HISTORY
OF
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
BY
JOHN EICHAED GREEN, M.A.
VOLUME I.
KARLY ENGLAND 449-1071 THE CHARTER 1204-1291
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS 1071-1214 THE PARLIAMENT 1307-1461
WITH EIGHT MAPS
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1913
f|ris
TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS,
MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY,
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN,
AND
WILLIAM STUBBS.
o
*
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN. 449577
CHAPTER II.
OQ
THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 577 796 ....-
CHAPTER III.
WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN. 796947 ........ 70
CHAPTER IV.
FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY. 954 1071 ...... 87
CONTENTS.
BOOK II.
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE CONQUEROR. 1071 1085 123
CHAPTER II.
THE NORMAN KINGS. 10851154 135
CHAPTER III.
HENRY THE SECOND. 11541189 161
CHAPTER IV.
THE ANGEVIN KINGS. 1189 1204 . 183
BOOK III.
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
CHAPTER I.
JOHN, 12141216 195
CHAPTER II.
HENRY THE TH1ED. 12161232 .... 250
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER III.
PACK
THE BARONS' WAR. 12321272 ... , 271
CHAPTER IV
HOWARD THE FIRST. 1272 1307 313
BOOK IV.
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
CHAPTER L
KDWARD THE SECOND. 1307 1327 . 370
CHAPTER II.
EDWARD TIIK THIRD. 13271347 393
CHAPTER III
THE PEASANT REVOLT, 1347 1381 , 426
CHAPTER IV.
RICHARD THE SECOND. 1381 1400 . . , 486
CHAPTER V.
THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER. 1399 1422 521
CHAPTER VL
THE WARS OF THE ROSES. 1422 1461 , 546
LIST OF MAPS.
NO. PAGE
1. BRITAIN AND THE ENGLISH CONQUEST 24
2. THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS IN A.D. 600 32
3. ENGLAND AND THE DANELAGH 73
4. THE DOMINIONS OF THE ANGEVINS 160
5. IRELAND JUST BEFORE THE ENGLISH INVASION .... 176
6. SCOTLAND IN 1290 , 345
7. FRANCE AT THE TREATY OP BRETIGNY ....... 440
8. THE WARS OF THE ROSES 574
BOOK I.
EARLY ENGLAND.
4491071.
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I.
(4491071.)
For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are
scant and imperfect. The only extant British account is the " Epis-
tola " of Gildas, a work written probably about A.B. 560. The style of
Gildas is diffuse and inflated, but his book is of great value in the light
it throws on the state of the island at that time, and as giving at its
close what is probably the native story of the conquest of Kent. This
is the only part of the struggle of which we have any record from
the side of the conquered. The English conquerors, on the other
hand, have left jottings of their conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex
in the curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now
known as the " English " or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," annals which are
undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture.
For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern
Coast we possess no written materials from either side ; and a frag-
ment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compil-
ation ( " Historia Britonum " ) which bears the name of Nennius alone
throws light on the conquest of the North.
From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded
by a wonderful combination of historical and archaeological knowledge
in constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South-
western Britain which must serve as the starting-point for all future
enquirers. This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of
the account given in my text ; and I can only trust that it may eoon
be embodied in some more accessible form than that of a series of
papers in the Transactions of the Archaeological Institute. In a like
way, though Kemble's " Saxons in England " and Sir F. Palgrave's
" History of the English Commonwealth " (if read with caution) contain
much that is worth notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution
of the English people and the changes introduced into it since their
settlement in Britain must be mainly drawn from the "Constitutional
History" of Professor Stubbs. In my earlier book I had not the ad-
vantage of aid from this invaluable work, which was then unpublished ;
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
in the present I do little more than follow it in all constitutional
questions as far as it has at present gone.
Bseda's " Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum," a work of which
I have spoken in my text, is the primary authority for the history oi
the Northumbrian overlordship which followed the Conquest. It is
by copious insertions from B;eda that the meagre regnal and episcopal
annals of the West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which they
at present appear in the part of the English Chronicle which concerns
this period. The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, with those of Cuthbert by an
anonymous contemporary and by Bseda himself, throw great light on
the religious and intellectual condition of the North at the time of its
supremacy. But with the fall of Northumbria we pass into a period
of historical dearth. A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved
among the meagre annals of Wessex in the English Chronicle : but
for the most part we are thrown upon later writers, especially Henry
of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, who, though authors of
the twelfth century, had access to older materials which are now lost.
