REFORMS IN LAW. 
 
 out the provisions of this statute commissioners were sent 
 round the country to investigate the titles by which the 
 barons held their privileges. Writs were addressed to the 
 great lords asking by what warrant (^quo warranto) they 
 acquired these powers. It seemed to many that the king 
 was interfering with traditional and unquestioned rights. 
 The Earl of Warenne produced an ancient and rusty 
 sword and said, " This is my title. With this my ances- 
 tors under William the Conqueror won their lands, and 
 with the sword I will maintain them." It was a sign that 
 Edward would have to deal, no less than his father, with 
 a haughty and independent baronage. In 1279 came 
 the Statute of Mortmain. By this it was intended, in the 
 interests of the barons as well as of the king, to prevent 
 the grant of lands to churches, or to clergy as such, 
 whereby the land would be released from its feudal 
 obligations and the lords or the king be deprived of 
 military services and many other dues. All grants of 
 land to corporations, whereby the land came into the dead 
 hand^ were forbidden. In 1283 the Statute of Merchants^ 
 for the easier recovery of trade debts, "in 1284 the Statute 
 of Rhuddlan already mentioned, did much to simplify the 
 work of the king's judges and financiers. In 1285 came 
 the Second Statute of Westminster^ which covered a large 
 range of law, modifying and reforming. It included the 
 law de donis conditionalibiis^ which safe-guarded the rights 
 of legal heirs to landed property. 
 
 In the same year the Statute of Winchester revived and 
 reorganized the ancient military force of the land, which 
 had done such good service against King David in 1138, 
 and William the Lion in 11 74. It provided also for a 
 police system, by the enforcement of the duties of citizens 
 in watch and ward. In 1290 The Third Statute of West- 
 mijister [Quia Emptores) prevented the lessening of a 
 feudal lord's privileges by the granting of land from one of 
 his tenants to a sub-tenant. From this date all new grants 
 became as grants from the original lords: and no new 
 manors could be created. In later years there seemed 
 little need for new laws. In 1305 the writ of *Trailbaston' 
 
THE MODEL PARLIAMENT. 8/ 
 
 directed the prompt and rigorous suppression of the 
 thieves and marauders who disturbed the land. In 1307 
 the Statute of Carlisle forbade the collecting of money for 
 the pope. This list shows the comprehensive nature of 
 Edward's legislation, but it by no means expresses the 
 whole of his work in legal reform. Directly and indirectly, 
 by legislation, by the encouragement of a The law 
 scientific study of law, and by the increase of courts, 
 litigation which was to some extent the result of his 
 measures, he did much both to systematically organize 
 the law courts, and to raise up trained bodies of lawyers. 
 Men began to be advised by 'attorneys', and represented 
 by * counsel'. The judges became professional men, 
 adhering to their own work and their own courts, and not, 
 as under Henry II., made useful wherever the king wanted 
 them. The law courts became easier of access, and more 
 rapid, more scientific, and more regular in their working. 
 And in the country at large order was enforced, and men 
 were able to live more securely and with a growing feeling 
 of loyalty to the king and unity in the nation. 
 
 This feeling was increased by Edward's great work in 
 the development, or the creation, of Parliament as we 
 now know it. After various preliminary The Model 
 efforts, he issued writs in 1295 for a parlia- Parliament, 
 ment which should fully represent all the classes of 
 the nation. He did not destroy the feudal council of 
 the king, which the barons attended because they held 
 land of the king; but he took part of this council, and 
 he took also from the shire courts and the church courts, 
 and out of these he made his Model Parliament. This 
 contained representation of the three estates of the realm, 
 the clergy, the barons, and the people (or commons). 
 The clergy appeared by (i) all bishops and those abbots 
 to whom the king sent special summons, (2) two elected 
 representatives from each diocese and each cathedral. 
 The barons were now distinguished by Edward, who made 
 a practical separation between the greater and the lesser, 
 by summoning the former by special writ — and thus 
 creating the House of Lords — and leaving the latter 
 
55 FOREIGN WARS. 
 
 without any special political privilege. Thus the * Com- 
 mons' included the lesser barons or knights, the free- 
 holders, the citizens; and Edward created the House of 
 Commons by requiring the sheriffs in each county to 
 cause to be elected two knights from the shire and two 
 citizens from each important town, who were to come to 
 the Parliament to represent the community which elected 
 them. These three estates were not yet divided into 
 distinct houses, and the inferior clergy, partly because 
 they already met in their own convocation, rarely if ever 
 obeyed the royal summons to send representatives. But 
 a parliament was thus created which fairly represented all 
 interests in the land ; and to this parliament Edward gave 
 the fullest competence in advising and in ordaining that 
 had ever been given to any English assembly. He never 
 shook himself entirely free of the idea of kingship as in- 
 volving a supreme and arbitrary power, but he aimed at, 
 and on the whole he honestly carried out the realization 
 of his maxim * Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur ' 
 (that which touches all, should be approved by all). 
 How important this concession was will be seen as we 
 consider the later history of the reign. 
 
 But Edward had constantly to turn from home to 
 foreign politics, from his great legal and constitutional 
 reforms to the care, and the extension, of his- interests 
 abroad. 
 
 During the early years of his reign he was occupied in 
 doing homage for his Aquitanian possessions to the 
 Edward's French king, his cousin, and in recognizing 
 foreign policy, ^g rights as feudal lord. In 1279 he suc- 
 ceeded in right of his wife to the county of Ponthieu, at 
 the mouth of the Somme, which once again gave to Eng- 
 land a footing in northern France. The Treaty of Amiens 
 in the same year made a satisfactory arrangement between 
 the kings. But the next ten years were years of constant 
 political intrigue, though not of actual war. In 1286 
 Edward went to France for three years. He did hom- 
 age to the new French king, Philip IV. (the Fair), and 
 he busied himself in trying to make peace in Europe and 
 
THE SCOTS SUCCESSION. 89 
 
 preparing for a crusade. He set himself to develop the 
 commerce of Bordeaux, and to found new towns through- 
 out his duchy. But the peace did not last long. The 
 development of the southern trade, which Edward had 
 fostered, led to war with the north. The seamen of Gas- 
 cony and of Normandy were constantly fighting in the 
 English Channel. French ships were captured, and 
 Philip required Edward to give reparation. The English 
 king replied that all men wronged could get justice in 
 the English courts; and when he refused to come to 
 Paris, Philip declared that he had forfeited the duchy of 
 Aquitaine. After negotiations, which the French king 
 used only to gain time, Philip, by an act of shameful 
 treachery, gained possession of a number of castles, and 
 soon of the whole of Gascony. Edward got up a great 
 European alliance against him; but the troubles in Scot- 
 land and Wales, and the difficulties in his own land, pre- 
 vented his ever seriously undertaking the French war. It 
 dragged on for years with varying success, and the French 
 continually aided the Scots, while Edward joined with 
 the Flemings against France. At length a truce was 
 made in 1299, when Edward married as his second wife 
 the French king's sister, Margaret. Peace was made, 
 May 20, 1303, by which Gascony was restored to the 
 English king. 
 
 Scotland claimed a far greater share of Edward's atten- 
 tion than France. In 1286 Alexander III., the last of 
 the old line of Scots kings, died. His heiress was Mar- 
 garet, his granddaughter, only child of his daughter Mar- 
 garet and Eric King of Norway. She was summoned to 
 Scotland, and it was arranged that she should marry the 
 young Edward of England. But she died on her voyage, 
 and there remained no one who had clear The Scots 
 right to the Scots crown (1290). A great Succession, 
 number of claimants started up, and it was agreed to 
 submit the decision to Edward I. as overlord. The rights 
 of England over Scotland had been both indefinite and 
 contested, and their exercise had depended upon the 
 strength of the sovereign by whom they were enjoyed. 
 
90 THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLES. 
 
 But Edward believed them to be genuine and fully legal, 
 and he undertook the task of adjudging the claims as a 
 feudal duty and in simple faith. Three claimants were 
 prominent, Henry, Lord Hastings, John Balliol, and 
 Robert Bruce. On November 30, 1292, the crown was 
 awarded to John Balliol, and he did homage to Edward 
 for the kingdom. For a while the new king ruled happily 
 as a vassal of England. But the French war and Edward's 
 financial troubles led before long to far more serious dis- 
 turbance. 
 
 Edward had all along been hampered by want of 
 money. He had begun his reign with heavy debts of 
 his father's and from his own crusade. So long as there 
 was no exceptional demand upon him, he had been able 
 to carry on the government without any excessive taxa- 
 tion. In 1290 he had yielded to popular pressure, and 
 Edward's ^^^ banished all Jews from England. This 
 money was a Considerable sacrifice of money to him ; 
 
 troubles. ^^^ ^^iq measurc w^as unwise and wrong, and 
 
 it seems to have been carried out in some cases with 
 great cruelty. A few years later the king felt the need 
 of those from whom he could readily obtain money, but 
 he was too honourable to take a bribe (as the French 
 king did) to allow the Jews to return. 
 
 From this time troubles came thickly upon him. His 
 devoted wife, Eleanor of Castile, whom men called " the 
 'peacemaker", died in 1290, and Bishop Kirkby his 
 treasurer in the same year. In 1292 died the great 
 lawyer Burnel. In 1294 a general rising took place in 
 Wales. With the Welsh Philip of France allied himself; 
 and he also induced John Balliol to join him. For the 
 King of Scots had begun to chafe against his suzerain, 
 when Edward began to interfere in local Scottish matters, 
 by summoning Scots litigants to appear before his courts 
 at Westminster. 
 
 It was in the midst of these troubles that Edw^ard 
 The Scots summoned his great parliament of 1295, 
 war, 1296. |.]^^s asking the help and counsel of his 
 people in his greatest stress. Help was not refused. 
 
THE SCOTS CLAIMS. 
 
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92 CONQUEST OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 Clergy, barons, knights, and townsmen all granted liberal 
 taxes, ranging from an eleventh to a seventh of their 
 goods. With this he prepared to meet the threatened 
 danger. To Gascony he sent a large force. Then he 
 prepared to meet the Scots. First he sent a special sum- 
 mons to Balliol to attend his parliament at Newcastle on 
 March i, 1296, with his barons. When they did not 
 come, Edward prepared to march against them. But 
 already a force of near forty thousand Scots had burst 
 into Cumberland, and was ravaging far and near. The 
 chronicle of Lanercost, written at the time in the in- 
 vaded district, says that they " surpassed the cruelty 
 of the heathen, for, not being able to seize upon the 
 strong, they wreaked their vengeance on the weakly, 
 the sickly, and the young; children of two and three 
 years old they impaled on spears and threw into the 
 air, consecrated churches they burned, and they vilely 
 treated and slew women dedicated to God". They 
 were stayed by the stalwart resistance of the burghers of 
 Carlisle. 
 
 Edward did not turn aside. He was soon before Berwick 
 and took it with little difficulty, though with great loss of 
 men on both sides. Thence he marched on. The castle 
 of Dunbar was held against him by its countess, though 
 the earl himself was in his army. The Scots sent a large 
 force to protect it, but Edward's generals proved victorious, 
 and on April 27 the castle surrendered to the king in 
 person. Three of the Scots earls, four barons, and 
 The Conquest scvcnty knights were among the captives, 
 of Scotland. Thencc Edward proceeded and took Rox- 
 burgh, Dumbarton, and Jedburgh. Edinburgh yielded 
 to an eight days' siege, then Stirling and Perth; and on 
 July 10 Balliol came to him at Brechin and submitted, 
 admitting his disloyalty and surrendering the kingdom of 
 Scotland into his hand as a justly forfeited fief. 
 
 On August 28, in a parliament at Berwick, the Scots 
 barons took anew the oath of allegiance, and renounced 
 their alliance with France. Edward, like Henry H. 
 before him at the Treaty of Falaise, took the castles of 
 
EDWARD AND THE CHURCH 93 
 
 Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Jedburgh, and Berwick into his 
 own hands; and he appointed the Earl of Warenne as 
 guardian of Scotland. He took no bitter vengeance. 
 Balliol was kept for only three years in honourable cap- 
 tivity, and was then allowed to retire to his estates in 
 Normandy. The barons who had broken their oaths he 
 forgave. But when he returned he took with him to 
 England the Scots regalia^ and the ancient stone on which 
 the kings were wont to be crowned, and which still re- 
 mains in Westminster Abbey, set into the chair on which 
 British sovereigns now sit at their coronation. Thus Scot- 
 land submitted. 
 
 But Edward's troubles were not over. In 1296 Pope 
 Boniface VIII. had, by the Bull Dedericis /^/V-<?^, forbidden 
 ecclesiastics to pay any taxes on church pro- Quarrel with 
 perty without the pope's leave. Edward had *^^ Church, 
 already done something to anger churchmen. He had 
 compelled Archbishop Peckham to withdraw some 
 canons which had been issued reflecting on the royal 
 power. He had, by the Statute of Mortmain, obtained 
 the power of stopping all grants of land to the church. 
 He had made great demands on the clergy for money, 
 extending in 1294 to half their revenues. And they 
 had been reluctant to attend the national parliament 
 which met in 1295. The Bull caused an open quarrel. 
 Archbishop Winchelsey, who had succeeded Peckham 
 in 1294, refused to allow any further grant; and the 
 king thereupon declared that all clergy who would 
 not pay were outlawed. "You that appear for the 
 clergy," said the chief-justice at Westminster, "take 
 notice that in future no justice is to be done them in the 
 king's court in any matter of which they may complain; 
 but nevertheless justice shall still be done to all persons 
 who have any complaint, against them." At this very 
 time other classes were almost equally at variance with 
 the king. The barons were chafing under his inquiry 
 into their privileges, and his restrictions of their rights. 
 The merchants were protesting against the increase of 
 the customs (6^. Zd. on each sack of wool exported had 
 
94 EDWARD AND THE BARONS. 
 
 been first granted in 1275). It was not hard to organize 
 a determined opposition. 
 
 In 1297 the king summoned the barons. It seemed 
 that his model parliament had soon broken down, for 
 the clergy were outlawed and he did not summon the 
 Commons. Edward demanded that his barons should 
 Quarrel with serve for the recovery of Gascony, while he him- 
 the barons, g^jf ^gj^|- |-q Flandcrs to attack France from 
 the north. Roger Bigot, Earl of Norfolk and Earl Mar- 
 shal, and Humfrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, the Con- 
 stable, refused to go without him. Their duty, they said, 
 required their attendance on the king; but they had no 
 other obligation. " By God," said Edward, " you shall 
 go or hang." " By the same oath," answered the Mar- 
 shal, "I will neither go nor hang." It seemed as if a 
 new barons' war would break out. Edward summoned 
 a feudal levy at Westminster, July 1297, and there a peace 
 seemed to be made. The pope allowed the clergy to 
 make voluntary gifts. King and clergy were reconciled. 
 Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of 
 the Forests. The king then went to Flanders, and his 
 son Edward was left to arrange for the reissue of Magna 
 Carta. The 'Confirmation of the Charters' is an im- 
 portant document. Besides renewing the Great Charter 
 The Confir- ^^^ ^^^ Charter of the Forest, and requiring 
 matio Carta- that they should be read in all cathedral 
 '""™* churches twice a year, it declared that the 
 
 king would take no more such " aids, tasks, and prises " 
 as he had taken without the common consent of the 
 realm, and it undertook that the maletote (or heavy cus- 
 tom) on wool should never again be levied without 
 consent. Edward accepted and confirmed the act, and 
 again in 1299 he renewed his oath to it. In 1300, 
 the Articuli super cartas limited the power of royal 
 officials, and ordered a forest survey. In 130 1 the 
 charters were again renewed and reform undertaken. 
 Thus, though the king had still some means of taking 
 money apart from Council or Parliament, he stood 
 honestly by his word and kept within his rights. But 
 
THE RISING OF SCOTLAND. 95 
 
 the archbishop and the barons still suspected him, and 
 his last years were troubled by their distrust and oppo- 
 sition. 
 
 These last years were again years of strife with Scotland, 
 Wales had again been gradually reduced to submission, 
 and young Edward had been made its prince. But the 
 Scots had not remained at peace after the conquest of 1 296. 
 The Earl Warenne, Edward's minister, had been attacked 
 by an outlaw of Galloway, William Wallace (or the Welsh- 
 man), and was utterly defeated at Stirling, September 10, 
 1297. Wallace became for a time the ruler of Scotland; 
 the battle of Stirling had placed the land at his mercy, and 
 he was a stern conqueror. Contemporary writers record 
 terrible instances of his barbarity, and when he invaded 
 England he spared neither age nor sex. The English 
 border lords retaliated with similar brutalities. Edward 
 determined to bitterly avenge the attack of the " governor 
 of Scotland ", as Wallace was now called. He gathered 
 a great army at York, and after a year's delay he was 
 ready to proceed, having now made peace with France. 
 He pursued Wallace to the forest of Falkirk. There he 
 won a great victory on July 22, 1298, and utterly crushed 
 the power of Wallace. The *' governor" yielded up his 
 office and fled. 
 
 The Scots, however, would not now submit as readily 
 as before. They declared that they held the kingdom 
 for John Balliol, whom Edward had im- The Rising 
 prisoned, and they named three regents to of Scotland, 
 rule the land for him. War went on without any decisive 
 action, till Pope Boniface VIII. interfered, and declared 
 that he was lord of Scotland; but the English Parliament 
 at Lincoln, in 1301, declared that the claim was unjustifi- 
 able, and asserted Edward's right to rule. Year after year 
 Edward fought, with varying success, till in 1303 he over- 
 ran the whole land, received the submission of the regents 
 — the Bishop of S. Andrews, John Comyn, and Robert 
 Bruce, — and after the capture of Stirling, in 1304, drew 
 up a plan for the ruling of Scotland, by which English 
 judges were to be joined to the Scots and the Scots 
 
96 THE LAST WAR. 
 
 Parliament was to send representatives every year to the 
 English Parliament. 
 
 Thus Scotland had a second time submitted to the 
 English king; no leader still held out, and even Wallace 
 in his exile was willing to yield on terms. The king, it 
 appears, was ready to receive his surrender, but Wallace 
 soon changed his mind, for he returned from France to 
 Scotland and remained in hiding. He was captured, and 
 executed in London, "for the robberies, murders, and 
 felonies of which he had been guilty ", for the king, in his 
 narrow legal view of Wallace's actions, refused to see in 
 him anything more than a chief of marauders. 
 
 Edward thought that Scotland was now at peace. But 
 it was to remain so only for a short time. In the winter 
 of 1305 Robert Bruce, grandson of him who had claimed 
 the crown in 1291, murdered the regent John Comyn 
 (who stood loyal to his oath to Edward) in the church of 
 Dumfries ; he mustered his retainers, got himself crowned 
 at Scone, and raised a revolt against the English king. 
 The last Edward again marched northwards, with his 
 
 campaigns, nephew Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 
 as his lieutenant. Wherever he came he conquered, but 
 Bruce fled from him into the wild north and could not be 
 caught. At last Edward determined to put forth his whole 
 strength, and gathered a great army that he might utterly 
 crush the country. As he marched he fell sick. He 
 stayed several months at Carlisle, and when he went for- 
 ward again he died, on July 7, 1307, at Burgh-on-Sands. 
 
 In his later years and in his Scots wars he had been 
 harsh and cruel, but he did all in firm confidence in the 
 justice of his cause. " When he made his solemn vow, 
 at the knighting of Prince Edward in 1306, to avenge 
 the murder of Comyn and punish the broken faith of the 
 Scots, he looked on them not as a noble nation fighting 
 for liberty, but as a perjured and rebellious company of 
 outlaws, whom it would be a shame to him as a king and 
 as a knight not to punish." 
 
 He was a great warrior, a great lawgiver, a great worker, 
 and he died still working. ^ Under his hand the constitu- 
 
EDWARD OF CAERNARVON. 97 
 
 tion of England had changed more than it changed for 
 two centuries after. He had thrown his whole heart into 
 what he did for his people, and he left marks which could 
 never be effaced. Even in his mistakes we cannot forget 
 that he was good as well as great, and his severity does 
 not conceal his true love for his people. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE REIGN OF EDWARD II., 1307-1327. 
 
 Edward II. was a very different man from his father. 
 He was unlike any of his ancestors who had reigned in 
 England. All the Angevin kings had loved Edward's 
 to rule, whether they governed well or ill. character. 
 Edward cared for none of those things. He would have 
 been happy as a baron with half a dozen country 
 manors to look after, or as a wealthy merchant dealing 
 liberally with artists and craftsmen. As a king he was 
 utterly out of place. His father had loved work, he loved 
 nothing but ease. He was weak where his forefathers had 
 been strong, and without being actively vicious he had no 
 active virtue. It was an age when no king could afford 
 to be idle, and the idleness of Edward II. was his ruin. 
 