A little may be gleaned from biographies such as that of Guthlac of
Crowland ; but the letters of Boniface and Alcwine, which have been
edited by Jaffe in his series of " Monumenta Germanica," form the most
valuable contemporary materials for this period.
From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the English
Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we have said, is a com-
pilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the Conquest of South
Britain, and (2) Short Notices of the Kings and Bishops of Wessex
expanded by copious insertions from Ba?da, and after the end of his
work by brief additions from some northern sources. These materials
may have been thrown together into their present form in Alfred's
time as a preface to the far fuller annals which begin with the reign
of .ZEthelwulf, and which widen into a great contemporary history
when they reach that of Alfred himself! After jElfred's day the
Chronicle varies much in value. Through the reign of Eadward the
Elder it is copious, and a Mercian Chronicle is imbedded in it : it
then dies down into a series of scant and jejune entries, broken how-
ever with grand battle-songs, till the reign of .^Ethelred when its
fulness returns.
Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass
of historical material for the age of Alfred and his successors
The life of ^Elfred which bears the name of Asser, puzzling as it
is in some ways, is probably really Asser's work, and certainly
of contemporary authority. The Latin rendering of the English
Chronicle which bears the name of ^Ethelweard adds a little to
our knowledge of this time. The Laws, which form the base of
our constitutional knowledge of this period, fall, as has been
well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
Eadward, -^Ethelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the earlier laws
of jEthelberht and Ine, " mainly of the nature of amendments of
custom." Those of Alfred, yEthelred, Cnut, with those which bear
the name of Eadward the Confessor, " aspire to the character of
Codes." They are printed in Mr. Thorpe's " Ancient Laws and In-
stitutes of England," but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs
in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly bears on our
AUTHORITIES.
constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters and other documents
belonging to this period has been collected by Kemble in his " Codex
Diplomaticus JEvi Saxonici," and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in
his " Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum." Dunstan's biographies have
been collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series published
by the Master of the Eolls.
In the period which follows the accession of ^Ethelred we are still
aided by these collections of royal Laws and Charters, and the
English Chronicle becomes of great importance. Its various copies
indeed diiier so much in tone and information from one another that
they may to some extent be looked upon as di&tinct works, and " Flo-
rence of Worcester" is probably the translation of a valuable copy of
the " Chronicle " which has disappeared. The translation however
was made in the twelfth century, and it is coloured by the revival of
national feeling which was characteristic of the time. Of Eadward the
Confessor himself we have a contemporary biography (edited by Mr.
Luard for the Master of the Rolls) which throws great light on
the personal history of the King and oa his relations to the house of
Godwine.
The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of St. Quentin,
u verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and con-
tinued by William of Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror.
William's work in turn served as the basis of the " Roman de Rou "
composed by Wace in the time of Henry the Second. The primary
authority for the Conqueror himself is the " Gesta Williemi " of his
chaplain and violent partizan, William of Poitiers. For the period of
the invasion, in which the English authorities are meagre, we have
besides these the contemporary " Carmen de Bello Hastingeusi," by
Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the pictures in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and confused but
honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement in
Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his account of
the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary authorities
for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for northern
matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his remark-
able combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book
is of course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief docu-
ments for the early history of Anjou have been collected in the
" Chroniques d' Anjou " published by the Historical Society of France.
Those which are authentic are little more than a few scant annals of
religious houses ; but li'^ht is thrown on them by the contemporary
French chronicles. The " Gesta Comitum " is nothing but a compila-
tion of the twelfth century, in which a mass of Angevin romance as
to the early story of the Counts is dressed into historical shape by
copious quotations from these French historians.
It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our earlier history
when historical criticism has done more than has yet been done for
the materials given us by Ireland and Wales. For Welsh history the
" Brut-y-Tywysogion " and the " Annales Cambrite " are now acces-
sible in the series published by the Master of the Rolls ; the "Chronicle
of Caradoo of Lancarvan" is translated bv Powel ; the Mabinogion,
or Romantic Tales have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest ;
YOL. L 2
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
and the "Welsh Laws collected by the Record Commission. The im-
portance of these, as embodying a customary code of very early date,
will probably be better appreciated when we possess the whole of the
Brehon Laws, the customary laws of Ireland, which are now being
issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to which attention has
justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine (" Early History of Institu-
tions ") as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest antiquity.