 The new king began by disregarding his father's last 
 injunctions. Edward I. had been a severe parent — had 
 punished his son's faults, and had tried ear- His disregard 
 nestly to train him for a life of business. Now ^°^ ^^^ father, 
 that he was free the son seemed only to despise his father's 
 memory. He had been instructed to carry on the Scots 
 war with vigour. He left it immediately to the charge of 
 Aymer de Valence. His bosom friend, Piers Gaveston, 
 a young Gascon knight, brave but insolent, who had been 
 brought up with him, had been banished by his father. 
 Edward II. recalled him at once and made him Earl of 
 Cornwall. He then crossed to France to marry Isabella, 
 daughter of Philip the Fair, and he left Gaveston as regent 
 
 (m78) g 
 
98 BARONAGE AND KING. 
 
 of the kingdom. On February 25, 1308, the king and 
 queen were crowned at Winchester; and the king took an 
 oath to hold and keep the laws ^' which the community 
 shall have made ", a clear sign that men knew how great 
 power under Edward I. had come to the Commons. 
 But such a policy was not one to propitiate the baronage, 
 Strength of who took the occasion of the accession of a 
 the Baronage, weak king to assert their own claims to be 
 the real rulers of the land. And while the king was 
 weak the barons had a strong leader. Thomas, Earl of 
 Lancaster, was the king's cousin. He was the son of 
 that Edmund to whom the pope had given Sicily in the 
 time of Henry IH. He had married the daughter of 
 Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, the faithful minister of 
 Edward I. He was high steward of England and Earl 
 of Lancaster, Derby, and Leicester, and in right of his 
 wife he would succeed to the earldoms of Salisbury and 
 Lincoln. His ambition was as great as his possessions, 
 and he lost no opportunity of increasing his power and 
 making his opposition felt. At the king's first parliament 
 The fall of the barons united against Gaveston, and the 
 Gaveston. j.jj^g ^^^ forced to banish him. He turned 
 the disgrace into an honour by making him Regent of 
 Ireland. But the removal of the favourite did not make 
 the king govern well. Parliament was not called again 
 for eighteen months, and the king obtained money from 
 Italian bankers, the Frescobaldi, who collected the customs 
 which he farmed out to them. When Parliament met, the 
 Commons were as active as the Lords in protest against 
 misgovernment. But the king foolishly recalled Gaveston, 
 and in three months Gaveston had again raised the hatred 
 of the great earls against him. The Earl of Warwick, Guy 
 Beauchamp, had always been his foe. Lancaster had re- 
 mained neutral; now he and the Earls of Lincoln, Oxford, 
 Arundel, Hereford, and Pembroke turned against the 
 favourite. 
 
 In March, 13 10, the council of barons demanded 
 redress of grievances, and twenty persons were appointed 
 to make ordinances, "to the honour and advantage of 
 
ORDINANCES OF I31I. 99 
 
 holy church, to the honour of the king and to his advan- 
 tage and that of his people, according to the oath which 
 the king took at his coronation ". The " Lords Ordainers " 
 included Archbishop Winchelsey, now returned from 
 banishment, Warwick, Lancaster, and Lin- xheOrdin- 
 coln. They produced to the Parliament in ances of 
 131 1 the Ordinances of London. By these °" °"* 
 Gaveston was banished, and the Frescobaldi were to be 
 dismissed. In future all great officers of state were to be 
 appointed with the counsel and consent of the barons, 
 and without such consent no war was to be made and no 
 forces were to be summoned, nor was the king to leave 
 England. The Ordinances were the last great constitu- 
 tional document embodying the baronial claim to govern 
 the country. They are strikingly similar to the Provisions 
 of Oxford in 1258. They utterly ignore the great work of 
 Edward I., in admitting the Commons to a share in the 
 work of legislation. They reduce the king to a cipher, 
 and the third estate to a mere consenting but uncon- 
 sulted party. 
 
 But Edward was too weak to resist. He accepted the 
 Ordinances, 5th October, 131 1; but at the beginning of 
 the next year, as he marched to Scotland, he recalled 
 Gaveston and gave him back his estates. The barons 
 at once prepared for war. They marched into Yorkshire, 
 besieged Gaveston in Scarborough Castle, and compelled 
 him to surrender, May 19, 131 2. Then, as he went south- 
 wards to answer for his deeds at the parlia- The murder 
 ment that was summoned, he was carried off of Gaveston. 
 by the Earl of Warwick and beheaded on Blacklow Hill, 
 two miles from Warwick, on June 19, 13 12, in the pre- 
 sence of Thomas of Lancaster. His fate was the result 
 of the king's folly and his own greed; and he had made 
 the barons' jealousy irreconcilable by his flouts and jeers. 
 Warwick he had called " the black dog of Arden ", and 
 Lancaster '' the mummer ". The nicknames were dearly 
 avenged. 
 
 Edward was too weak to avenge his death. The pope, 
 the Earl of Gloucester (whose sister was Gaveston's wife), 
 
lOO BANNOCKBURN. 
 
 and the king's own brother-in-law PhiHp of France, gave 
 counsels of peace; and Edward professed to be reconciled 
 to the earls who had done the deed. Year by year, 
 indeed, he lost the little strength he had had. His 
 father's method of constitutional government was super- 
 seded by the method of the Ordainers. Archbishop 
 Winchelsey died in 13 13, and was succeeded by the 
 Chancellor Reynolds. Henry de Lacy, too, was dead, 
 and Lancaster now held his earldoms. Thus in Eng- 
 land the king was more than ever the creature of the 
 barons and their leader. 
 
 All this while affairs in Scotland had been going from 
 bad to worse. Robert Bruce had captured almost all 
 the chief towns and castles. Stirling still held out, and 
 Edward determined to relieve it. But Lancaster and the 
 barons, who had been intriguing with Bruce, and who by 
 no means wished to see their king a successful general, 
 refused to follow him to the war because the consent of 
 The Battle of the baronage in Parliament had not been 
 Bannockburn. ^sked as the Ordinances required. Edward 
 nevertheless gathered a great army. He had thirty thou- 
 sand horsemen, besides many irregular levies from Wales 
 and Ireland as well as England, and a body of good 
 archers. The armies met at Bannockburn, near Stirling, 
 June 23, 1 3 14. Bruce had a much smaller force, and 
 they were mostly footmen. But he had the advantage of 
 having chosen the ground, and he had digged rows of 
 pits, which he fitted with stakes, to protect his own posi- 
 tion and check the charge of the English knights. The 
 English archers w^ere driven back, and the furious onset 
 of the knights failed to break the Scots' stubborn squares 
 of pikemen. The confusion that followed led to flight, 
 and when the feeble king turned his rein, all the English 
 troops streamed from the field in disorderly rout. The 
 gallant young Earl of Gloucester, Edward's own kinsman 
 and his only true friend, was left dead on the field. 
 
 The battle of Bannockburn won the independence of 
 Scotland, and it completed the ruin of the English king. 
 Revolts began in Ireland and Wales. The latter was 
 
THOMAS OF LANCASTiiJA. lOI 
 
 soon checked; but in Ireland Edward Bruce was crowned 
 king, was joined by his brother the King of the Scots, and 
 for three years ravaged the land, doing great damage, till 
 in October 131 8 he was defeated and slain near Dundalk 
 by the lords of the English pale {i.e. the district in which 
 the EngUsh ruled). 
 
 Lancaster now ruled supreme in England. He made 
 the king dismiss his ministers, put him on an allowance, 
 and required that he should live of his own The rule of 
 (that is, on his income from land and feudal Lancaster, 
 dues, and without taxation). Robert Bruce conquered 
 all Scotland and even captured Berwick, and Thomas of 
 Lancaster would not oppose him. In England there was 
 nothing but confusion and private war. In 13 18 a new 
 council was appointed, but Lancaster was still supreme. 
 In 13 1 9 Edward made another attempt to recover Scot- 
 land, but was driven back, and the Scots invaded Eng- 
 land and defeated the Yorkshire militia at Mytton Bridge 
 — a fight called the * Chapter of Mytton ', because so many 
 clergy were slain. All this while Lancaster, though 
 supreme, seemed to care as little as the king for the exer- 
 cise of power. He would not attend Parliament, he 
 would not fight the Scots, and the barons were gradually 
 deserting him and dividing into parties. The king was 
 winning over the Earls of Warenne and Pembroke; and 
 the two Despensers, the elder of whom had been of 
 Simon de Montfort's party in the Barons' war, were hold- 
 ing the position of his ministers. 
 
 The heirs of the last Earl of Gloucester who fell at 
 Bannockburn were the husbands of his three sisters, the 
 younger Despenser, Roger d'Amory, and Hugh of Audley. 
 D'Amory and Lord Badlesmere, with Pembroke, formed a 
 party to oust Lancaster from power, but they were by no 
 means agreed on their course of action. On the Welsh 
 marches the Earl of Hereford and Roger Mortimer, would 
 ;not keep order, and came into conflict with the Despensers. 
 On July 15, 132 1, the barons in Parliament accused and 
 condemned the Despensers as having interfered without 
 authority in the government and having enriched them- 
 
iq;2 ', : THE, king's rule. 
 
 selves by the perversion of justice. They were sentenced 
 to forfeiture and banishment. Lancaster was again 
 supreme. 
 
 But in October an insult to the queen offered by Lady 
 Badlesmere led Edward to raise an army, with which he 
 punished the offender and then marched on to seize 
 the castles of Hereford and D'Amory. Lancaster had 
 not interfered to save the Badlesmeres; he got together 
 an army when it was too late. The king recalled the 
 Despensers, and was soon at the head of a large force. 
 The King's On March i6, 1322, the Earl of Hereford 
 triumph, 1322. ^^^ ^Y^Q Eai-i Qf Lancaster were defeated by 
 Sir Andrew Harclay at Boroughbridge. Hereford was 
 killed and Lancaster taken captive. Five days later he 
 was tried for high treason in the castle of Pontefract, and 
 was condemned. He was executed as a traitor. 
 
 The king had at last won an unexpected triumph. A 
 parliament at York revoked the Ordinances, and declared 
 that "all matters to be established for the estate of our 
 lord the king and his heirs, the realm and people, shall 
 be treated, granted, and established in Parliament by our 
 lord the king, and by the consent of the clergy, earls, and 
 barons, and by the commonalty of the realm ". This was 
 a return to the good rule of Edward I., and it showed 
 that his son now claimed to rule the kingdom by the 
 popular counsel, and not, as the barons wished, only 
 through the nobles. 
 
 But Edward, whatever his intentions, seemed incapable 
 of ruling well. He marched against the Scots, but he 
 His incapacity had no succcss. Sir Andrew Harclay, whom 
 for rule. |^g trusted, intrigued with Bruce, and was 
 
 executed as a traitor. At length a truce was made with 
 the Scots for thirteen years in May 1323. It was a time 
 of bad harvests and much misery among the poor. 
 Edward left government wholly to the Despensers, who 
 proved greedy and thought only of enriching themselves. 
 So matters went on from bad to worse, and at length even 
 Edward's wife turned against him. 
 
 In 1323 Charles the Fair, the new King of France, 
 
EDWARD'S DEPOSITION. I03 
 
 demanded that Edward should do homage for his great 
 French fiefs of Guienne and Gascony. The Despensers, 
 whose support lay only in the king, refused to let him 
 leave England. At length he sent his wife with his 
 young son Edward, whom he made Duke of Aquitaine 
 and Count of Ponthieu. At the French court invasion of 
 she made friends of her husband's foes, and Mortimer, 
 she fell in love with the banished lord marcher, Roger 
 Mortimer. A plot was arranged, in which even the 
 king's brother Edmund, Earl of Kent, joined. On Sep- 
 tember 24, 1326, Queen Isabella landed at Orwell. Earl 
 Henry of Lancaster joined her with the remains of his 
 brother's party, and all the bishops, too, pronounced 
 against the king. Edward fled to Wales. The Despen- 
 sers were captured and hanged. 
 
 Young Edward was declared guardian of the kingdom, 
 and he summoned a parliament in his father's name. 
 Then the king was captured and put in prison at Kenil- 
 worth. On the yth of January, 1327, Parliament met, 
 and was asked to choose between father and son. No one 
 save four honest bishops protested in favour of the king's 
 rights. The miserable Archbishop Reynolds uttered the 
 wretched saying that " the voice of the people Deposition of 
 was the voice of God ". Six articles were *^® ^^"&- 
 drawn up as reasons for the deposition, (i) The king 
 was incompetent to govern^ he ever chose ill counsellors, 
 and could not tell ill from good. (2) He had always 
 resisted good counsel, and had spent his time in unworthy 
 occupations. (3) By his lack of government he had lost 
 Scotland, Ireland, and Gascony. (4) He had injured the 
 church, and imprisoned, exiled, and slain many great 
 men. (5) He had broken his coronation oath. (6) He 
 had ruined the realm and could not mend himself. On 
 January 20 the articles were sent to the king by the 
 hands of twenty-four representatives of all classes in 
 Parliamentc He admitted their truth and resigned the 
 crown. He lingered on for eight months, while England 
 was ruled by Isabella and Mortimer with savage cruelty. 
 Henry of Lancaster first had charge of the deposed 
 
I04 CHANGES OF TWO CENTURIES. 
 
 Edward, but he was soon transferred to less scrupulous 
 hands. On September 21, 1327, he was 
 murdered in Berkeley Castle, men said in a 
 horrible way. Thus miserably perished the son of the 
 great Edward, a man who might have ruled with his people's 
 love as he was left with the strength of his father's govern- 
 ment. No more piteous tale of mere idle refusal of good- 
 ness and of honest work is to be found in English history, 
 and certainly no more piteous retribution. 
 
 It was a true king that men in the fourteenth century 
 needed, and Edward II. was no king in heart or in mind. 
 Weakness often meets a harsher fate than crime, but 
 Edward's weakness was a crime no less than a failure. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 ENGLAND UNDER THE HOUSE OF ANJOU. 
 
 The two hundred years from the accession of Stephen 
 to the death of Edward II. cover one of the most moment- 
 The changes ^^^ periods in our annals. In 1135 England 
 of two was a conquered country, at the mercy of a 
 
 centuries. strong king or a turbulent baronage, governed 
 by foreigners, slowly settling down under a system of land 
 tenure which was new and strict and oppressive. The 
 old self-government of the English was suspended, if not 
 destroyed; but its survivals, and the influence of routine, 
 gave hope for the future. The experience of the unchecked 
 independence of hundreds of petty lords was bitter but 
 useful; it gave strength to the sentiment of loyalty and 
 confidence in the throne, which was the true support of 
 Henry II., of Richard I., of the great Edward. 
 
 In 1327 England had enjoyed a self-government of a 
 different kind, but of much greater possibilities than the 
 early English system had ever offered. The people were 
 not only recovering the management of their own local 
 
KING AND BARONS. I05 
 
 affairs — they were obtaining control over the central 
 government itself. 
 
 The change was a great one, and it was due most of all 
 to the action of the kings. It is impossible to exaggerate 
 the influence of the individual character of The 
 the monarch in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- Monarchy, 
 turies. A strong king could often carry all before him; a 
 weak king could lose more than all a strong king had 
 won " The hearts of kings and their thoughts are in 
 the hand of God," wrote a minister of Henry II., " and 
 by His judgment they stand or fall." Thus it was not 
 for meaner persons to judge them or even to discuss their 
 actions. This was the theory that commended itself to 
 men's minds under a born ruler of men. It was quite 
 different when men had a king who could not discern 
 between good and evil. The career of Henry II., strong 
 but wicked, finds the completest possible contrast in that 
 of Edward II., weak but not vicious. Thus the power of 
 the nation abroad, and its internal condition also, seem 
 during this period at the mercy of the man who may be 
 seated on the throne. But in reality, by , slow process, 
 the work of the great kings is giving to the people the 
 power to control the kings themselves : it is the policy of 
 Henry II. and of Edward I. that makes the deposition of 
 Edward II. possible. 
 
 The two centuries, then, leave the king scarcely less 
 strong, but they place his strength more definitely in 
 union with his people and therefore ultimately under their 
 control. With the baronage the case is different. The 
 barons of Edward IL, turbulent and selfish The 
 though they are, are of a different lace to Baronage, 
 those who fought for Stephen or Matilda. In 1135 the 
 barons were determined to continue as independent feudal 
 magnates; in 1327 they had learnt that it was impossible 
 to resist the central authority, and they therefore endeav- 
 oured to win that central authority for themselves. Be- 
 sides this they had been foreigners, ruling with a foreign 
 king over a conquered people; they became Englishmen, 
 under a king as English as any of our sovereigns, and 
 
Io6 CHURCH AND PEOPLE. 
 
 they felt themselves of the same race as the yeomen and 
 Th ch h *^^ citizens beneath them. The church was 
 
 the most stable institution of the period. It 
 fought with strong kings and it coerced weak ones. It 
 was by no means always wise or happy, but it gave Eng- 
 land great administrators and hardworking statesmen, 
 and it helped to win Magna Carta and the Confirmatio 
 Cartarum. During the whole of the period it could be 
 said that the church was on the side of liberty; while 
 men like Becket, Edmund Rich, Robert Grosseteste, and 
 a crowd of forgotten friars, helped to give Englishmen a 
 high ideal of purity and self-sacrifice, and to mould the 
 best features of English life. 
 
 The people themselves were winning new rights during 
 this time. The system of the manor, by which the lord 
 
 ruled despotically over all men dwelling 
 ^°^ ^' on his land, whom the lawyer held to be 
 little better than his slaves, was being gradually relaxed. 
 The local courts of hundred and shire, which the tenants 
 (or villeins) came to attend, conferred or recognized rights 
 in them, which grew as time went on. The people could 
 make oath before the king's justices, they could grant and 
 assess taxes in the county court, and they came to vote 
 for men who should speak for them in the national 
 councils. But the greatest change of all was certainly in 
 the towns. From the accession of Henry II. to the 
 death of Henry III. there is a continuous succession of 
 charters to town bodies and corporations. The towns 
 were organized with extraordinary complexity and com- 
 
 pleteness. The great merchants had a guild 
 
 — this began as early as William I. — which 
 grew to govern all the trade in the town, and which came 
 to ask the kings for privileges of ruling, and of freedom, 
 for the city itself. Thus the charters of Henry II. and 
 Richard I. were often granted to the "citizens of the mer- 
 chant guild". The towns won the right to collect their own 
 dues according to their own rules, and pay them in a 
 lump sum to the treasury without the interference of the 
 king's sheriff. Then they came to seek, what towns in 
 
THE TOWNS. 107 
 
 France were winning already, full control of all their own 
 affairs and recognition by the state as a single unit. Thus 
 the great towns, when they received the grant of a "Com- 
 muna" (this was general under John and Henry III.), were 
 treated as a single person, and might deal, just as a great 
 baron or bishop might, directly with the state. They 
 won the right of choosing their own chief magistrate. 
 Under Richard I. London was allowed to choose its 
 mayor and Lincoln its reeve, and the privilege soon be- 
 came common. 
 
 Within the towns the men of each trade clustered 
 together and held themselves close, in streets which bore 
 the names of their trades, watching with special The Craft 
 watchfulness over their own privileges. Thus Guilds, 
 each craft came to have its guild. Lads had to serve 
 apprenticeship under a craftsman till they were free to 
 work on their own account, and at length were admitted 
 to be master-craftsmen themselves. These guilds pro- 
 tected the workmen and kept up the work done to a worthy 
 standard; but they were jealous of intruders, and more 
 and more kept each trade in its own family succession. 
 But the towns were constantly growing, and the country 
 folk came eagerly to them to secure their full freedom, 
 and to enjoy the privilege of having their own free houses 
 and their own work uncontrolled save by the rules of the 
 guild. 
 
 Thus the towns increased enormously during the thir- 
 teenth century, and it was in them that the church, and 
 especially the friars, found their chief work. The wealth 
 that came from trade showed itself in new . , . 
 
 1 J 11 <-.. 1 Architecture. 
 
 houses and new churches. Stone houses, 
 like the famous house of Aaron the Jew, still standing in 
 Lincoln, began slowly to replace the cottages built of 
 wood and wattles. Stone churches everywhere super- 
 seded the old English churches of wood. They began, 
 too, to be built in a new style. S. Hugh of Lincoln, the 
 friend of Henry H. and Richard I., was one of the earliest 
 to introduce the work that is called Early English or 
 pointed. In this there are long, narrow lancet windows, 
 
Io8 THE CHURCHES. 
 
 pillars with clustered shafts, finely moulded and decorated, 
 and tall pointed spires; and the churches are generally 
 long, with fine vaulted roofs. The cathedral of Salisbury, 
 begun in 1220, by Bishop Herbert le Poer, and finished 
 in 1260, is a splendid specimen of this style; and we 
 have also the choir of Lincoln Minster, and the king's 
 hall at Winchester, and later the abbey of Westminster, 
 which Henry HI. rebuilt over the shrine of Edward the 
 Confessor. In the latter part of the thirteenth century 
 came another change. The windows began to have 
 tracery work in simple geometrical figures. Additional 
 decoration was constantly being given to the stone-work, 
 to the pillars and the windows, both in geometrical and 
 in flowing style, and thus we reach the period of Archi- 
 tecture called Decorated, which flourished during the 
 greater part of the fourteenth century, and which gave 
 us much of the work in the cathedrals of York, and 
 Exeter, and Ely. The men who built these great 
 churches must have been both rich and religious. Thus 
 we find the merchants recognized as a separate class, 
 taxed separately, and holding special councils with the 
 Popularity of king, undcr Edward I. And thus the chroni- 
 the Church, clcrs are full of stories which show the simple 
 and beautiful religious faith which existed among the 
 people at large. Church services were very well attended. 
 The poor working people could often go to church daily 
 — and on saints' days there were holidays, when all men 
 attended special thanksgivings, and then held public 
 games and entertainments. There was great reverence 
 for special holiness of life. Many Englishmen were 
 canonized as saints, but the people had held them for 
 such before the church gave them the name. Such were 
 S. Thomas Becket, S. Hugh of Lincoln, S. Edmund Rich, 
 S. Richard of Chichester; and men called a little boy, 
 whom they said the Jews murdered at Lincoln, 'S. Hugh', 
 while some even desired to give like honour to Earl Simon 
 de Montfort. 
 