The enormous mass of materials which exists for the early history
of Ireland, various as they are in critical value, may be seen in Mr.
O'Curry's " Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History ; " and
they may be conveniently studied by the general reader in the "Annals
of the Four Masters," edited by Dr. O'Donovan. But this is a mere com-
pilation (though generally a faithful one) made about the middle of the
seventeenth century from earlier sources, two of which have been pub-
lished in the Rolls series. One, the " Wars of the Gaedhil with the
Gaill," is an account of the Danish wars which may have been written
in the eleventh century ; the other, the " Annals of Loch Ce," is a
chronicle of Irish affairs from the end of the Danish wars to 1590.
The "Chronicon Scotorum" (in the same series) extends to the year
1150, and though composed in the seventeenth century is valuable
from the learning of its author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The works of
Colgan are to Irish church affairs what the "Annals of the Four Mas-
ters " are to Irish civil history. They contain a vast collection of
translations and transcriptions of early saints' lives, from those of
Patrick downwards. Adanman's " Life of Columba " (admirably edited
by Dr. Reeves) supplies some details to the story of the Northumbrian
kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we find the " Book of
Rights," a summary of the dues and rights of the several over-kings
and under-kings, of much earlier date probably than the Norman in-
vasion ; and Cormac's " Glossary," attributed to the tenth century and
certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned of legal
and social details, and something of the pagan religion of Ireland.
CHAPTER I.
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN.
449577.
FOR the fatherland of the English race we must look far Old
away from England itself. In the fifth century after the England.
birth of Christ the one country which we know to have
borne the name of Angeln or England lay within the
district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the
heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the
northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered
homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on
inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of
heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless wood-
land broken here and there by meadows that crept
down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this
district however seem to have been merely an outlying
fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the
bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover
and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons of
Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the Rhine ;
on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the
Elbe. North again of the fragment of the English folk in
Sleswick lay another kindred tribe; the Jutes, whose name
is still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle,
Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family ; and at the moment when
. history discovers them they were being drawn together by
the ties of a common blood, common speech, common
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
The
English
Village.
social and political institutions. There is little ground
indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on them-
selves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them,
save by anticipation, the common name of Englishmen.
But each of them was destined to share in the conquest
of the land in which we live ; and it is from the union of
all of them when its conquest was complete that the
English people has sprung.
Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England
we know little. But from the glimpses that we catch of it
when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain
their political and social organization must have been that of
the German race to which they belonged. In their villages
lay ready formed the social and political life which is round
us in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted
each from its fellow villages, and within this boundary or
mark the " township," as the village was then called from
the " tun " or rough fence and trench that served as its
simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
body, though linked by ties which were strengthening
every day to the townships about it and the tribe of which
it formed a part. Its social centre was the homestead
where the setheling or eorl, a descendant of the first
English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood
and traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or
aethel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of
freelings or ceorls, men sprung, it may be, from descendants
of the earliest settler who had in various ways forfeited
their claim to a share in the original homestead, or more
probably from incomers into the village who had since
settled round 'it and been admitted to a share in the land
and freedom of the community. The eorl was distinguished
from his fellow villagers by ^his wealth and his nobler
blood ; he was held by them in an hereditary reverence ;
and it was from him and his fellow ffithelings that host-
leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in
times of war. But this claim to precedence rested simply
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
Justice.
on the free recognition of his fellow villagers. Within the CHAP. I
township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the
freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
" free-necked man " whose long hair floated over a neck
which had never bowed to a lord. He was the " weaponed
man " who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone
preserved that right of self-redress or private war which
in such a state of society formed the main check upon
lawless outrage.
Among the English, as among all the races of mankind,
justice had originally sprung from each man's personal
action. There had been a time when every freeman was his
own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of English
society of which we find traces this right of self-defence
was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of
public justice. The " blood- wite " or compensation in
money for personal wrong was the first effort of the tribe
as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life
and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal
price. " Eye for eye," ran the rough code, and " life for
life," or for each fair damages. We see a further step
towards the modern recognition of a wrong as done not to
the individual man but to the people at large in another
custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid,
not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the
family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of
the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in
each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
knit its families together ; every outrage was held to have
been done by all who were linked in blood to the doer of
it, every crime to have been done against all who were
linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of
the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not
as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of English justice.
Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect
Mm from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to
10
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
The
Land.
suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done. So
fully was this principle recognized that even if any man
was charged before his fellow-tribesmen with crime,his
kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges; for it was
by their solemn oath of his innocence or his guilt that he
had to stand or fall.
As the blood- bond gave its first form to English justice,
so it gave their first forms to English society and English
warfare. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of
battle, and the feelings of honour and discipline which
held the host together were drawn from the common duty
of every man in each little group of warriors to his house.
And as they fought side by side on the field, so they
dwelled side by side on the soil. Harling abode by
Harling, and Billing by Billing ; and each " wick " or
" ham " or " stead" or " tun " took its name from the kins-
men who dwelled together in it. In this way the home or
" ham " of the Billings was Billingham, and the " tun "
or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But in
such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the
larger tie of land. Land with the German race seems
at a very early time to have become everywhere the
accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly
the free-holder, and the exercize of his full rights as a free
member of the community to which he belonged became
inseparable from the possession of his " holding " in it.
But property had not as yet reached that stage of abso-
lutely personal possession which the social philosophy of
a later time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The
woodland and pasture-land of an English village were
still undivided, and every free villager had the right of
turning into 'it his cattle or swine. The meadow-land
lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest
to spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh
that the common meadow was fenced off into grass-fields,
O
one for each household in the village; and when hay-
harvest was over fence and division were at an end again.
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
11
The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal
shares both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families
of the freemen, though even the plough-land was subject
to fresh division as the number of claimants grew greater
or less.
It was this sharing in the common land which marked
off the freeman or ceorl from the urifree man or laet, the
tiller of land which another owned. As the ceorl was
the descendant of settlers who whether from their earlier
arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the
village had been admitted to a share in its land and its
corporate life, so the Iset was a descendant of later
comers to whom such a share was denied, or in some cases
perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land had been
wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom
the Iset was free enough. He had house and home of his
own, his life and limb were as secure as the ceorl's save
as against his lord ; it is probable from what we see in
later laws that as time went on he was recognized among
the three tribes as a member of the nation, summoned
to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at law, and called
like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree
as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in
the common land of the village. The ground which he
tilled he held of some free man of the tribe to whom he
paid rent in labour or in kind. And this man was his
lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in
the general social life of his fellow villagers, he had no
rights as against his lord. He could leave neither land nor
lord at his will. He was bound to render due service to
his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as these
services were done the land was his own. His lord could
not take it from him ; and he was bound to give him aid
and protection in exchange for his services.
Far different from the position of the iset was that of the
slave, though there is no ground for believing that the
slave class was other than a small one. It was a class
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
077.
Lcet and
Slave.
12
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
The
Moot.
which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine drove
men to " bend their heads in the evil days for meat ; " the
debtor, unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground
his freeman's sword and spear, took up the labourer's
mattock, and placed his head as a slave within a master's
hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king.
Sometimes a father pressed by need sold children and wife
into bondage. In any case the slave became part of the
live stock of his master's estate, to be willed away at death
with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as
his own. His children were bondsmen like himself ; even a
freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's
taint. " Mine is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an
English proverb. Slave cabins clustered round the home-
stead of every rich landowner; ploughman, shepherd,
goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid,
barnman, sower, hay ward and woodward, were often slaves.
It was not indeed slavery such as we have known in
modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare : if the
slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash.
But his master could slay him if he would ; it was but
a chattel the less. The slave had no place in the justice
court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or guilt-fine for
his wrong. If a stranger slew him his lord claimed the
damages ; if guilty of wrong-doing, " his skin paid for
him" under his master's lash. If he fled he might be
chased like a strayed beast, and when caught he might be
flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a woman-slave
she might be burned.
With the public life of the village however the slave had
nothing, the Iset in early days little, to do. In its Moot,
the common meeting of its villagers for justice and govern-
ment, a slave had no place or voice, while the Iset was
originally represented by the lord whose land he tilled.
The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in
the body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the
EAELY ENGLAND. 449-1071.