 The monasteries found employment for many who would 
 otherwise have starved. The great religious houses scat- 
 
THE MONASTERIES. IO9 
 
 tered over Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, East Anglia, the 
 borderlands of Wales and Scotland, and less thickly 
 over the midland and southern shires, did The mon- 
 a great work in reviving agriculture, and in astenes. 
 founding what became the chief English industry, the 
 wool trade. Under Richard I., John, and Henry HI. the 
 wool of the Cistercians was a great part of the wealth of 
 England; these kings seized them without scruple, and it 
 was on the wool and wool-fells (sheepskins) that Edward 
 I. placed special taxes when he was in greatest need. A 
 new feature was added to EngUsh life by the coming of 
 the Friars, by whom the poorest people were ^^^ ^^.^^^ 
 brought nearer to the ministrations of the 
 church, and were also made to express their feelings as 
 to the needs and dangers of the time. The great schools 
 or universities, in the chief monasteries, and especially in 
 the towns of Oxford and Cambridge, grew enormously under 
 Henry HI. Even under Stephen there had been lectures 
 in Roman law at Oxford. By the end of the thirteenth 
 century the two universities became the chief seats of 
 learning in England, and brought up the men who led 
 the religious and political thought of the day. 
 
 Thus through the greatness of her kings and their 
 foreign possessions, through her trade and the influence 
 of her church and her universities, England had become 
 known as a great power in Europe. To retain this 
 position she depended not a little upon her ^j^^ ^^^^ 
 military forces. At home, as has been already W national 
 mentioned, the old English fyrd or national 
 militia was kept up. It did good service under Stephen 
 and under Henry 11. , and it was reorganized and im- 
 proved by the latter king, by Henry III., and by Edward 
 I. It remained without great alteration during the whole 
 of this period, but it was gradually becoming connected 
 more with police arrangements and the ordinary keeping 
 of the peace than with active military duty. Edward I. 
 began the custom of issuing ^ Commissions of array ' to 
 certain individuals, by which they were empowered to 
 select from the national militia a certain number for 
 
no ARMY AND NAVY. 
 
 special duty. These were paid by the crown. The feudal 
 (a) feudal obligation to serve forty days in the lord's 
 ^^^y- cause gradually broke down under the diffi- 
 
 culties that arose out of the constant demands of the 
 kings' foreign wars. Henry II. endeavoured to avoid the 
 danger as well as the inconvenience of calling out the 
 whole feudal force by taking a fixed payment (scutage) 
 instead. He then used the money for the employment 
 of mercenaries. But hired troops, as the only kind of 
 standing army known, were always unpopular in England; 
 Henry II., after 1174, never employed them again in 
 England, and nothing so decisively turned the nation 
 against John as the raids of his foreign hirelings. As 
 Normandy was severed from England the obligation to 
 serve in the field began to sit lightly on the English 
 barons. S. Hugh's famous refusal to pay for troops out 
 of England w^as followed a century later by the refusal of 
 the two great earls to serve themselves except where the 
 king went. And in the latter case the earls asserted that 
 they served rather as officials, the Marshal and Constable, 
 than as feudal barons bound by the holding of their land 
 to military service to their lord. 
 
 During this period the English were acquiring the 
 
 unquestionable sovereignty of the seas. Henry II. 's 
 
 fleet was an important feature in the national 
 
 e navy. strength. The defeat of the French succours 
 in 1 2 17, by some forty ships of the Cinque Ports under 
 Hubert de Burgh, was the first battle in which England was 
 saved from conquest by the courage of her seamen. The 
 encouragement of these towns. Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, 
 New Romney, and Hastings, was one of the chief works 
 of the kings between 1 200 and 1300. They were required 
 to furnish ships, and they received great and special 
 privileges in return. Though thus recognized and re- 
 warded by the state, they were little more than nests of 
 The Cinque pirates, claiming to act under royal sanction, 
 Ports, j3^^ quite as often fighting only for their own 
 
 hands. By Henry IIL's Shipping Ordinance of 1229, it 
 was declared that the Cinque Ports and neighbouring towns 
 
THE STRENGTH OF ENGLAND. Ill 
 
 furnished fifty-seven ships, and one thousand one hun- 
 dred and ninety-seven persons to man them. Edward I. 
 greatly increased the privileges of the Ports, and the long 
 sea-fights of 1293, which led to a practical war with France, 
 show the strength as well as the piracy of the half- 
 recognized English fleet. Besides the ships of the Cinque 
 Ports Henry II., Richard I., and John did much to 
 develop a regular English navy. Under Richard I. for 
 the first time England undertook a distant expedition by 
 sea, and his fleet was famous among those of the Crusad- 
 ing nations for its strength, and for the strict regulations 
 under which it was placed. John appears to have been 
 the first sovereign to give a permanent engagement to 
 seamen, and under him the supremacy of England in the 
 Channel was asserted more clearly than it had been 
 claimed by previous kings. The "sovereignty of the 
 narrow seas", however, was long contested. It was ad- 
 mitted by the Flemings in 1320, but little practical result 
 came from the admission. England, however, could 
 more than hold her own in the Channel, and her fleet 
 could keep off all invasion. Under Edward III. she was 
 to become unquestionably supreme. 
 
 Such was England, learning union within and having 
 strength without, when Edward II. ended his feeble reign. 
 Great kings had made her great in Europe, The strength 
 and as yet she had gained perhaps more than °^ England, 
 she had lost by her introduction into the foreign interests 
 which sprang from her sovereigns' foreign birth and in- 
 heritance. If she was no farther advanced than some 
 other lands in the self-government of her people, her pro- 
 gress had been sure, and her free institutions were more 
 firmly based than those of France or of the Spanish 
 kingdoms. 
 
 And within, in spite of poverty on the outskirts of the 
 towns and the hard lives of some of the half-servile poor, 
 men as a rule lived well, and comfort greatly increased 
 during the two centuries we have traversed. It was an 
 era of emancipation among the poor in town and country. 
 The population rose to nearly four millions. The growing 
 
112 NATIONAL FEELING. 
 
 riches of the country were seen not only in its buildings 
 but in the strong, substantial clothes men wore, the bright 
 colours, the fine furs, and the costly jewels that were loved 
 The national by men and women alike. Foreign con- 
 feeiing. ncxious had brought some foreign tastes, but 
 
 EngUshmen were able to hold their own; the church and 
 the baronage, as well as the people of the thirteenth 
 century, were strongly national, and the great King Ed- 
 ward I. was truly a national monarch. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Acre, captured by Richard I., 43. 
 
 Adela, daughter of William I., mother 
 of King Stephen, 9. 
 
 Adrian IV., Pope, grants Ireland to 
 Henry II., 26. 
 
 Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, impri- 
 soned by Stephen, ii. 
 
 Alexander III., Pope, his difficult posi- 
 tion in the Beclcet quarrel, 23; sup- 
 ports Becket, 23; absolves Henry II., 
 24. 
 
 Alnwick, battle of, 28, 31. 
 
 Amiens, the Mise of, 73. 
 
 Anjou, the counts of, 8. 
 
 Aquitaine, comes by marriage to Henry 
 II., 17; rebellions in, 30, 68; seized 
 by Philip the Fair, 89; recovered by 
 Edward I., 89. 
 
 Arsouf, battle of, 44. 
 
 Arthur of Brittany, 47; his claims, 50; 
 murdered by King John, 51. 
 
 Ascalon, Richard I. at, 44. 
 
 Balliol, John, is awarded the Scottish 
 crown by Edward I., 90; makes war 
 on England, 92; deposed, 92. 
 
 Bannockburn, battle of, 100. 
 
 Barons' War, the, 73-76. 
 
 Barri, Gerald of, his books on Ireland, 
 27. 
 
 Becket, Thomas, chancellor of Henry 
 II., 19; made archbishop, 21; opposes 
 the king, 21; exiled, 22; reconciled 
 to Henry, 23; returns to England, 
 23; murdered, 23. 
 
 Bigot, Roger, Earl of Norfolk, resists 
 Edward I., 94. 
 
 Blanche, niece of King John, marries 
 Louis VIII. of France, 50. 
 
 Bouvines, battle of, 55. 
 
 Bristol, castle of, 13. 
 
 Brittany, ruled by Henry II., 30; re- 
 volts, 30, 33. 
 
 Bruce, Edward, makes himself king of 
 Ireland, 100; slain in battle, loi. 
 rM78) 
 
 Bruce, Robert the Elder, claims Scot- 
 tish throne, 90. 
 
 Bruce, Robert the Younger, rebels 
 against Edward I., 96; his defeats, 
 96; victorious at Bannockburn, 100; 
 ravages England, loi; recognized as 
 king, 102. 
 
 Burgh, Hubert de, wins battle of Dover, 
 60; justiciar of Henry III., 61; dis- 
 graced, 63. 
 
 Carucage tax levied by Richard I., 46, 
 Ca.shel, Synod of, 26. 
 Chaluz, Richard I. killed at, 47. 
 Charter, the Great, signed by John, 56; 
 
 confirmed by Henry III., 67, 71; con- 
 firmed by Edward I., 94. 
 Chateau Gaillard, built by Richard I., 
 
 47; taken by French, 51. 
 Chester, Ralph, Earl of, rebels against 
 
 Stephen, 13. 
 Cinque Ports, the, no, iii. 
 Cistercian monks, their settlement in 
 
 Yorkshire, 16. 
 Clarendon, Constitutions of, 22; Assize 
 
 of, 28. 
 Clericis Laicos, the Bull, 93. 
 Colombieres, interview of Henry II. 
 
 and Philip II. at, 34. 
 Comyn, John, Regent of Scotland, 95; 
 
 murdered by Robert Bruce, 96. 
 Confirmatio Cartarum, the, 94. 
 Constance of Brittany, marries Geoffrey, 
 
 son of Henry II., 30. 
 Coroners first instituted, 46. 
 Coutances, " Walter of, justiciar of 
 
 Richard I., 42, 45. 
 Crusade, preached in England and 
 
 France, 33; Richard I. at the third, 
 
 43, 44; Edward I. at the, 77. 
 Cumberland ceded to Scotland by 
 
 Stephen, 11; taken back by Henry 
 
 II., 19. 
 Cyprus conquered by Richard I., 43. 
 
114 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Danegeld, quarrel of Henry II. and 
 Becket concerning, 21. 
 
 David I. of Scotland, aids Queen Ma- 
 tilda, 10; defeated at the battle of the 
 Standard, 11. 
 
 Dermot of Leinster, introduces English 
 into Ireland, 26. 
 
 Despenser, Hugh, favourite of Edward 
 II., loi; executed by rebels, 103. 
 
 Dover, naval victory at, 60. 
 
 Dunbar, battle of, 92. 
 
 Ecclesiastical Courts, strength of, under 
 Stephen, 11, 15; attacked by Henry 
 II., 22; their powers restricted by 
 Edward I., 93. 
 
 Edmund, son of Henry III., proclaimed 
 King of Sicily, 68. 
 
 Edward I., his place in the Barons' 
 war, 72-75; taken prisoner at Lewes, 
 75; victorious at Evesham, 76; his 
 Crusade, 77 ; his accession, 80 ; con- 
 quers Wales, 84; the great legislative 
 acts of^ 85 ; domestic policy of, 85-87; 
 French war of, 89, 90; arbitrator of 
 the Scots crown, 89 ; his Scottish 
 wars, 92, 95, 96 ; his quarrel with 
 Archbishop Winchelsey, 93 ; char- 
 acter of, 81, 82. 
 
 Edward II., proclaimed Prince of Wales, 
 85; his weak character, 97 ; oppressed 
 by the Lords Ordainers, 99; defeated 
 at Bannockburn, 100; his revenge on 
 Lancaster, 102; ruled by the Despen- 
 sers, 102 ; deposed, 103 ; murdered, 
 104. 
 
 Edward III. , used as a tool by Mortimer 
 and Isabella of France, 103; crowned 
 king, 104. 
 
 Eleanor, sister of Henry III., marries 
 Pembroke, 63 ; marries Simon de 
 Montfort, 64, 66. 
 
 Eleanor of Aquitaine, marries Henry II., 
 17; incites her sons to rebellion, 30; 
 aids Richard I., 45; defends John's 
 French dominions, 50, 51. 
 
 Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I., 
 77, 88; her death, 90. 
 
 Eleanor of Provence, queen of Henry 
 III., 63, 64. 
 
 Essex, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of, 
 his conduct in the civil wans, 14. 
 
 Essex, Henry of, disgraced for cowar- 
 dice in Wales, 24. 
 
 Eustace, son of Stephen, 14; his death, 
 
 15- 
 Evesham, battle of, 76. 
 Exeter, taken by Stephen, 10. 
 
 Falkirk, victory of Edward I. at, 95, 
 Fitz-Osbert, William, stirs up riots, 46. 
 Flanders, alliance of John with, 54; of 
 
 Edward I. with, 94. 
 Fornham, battle of, 30. 
 France. See under names of Louis 
 
 VII., VIII. and IX.; Philip II, 
 
 III., and IV. 
 Frederick I., Emperor, relations of 
 
 Henry II. with, 37. 
 Frederick II., Emperor, marries Isabel 
 
 of England, 63. 
 Fyrd, the old English militia, 10; serves 
 
 against the Scots, 10; called out by 
 
 Henry 1 1, against the revolted barons, 
 
 28; reformed by Edward I., 86. 
 
 Gaveston, Piers, friend of Edward II., 
 97; his quarrel with the Lords Or- 
 dainers, 98; murdered by Warwick 
 and Lancaster, 99. 
 
 Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II., 
 8. 17. 
 
 Geoffrey, brother of Henry II., his re- 
 bellion suppressed, 19 
 
 Geoffrey, son of Henry II., marries 
 Constance of Brittany, 30; his death, 
 
 33- 
 Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, son of 
 
 Henry II., adheres to Henry II., 34; 
 
 his troubles with Richard I., 42-46. 
 Giraldus Cambrensis. See Barri, 
 
 Gerald of. 
 Glanville, Ranulf, justiciar of Henry II., 
 
 32- 
 
 Gloucester, Gilbert, Earl of, allied to 
 de Montfort, 75 ; joins Prince Edward 
 and overthrows Simon, 76. 
 
 Gloucester, Gilbert (2), Earl of, helps 
 Edward II., 99; slain at Bannock- 
 burn, 100. 
 
 Gloucester, Robert, £arl of, supports 
 Queen Matilda, 10; defeats Stephen, 
 13; taken prisoner, 14; dies, 14. 
 
 Grosseteste, Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, 
 his political doings, 67. 
 
 Gwynedd, Welsh principality of, con- 
 quered by Edward I., 83. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 115 
 
 Harding, Stephen, founds Cistercian 
 order, 16. 
 
 Henry I., his character and death, 8. 
 
 Henry II., disputes the crown with 
 Stephen, 15; his accession, 16; his 
 strong government, 17, 19; his quarrel 
 with Becket, 19, 26, 27; makes Scot- 
 land tributary, 28; his legislation, 31, 
 32 ; his conquest of Ireland, 26 ; 
 quells first rebellion of his sons, 31; 
 later troubles of his reign, 34; his char- 
 acter, 35. 
 
 Henry III., crowned at Gloucester, 59; 
 his minority, 61-63; deposes Hubert 
 de Burgh and rules for himself, 63; 
 his misgovernment, 64, 66', his league 
 with the pope, 64: opposition of the 
 barons, 67; his French war, 68, 69; 
 accepts Provisions of Oxford, 70; 
 civil war with de Montfort, 73; taken 
 at Lewes, 75 ; his deliverance at Eves- 
 ham, 76, later years of, 77, 78. 
 
 Henry VI. , Emperor, imprisons Richard 
 
 I., 45. 
 Henry, son of Henry II., his coronation, 
 
 23; rebels against his father, 30. 
 Henry of Almaine, nephew of Henry 
 
 III., murdered by the young Mont- 
 forts, 76. 
 Henry, Bishop of Winchester, submits 
 
 to Queen Matilda, 13; returns to King 
 
 Stephen, 14. ' 
 Hereford, Humfrey Bohun, Earl of, 
 
 quarrels with Edward I., 94. 
 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, opposes illegal 
 
 taxation, 47. 
 
 Innocent III., Pope, his quarrel with 
 King John, 53. 
 
 Inquest of Sheriffs, the, 29. 
 
 Ireland, state of, in 12th century, 25; 
 landing of Richard of Clare in, 26; 
 does homage to Henry II., 26; re- 
 bellions in under Henry III., 63; in- 
 vaded by Edward Bruce, 100; recon- 
 quered from him, loi. 
 
 Isaac of Cyprus, deposed by Richard I., 
 
 43- 
 Isabel of Angouleme, marries King 
 
 John, 50. 
 Isabel of England, marries Frederic 
 
 II., 63. 
 Isabella of France, marries Edward II., 
 
 97; betrays him, 103; cau.ses him to be 
 murdered, 104. 
 
 Jerusalem, crown of, refused by Henry 
 II., 39; advance of Richard I. to- 
 wards, 44. 
 
 Jews, persecution of, in reign of Richard 
 I., 41; expelled from England by 
 Edward I., 90. 
 
 John, made Lord of Ireland, 26; con- 
 spires against his father, 34; given 
 great possessions, 4 1 ; conspires against 
 Richard I., 42, 45; his accession, 48; 
 his wars with Arthur of Brittany and 
 Philip of France, 50; loses Normandy 
 and Anjou, 51; his quarrel with the 
 pope, 52; the interdict, 53; resigns 
 the crown to Innocent III., 54; 
 troubles of, with the barons, 55; signs 
 the Great Charter, 56; last struggles 
 of, 57. 58. 
 
 Jury, origin of the, 19, 28. 
 
 Kenil worth, victory of Edward I. at, 
 
 76; agreement at, 76. 
 Kent, Edmund, Earl of, joins rebellion 
 
 against Edward II., 103. 
 
 Lacy, Henry de, justiciar of Edward 
 
 I., 82. 
 Lancaster, Henry, Earl of, joins in de- 
 posing Edward II., 103. 
 Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, 98 ; opposes 
 
 Gaveston, 99; government of, 100; 
 
 overthrown and executed by Edward 
 
 II., 102. 
 Langton, Stephen, made Archbishop of 
 
 Canterbury by Innocent III., 53; 
 
 joins the barons, 55: aids in drawing 
 
 up Magna Carta, 56. 
 Leicester, Simon, Earl of See under 
 
 Montfort. 
 Leinster, Dermot, King of, invites the 
 
 English to Ireland, 26. 
 Leopold of Austria, imprisons Richard 
 
 I., 45. 
 
 Lewes, battle of, 75; Mise of, 75. 
 
 Lincoln, Stephen defeated at, 13; the 
 French defeated at, 60. 
 
 Llewellyn, Prince of North Wales, his 
 rebellions against Edward I., 83; de- 
 feated and slain, 84. 
 
 London, sides with King Stephen, 10; 
 expels Matilda, 13; riots in, under 
 
ii6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Richard I., 46; sides with the barons 
 against John, 56; supports de Mont- 
 fort, 73, 75. 
 
 Longchamp, William, justiciar of Rich- 
 ard I., 41; his misgovernment, 41; 
 expelled from England, 42, 43. 
 
 Louis VII., divorces Eleanor of Acqui- 
 taine, 17; at war with Henry II. 
 about Toulouse, 20; .shelters Becket, 
 22, 23: long struggle of with Henry 
 II., ^osgg. 
 
 Louis VIII., set up as king of Eng- 
 land by the barons, 58; forced out of 
 England, 60. 
 
 Louis IX., his war with Henry III., 
 68, 69; arbitrates between Henry III. 
 and the barons, 73. 
 
 Lucy, Richard de, justiciar of Henry 
 11., 30, 32. 
 
 Magna Carta, signed by John, 56. 
 
 Maletote, levied by Edward I., 94. 
 
 Margaret of France, married to the 
 young Henry, 20. 
 
 Margaret of Norway, Queen of Scot- 
 land, her death, 89. 
 
 Marsh, Adam of, his writings, 62, 67, 79. 
 
 Martin, papal legate, his exactions, 
 67. 
 
 Matilda, daughter of Henry I., ex- 
 cluded by Stephen, 9; lands in Eng- 
 land, 11; her victories, 13; driven 
 from London, 13; escapes from Ox- 
 ford, 14; retires to the Continent, 14. 
 
 Matilda of Boulogne, wife of Stephen, 
 rallies his party after the battle of 
 Lincoln, 13, 14. 
 
 Matthew Paris, his works, 62, 64; his 
 criticism of Henry III., 62. 
 
 Mirabel, siege of, 50. 
 
 Mise of Amiens, the, 73. 
 
 Mise of Lewes, the, 75. 
 
 Monasteries, multitude of, founded in 
 reign of Stephen, 16; character of 
 in 13th century, 79, 109; legislation 
 of Edward I. against, 86. 
 
 Montfort, Simon of, Earl of Leicester, 
 marries Princess Eleanor, 66; ruler 
 in Gascony, 68; quarrels with Henry 
 III. and heads the baronial opposi- 
 tion, 71; raises civil war, 73; his vic- 
 tory at Lewes, 75; his parliament 
 and government of, 75 ; slain at 
 Evesham, 76. 
 
 Mortimer, Roger, conspires against Ed- 
 ward 11. , 103; murders him, 104, 
 
 Navy, the, no, in. 
 
 Nigel, Bishop of Ely, deprived of his 
 
 See by Stephen, n. 
 Norfolk, Roger Bigot, Earl of, opposes 
 
 Edward I., 94. 
 Normandy, submits to Stephen, 10; 
 
 conquered by Philip Augustus, 51. 
 Northampton, council of, 22. 
 
 Ordainers, the Lords, 99. 
 
 Otto, papal legate, his exactions, 66. 
 
 Otto of Saxony, Emperor, allied to 
 
 John, 54; defeated at Bouvines, 55. 
 Oxford, siege of, by Stephen, 14; great 
 
 council at, held by John, 55. 
 Oxford, the Provisions of, 70. 
 
 Pandulf, papal legate, overawes King 
 
 John, 54; serves Henry III., 61. 
 Parliament, origin of the word, 69. 
 Parliament, the Mad, 71. 
 Parliament, development of by de 
 
 Montfort, 75; by Edward I., 87; 
 
 position of under Edward II., 99. 
 Peckham, Archbishop, 93. 
 Pembroke, Richard, Earl of (Striguil), 
 
 conquers Leinster, 26. 
 Pembroke, William Marshal, Earl of, 
 
 serves King John, 51; regent for 
 
 Henry III., 59, 60. 
 Pembroke, Richard Marshal, Earl of, 
 
 his rebellion and death, 63. 
 Pembroke, Aymer de Valence, Earl of, 
 
 commands in Scotland, 96; serves 
 
 Edward II., 97. 
 Philip II. King of France, his wars with 
 
 Henry II., 33; his crusade, 43; in- 
 trigues against Richard I., 45; wars 
 
 of, with Richard I., 47; conquers 
 
 Normandy and Anjou, 51; threatens 
 
 to invade England, 54. 
 Philip IV. King of France, his unjust 
 
 dealings with Edward I., 88, 89; his 
 
 peace with England, 95. 
 Pontigny, residence of Becket at, 22; of 
 
 Edmund Rich at, 66. 
 Puiset, Hugh of. Bishop of Durham, 
 
 his power under Henry II., 31, 40; 
 
 made Earl of Northumberland by 
 
 Richard I., 40. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 117 
 
 Quia Entptores, statute of, 86. 
 Quo Warranto, writ of, 86. 
 
 Ralph, Earl of Chester, rebels against 
 Stephen, 13. 
 
 Rich, Edmund, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 22. 
 
 Richard I., rebellions of, against Henry 
 II., 30, 34; his accession, 39; goes on 
 crusade, 43; his exploits in Palestine, 
 44; imprisoned in Germany, 45; re- 
 stores order in England, 47; later wars 
 of, 47, 48. 
 
 Richard of Cornwall, son of John, 
 heads baronial opposition, 64, 66, 67; 
 his pretensions to the imperial crown, 
 70; aids Henry III. in the Barons' 
 war, 75. 
 
 Rishanger, William of, chronicler, 62. 
 
 Robert I. of Scotland. See under 
 Bruce. 
 
 Robert, Earl of Gloucester, aids Queen 
 Matilda, n; wins battle of Lincoln, 
 13; taken prisoner, 14. 
 
 Roches, Peter des, minister of Henry 
 III., 63. 
 
 Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, imprisoned 
 by Stephen, 11. 
 
 Rouen, taken by Philip of France, 51. 
 
 Saladin, takes Jerusalem, 33; campaigns 
 of Richard I. against, 43, 44. 
 
 Salisbury, John of, his writings, 36. 
 
 Salisbury, William Longsword, Earl of, 
 burns French fleet, 54; defeated at 
 Bouvines, 56. 
 
 Scarborough, Gaveston besieged at, 99. 
 
 Scone, Bruce crowned at, 96. 
 
 Scotland. See under A iejcander II. and 
 ///., Davzci, Robert I., Balliol, Wal- 
 lace, &c. 
 
 Scutage imposed by Henry II., 20. 
 
 Sheriffs, the Inquest of, 29. 
 
 Spain, dealings of Henry II, with, 37. 
 
 Standard, battle of the, 10, 11. 
 
 Statute of Wales, 85. 
 
 Stephen, King, his accesdon, 10; his 
 quarrel with th^ clergy, 11; rebellions 
 against, 12; taken prisoner, 13; re- 
 leased and restored, 14; dies, 15. 
 
 Stirling, battle at bridge of, 95; siege 
 of, 100. 
 
 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 14, 15. 
 
 Thomas of Lancaster, intrigues against 
 Gaveston, 98; contests the govern- 
 ment of the realm, loi ; his rebellion 
 and death, 102. 
 
 Thurstan, Archbishop of York, 10. 
 
 Toulouse, the war of, 20. 
 
 Touraine, held by Henry II., 17; con- 
 quered by Philip Augustus, 51. 
 
 Towns, the, in the 13th century, 106, 
 107. 
 
 Trailbaston, writ of, 86, 87. 
 
 Tutbury, taken by Edward I., 73. 
 
 Valence, William and Aymer of See 
 under Pembroke. 
 
 Wales, campaigns of Henry II. in, 24; 
 troubles of, in time of Henry III., 63, 
 70; conquered by Edward I., 84; re- 
 organization of, 85. 
 
 Wallace, William, rising of, 95 ; defeated 
 at Falkirk, 95; taken and executed, 
 96. 
 
 Wallingford, treaty of, 15. 
 
 Walter, Hubert, archbishop and jus- 
 ticiar, 45, 47; death of, 52, 
 
 Walter of Coutances, justiciar, 43, 45. 
 
 Warrenne, John, Earl of, opposes Quo 
 Warranto, 86; wins battle of Dunbar, 
 92; defeated by Wallace, 95. 
 
 Warwick, Guy, Earl of, 98; slays Gave- 
 ston, 99. 
 
 Wash, John's disaster at the, 58. 
 
 Westminster, First Statute of,85 ; Second 
 Statute of, 86; Third Statute of, 86. 
 
 Wexford, taken by the English, 26. 
 
 William the Lion, King of Scots, makes 
 war on Henry II., 28, 31; does hom- 
 age, 28, 50. 
 
 Winchelsey, Archbishop, his quarrel 
 with Edward I., 93; a Lord Ordainer, 
 99. 
 
 Winchester, Matilda at, 13. 
 
 Winchester, Statute of, 86. 
 
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 NE T RA TES, and would solicit correspondence concerning 
 
 terms for examination and introduction copies. 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers 
 
 153-157 Fifth Avenue, New York. 
 
THE GREAT SUCCESS OF 
 THE SERIES 
 
 is the best proof of its general popularity, and the excellence of 
 the various volumes is further attested by their having been 
 adopted as text-books in many of our leading educational institu- 
 tions. The publishers beg to call attention to the following list 
 comprising some of the most prominent institutions using volumes 
 of the series : 
 
 Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 
 Univ. of Vermont, Burlington, Vt. 
 Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn. 
 Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass. 
 Bellewood Sem., Anchorage, Ky. 
 Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, Tenn. 
 State Univ., Minneapolis, Minn. 
 Christian Coll., Columbia, Mo. 
 Adelphi Acad., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
 Earlham Coll., Richmond, Ind. 
 Granger Place School, Canandaigua, 
 
 N. Y. 
 Salt Lake Acad., Salt Lake City, Utah. 
 Beloit Col., Beloit, Wis. 
 Logan Female Coll., Russellville, Ky. 
 No. West Univ., Evanston, 111. 
 State Normal School, Baltimore, Md. 
 Hamilton Coll., Clinton, N. Y. 
 Doane Coll., Crete, Neb. 
 Princeton College, Princeton, N.J. 
 Williams Coll., Williamstown, Mass. 
 Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N. Y. 
 Illinois Coll., Jacksonville, 111. 
 
 Univ^ of South, Sewaunee, Tenn. 
 Wesleyan Univ., Mt. Pleasant, la. 
 Univ. of Cal., Berkeley, Cal. 
 So. Car. Coll., Columbia, S. C. 
 Amsterdam Acad., Amsterdam, 
 
 N. Y. 
 Carleton Coll., Northfield, Minn. 
 Wesleyan Univ., Middletown, Mass. 
 Albion Coll., Albion, Mich. 
 Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, N. H. 
 Wilmington Coll., Wilmington, O. 
 Madison Univ., Hamilton, N. Y. 
 Syracuse Univ., Syracuse, N. Y. 
 Univ. of Wis., Madison, Wis, 
 Union Coll., Schenectady, N. Y. 
 Norwich Free Acad., Norwich, Conn. 
 Greenwich Acad., Greenwich, Conn. 
 Univ. of Neb., Lincoln, Neb. 
 Kalamazoo Coll., Kalamazoo, Mich. 
 Olivet Coll., Olivet, Mich. 
 Amherst Coll., Amherst, Mass. 
 Ohio State Univ., Columbus, O. 
 Free Schools, Oswego, N. Y. 
 
 Bishop J. F. Hurst, ex- President of Drezv Theol. Sem, 
 '* It appears to mc that the idea of Morris in his Epochs is 
 strictly in harmony with the philosophy of history — namely, that 
 great movements should be treated not according to narrow 
 geographical and national limits and distinction, but universally, 
 according to their place in the general life of the world. The 
 historical Maps and the copious Indices are welcome additions 
 to the volumes. " 
 
EPOCHS OF MODERN 
 HISTORY. 
 
 A SERIES OF BOOKS NARRATING THE HISTORY OF 
 
 ENGLAND AND EUROPE AT SUCCESSIVE EPOCHS 
 
 SUBSEQUENT TO THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 
 
 Edited by 
 
 Edward E. Morris. 
 
 Eighteen volumes, i6mo, with 74 Maps, Plans, and Tables. 
 
 Sold separately. Price per vol., $1.00. 
 
 The Set, Roxburgh style, gilt top, in box, $18.00. 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES- 
 England and Europe in the Ninth Century. 
 
 By the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M.A. 
 
 "A remarkably thoughtful and satisfactory discussion of 
 the causes and results of the vast changes which came upon 
 Europe during the period discussed. The book is adapted to 
 be exceedingly serviceable." — Chicago Standard. 
 
 "At once readable and valuable. It is comprehensive and 
 yet gives the details of a period most interesting to the student 
 of history. " — Herald and Presbyter. 
 
 '* It is written with a clearness and vividness of statement 
 which make it the pleasantest reading. It represents a great 
 deal of patient research, and is careful and scholarly." — • 
 Boston Journal. 
 
 THE NORMANS IN EUROPE— The Feudal 
 System and England under the Norman 
 Kings. By Rev. A. H. Johnson, M.A. 
 
 ** Its pictures of the Normans in their home, of the Scan- 
 dinavian exodus, the conquest of England, and Norman 
 administration, are full of vigor and cannot fail of holding the 
 reader's attention." — Episcopal Register. 
 
 " The style of the author is vigorous and animated, and he 
 has given a valuable sketch of the origin and progress of the 
 great Northern movement that has shaped the history 0/ 
 modern Europe." — Boston Transcript. 
 
EPOCHS OF MODERN- HISTORY 
 
 THE CRUSADES. By Rev. G. W. Cox. 
 
 " To be warmly commended for important qualities. The 
 author shows conscientious fidelity to the materials, and such 
 skill in the use of them, that, as a result, the reader has 
 before him a narrative related in a style that makes it truly 
 fascinating. ' ' — Congregationalist. 
 
 *' It is written in a pure and flowing style, and its arrange- 
 ment and treatment of subject are exceptional." — Christian 
 Intelligencer. 
 
 THE EARLY P L A N T AG EN ETS-Their 
 Relation to the History of Europe; The 
 Foundation and Growth of Constitutional 
 Government. By Rev. w. Stubbs, m.a. 
 
 ''Nothing could be desired more clear, succinct, and well 
 arranged. All parts of the book are well done. It may be 
 pronounced the best existing brief history of the constitution 
 for this, its most important period." — The Nation. 
 
 ''Prof. Stubbs has presented leading events with such fair- 
 ness and wisdom as are seldom found. He is remarkably 
 clear and satisfactory." — The Churchman. 
 
 EDWARD 111. By Rev. W. Warburton, M.A. 
 
 " The author has done his work well, and we commend it 
 as containing in small space all essential matter." — New York 
 Independent. 
 
 ** Events and movements are admirably condensed by the 
 author, and presented in such attractive form as to entertain 
 as well as instruct." — Chicago Interior. 
 
 THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK 
 —The Conquest and Loss of France. By 
 
 James Gairdner. 
 
 "Prepared in a most careful and thorough manner, and 
 ought to be read by every student. " — New York Times. 
 
 " It leaves nothing to be desired as regards compactness, 
 accuracy, and excellence of literary execution." — Boston 
 Journal. 
 
EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY 
 
 THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REVO- 
 LUTION. By Frederic Seebohm. With Notes, on 
 Books in English relating to the Reformation, by Prof. 
 George P. Fisher, D.D. 
 
 "For an impartial record of the civil and ecclesiastical 
 changes about four hundred years ago, we cannot commend a 
 better manual." — Sunday- School Times. 
 
 "All that could be desired, as well in execution as in plan. 
 The narrative is animated, and the selection and grouping of 
 events skillful and effective." — The Nation. 
 
 THE EARLY TUDORS— Henry VII., Henry 
 VIII. By Rev. C. E. Moberley, M.A., late Master in 
 Rugby School. 
 
 "Is concise, scholarly, and accurate. On the epoch of which 
 it treats, we know of no work which equals it." — N. Y. Observer. 
 
 " A marvel of clear and succinct brevity and good historical 
 judgment. There is hardly a better book of its kind to be 
 named." — New York Independent. 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. By Rev. M. 
 Creighton, M.A. 
 
 " Clear and compact in style ; careful in their facts, and 
 just in interpretation of them. It sheds much light on the 
 progress of the Reformation and the origin of the Popish 
 reaction during Queen Elizabeth's reign ; also, the relation of 
 Jesuitism to the latter." — Presbyterian Review. 
 
 " A clear, concise, and just story of an era crowded with 
 events of interest and importance." — N^tv Yc^^^ ^^^orld. 
 
 THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR— I 61 b- 1 648- 
 
 By Samuel Rawson Gardiner. 
 
 " As a manual it will prove of the greatest practical value, 
 while to the general reader it will afford a clear and interesting 
 account of events. We know of no more spirited and attractive 
 recital of the great era. " — Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 ** The thrilling story of those times has never been told so 
 vividly or succinctly as in this volume." — Episcopal Register. 
 
EPOCHS OF MODERiV HISTORY, 
 
 THE PURITAN REVOLUTION; and the First 
 Two Stuarts, 1 603- 1 660. By Samuel Rawson 
 Gardiner. 
 
 " The narrative is condensed and brief, yet sufficiently com- 
 prehensive to give an adequate view of the events related." 
 — Chicago Standard. 
 
 **Mr. Gardiner uses his researches in an admirably clear 
 and fair way " — Congregaiionalisi. 
 
 * * The ^ketcn io concise, but clear and perfectly intelligible." 
 — Hartford Courant, 
 
 THE ENGLISH RESTORATION AND LOUIS 
 XIV., from the Peace of Westphalia to the 
 Peace of Nimwegen. By Osmund Airy, M.A. 
 
 •• It is crisply and admirably written. An immense amount 
 oi information is conveyed and with great clearness, the 
 arrangement of the subjects showing great skill and a thor- 
 ough command of the complicated theme." — Boston Saturday 
 Evening Gazette. 
 
 *'The author writes with fairness and discrimination, and 
 has given a clear and intelligible presentation of the time." — 
 New York Evangelist. 
 
 THE FALL OF THE STUARTS; and Western 
 Europe. By Rev. Edward Hale, M.A. 
 
 " A valuable compend to the general reader and scholar." 
 — Providence Journal. 
 
 **It will be found of great value. It is a very graphic 
 account of the history of Europe during the 17th century, 
 and is admirably adapted for the use of students." — Boston 
 Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 "An admirable handbook for the student. " — The Churchman, 
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. By Edward E. Morris, M.A. 
 
 "The author's arrangement of the material is remarkably 
 clear, his selection and adjustment of the facts judicious, his 
 historical judgment fair and candid, while the style wins by 
 its simple elegance." — Chicago Standard. 
 
 *• An excellent compendium of the history of an important 
 period." — The Watchman, 
 
EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY. 
 
 THE EARLY HANOVERIANS-Europe from 
 the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix- 
 la-Chapelle. By Edward E. Morris, M.A. 
 
 ** Masterly, condensed, and vigorous, this is one of the 
 books which it is a delight to read at odd moments ; which 
 are broad and suggestive, and at the same time r:ndensed in 
 treatment. " — Christian Advocate. 
 
 *' A remarkably clear and readable summary of the salient 
 points of interest. The maps and tables, no less than the 
 author's style and treatment of the subject, entitle the volume 
 to the highest claims of recognition." — Boston Daily Ad- 
 vertiser, 
 
 FREDERICK THE GREAT, AND THE SEVEN 
 YEARS' WAR. By F. W. Longman. 
 
 * ' The subject is most important, and the author has treated 
 it in a way which is both scholarly and entertaining." — The 
 Churchman. 
 
 •'Admirably adapted to interest school boys, and older 
 heads will find it pleasant reading." — New York Tribune. 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FIRST 
 EMPIRE. By William O'Connor Morris. With 
 Appendix by Andrew D. White, LL.D., ex-President of 
 Cornell University. 
 
 ** We have long needed a simple compendium of this period, 
 and we have here one which is brief enough to be easily run 
 through with, and yet particular enough to make entertaining 
 reading." — New York Evening Post. 
 
 *' The author has well accomplished his difficult task of 
 sketching in miniature the grand and crowded drama of the 
 French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, showing 
 himself to be no servile compiler, but capable of judicious 
 and independent criticism," — Springfield Republica7t. 
 
 THE EPOCH OF REFORM— 1 830-1 850. By 
 
 Justin McCarthy. 
 
 "Mr. McCarthy knows the period of which he writes 
 thoroughly, and the result is a narrative that is at once enter- 
 taining and trustworthy." — New York Examiner. 
 
 ** The narrative is clear and comprehensive, and told with 
 abundant knowledge and grasp of the subject." — Boston 
 Courier, 
 
IMPORTANT HISTORICAL 
 WORKS. 
 
 CIVILIZATION DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 Especially in its Relation to Modern Civil- 
 ization. By George B. Adams, Professor of History in 
 Yale University. 8vo, ^2.50. 
 
 Professor Adams has here suppHed the need of a text-book 
 for the study of Mediaval History in college classes at once 
 thorough and yet capable of being handled in the time usually 
 allowed to it. He has aimed to treat the subject in a manner 
 which its place in the college curriculum demands, by present- 
 ing as clear a view as possible of the underlying and organic 
 growth of our civilization, how its foundations were laid and its 
 chief elements introduced. 
 
 Prof. Kendric C. Babcock, University of Minnesota: — ''It 
 is one of the best books of the kind which I have seen. We 
 shall use it the coming term." 
 
 Prof. Marshall S. Brown, Michigan University: — "I 
 regard the work as a very valuable treatment of the great 
 movements of history during the Middle Ages, and as one 
 destined to be extremely helpful to young students. ' ' 
 
 Boston Herald: — ^'Professor Adams admirably presents 
 the leading features of a thousand years of social, political, 
 and religious development in the history of the world. It is 
 valuable from beginning to end." 
 
 HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By E. 
 
 Benjamin Andrews, D.D., LL.D., President of Brown 
 University. With maps. Two vols., crown octavo, ^4.00. 
 
 Boston Advertiser: — ''We doubt if there has been so 
 complete, graphic, and so thoroughly impartial a history of our 
 country condensed into the same space. It must become a 
 standard." 
 
 Advance: — "One of the best popular, general histories of 
 America, if not the best." 
 
 Herald and Presbyter : — " The very histoiy that many 
 people have been looking for. It does not consist simply of 
 minute statements, but treats of causes and effects with philo- 
 sophical grasp and thoughtfulness. It i^ the work of a scholar 
 and thinker." 
 
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