13
moot-hill or the sacred tree where the community met from
time to time to deal out its own justice and to make its
own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the free-
dom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman
and tithing-man chosen for its governance. Here plough-
land and meadow-land were shared in due lot among the
villagers, and field and homestead passed from man to
man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here
strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to the
" customs " of the township as its elder men stated them,
and four men were chosen to follow headman or ealdor-
man to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such
as is stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some
mighty river that one looks back to these village-moots of
Friesland or Sleswick. It was here that England learned
to be a " mother of Parliaments." It was in these tiny
knots of fanners that the men from whom Englishmen
were to spring learned the worth of public opinion, of
public discussion, the worth of the agreement, the " com-
mon sense," the general conviction to which discussion
leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of
our own day has laughed at Parliaments as "talking
shops," and the laugh has been echoed by some who have
taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen
to deeds such as those which have ma'de England what she
is. The " talk " of the village moot, the strife and judgement
of men giving freely their own rede and setting it as freely
aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of other
men, is the groundwork of English history.
Small therefore as it might be, the township or village
was thus the primary and perfect type of English life,
domestic, social, and political All that England has been
since lay there. But changes of which we know nothing
had long before the time at which our history opens
grouped these little commonwealths together in larger
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
The
Folk.
14
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449
577.
CHAP. I. communities, whether we name them Tribe, People, or
Polk. The ties of race and kindred were no doubt drawn
tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war,
from a common greed of conquest, a common need of
defence. Its form at any rate was wholly military. The
Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of every
freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a
head who existed only so long as war went on, was the
leader whom the host chose to command it. Its Witena-
gemote or meeting of wise men was the host's council of
war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought
the men of their villages' to the field. The host was
formed by levies from the various districts of the tribe;
the larger of which probably owed their name of " hun-
dreds " to the hundred warriors which each originally sent
to it. In historic times however the regularity of such a
military organization, if it ever existed, had passed away,
and the quotas varied with the varying customs of each
district. But men, whether many or few, were still due
from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers
to the field.
The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the
first its form to the civil organization. But the peculiar
shape which its civil organization assumed was determined
by a principle familiar to the Germanic races and destined
to exercize a vast influence on the future of mankind.
This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the
general muster of the hundred were held to represent the
whole body of the township from whence they came.
Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was
made by this gathering of the representatives of the town-
ships that lay within its bounds, thus became at once a
court of appeal from the moots of each separate village as
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 449-1071.
15
well as of arbitration in dispute between township and
township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or
death fell to its share ; while it necessarily possessed the
same right of law-making for the hundred that the village-
moot possessed for each separate village. And as hundred-
moot stood above town-moot, so above the hundred-moot
stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general
Parliament of the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or
hundred-moot, the principle of representation was preserved.
In both the constitutional forms, the forms of deliberation
and decision, were the same. In each the priests pro-
claimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke,
groups of freemen from each township stood round, shaking
their spears in assent, clashing shields in applause, settling
matters in the end by loud shouts of " Aye " or " Nay."
Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this
older England we know less than of their political life.
But there is no ground for believing them to have been
very different in these respects from the other German
peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world.
Though their border nowhere touched the border of the
Empire they were far from being utterly strange to its
civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached the shores
of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts
and refinement of Rome were brought into contact with
these earlier Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and
shield-bosses which have been found in Sleswick, and
which can be dated not later than the close of the third
century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely
modelled on Roman metal-work. The vessels of twisted
glass which we know to have been in use at the tables
of- English and Saxon chieftains came, we can hardly
doubt, from Roman glass-works. Discoveries of Roman
coins in Sleswick peat-mosses afford a yet more con-
clusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
But apart from these outer influences the men of the
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conques^
of
Britain
449
577.
Social
Life.
16
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
Religion.
three tribes were far from beiDg mere savages. They
were fierce warriors, but they were also busy fishers
and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in handling
plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which
they hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling
sword and spear. They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as
they were hard toilers, and the " ale-feast " was the centre
of their social life. But coarse as the revel might seem to
modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which
rose in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in
its simplicity and dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a
train of maidens bore ale-bowl or mead-bowl round the
hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while
the gleeman sang the hero-songs of his race. Dress and
arms showed traces of a love of art and beauty, none the
less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings, amulets,
ear-rings, neck pendants, proved in their workmanship the
deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often
fastened with golden buckles of curious and exquisite
form, set sometimes with rough jewels and inlaid with
enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like
the honour in which the smith was held their tale of
industrial art. It is only in the English pottery, hand-
made, and marked with coarse zig-zag patterns, that we
find traces of utter rudeness.
The religion of these men was the same as that of the
rest of the German peoples. Christianity had by this
time brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire,
but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of the
north. The common God of the English people was Woden,
the war-god, the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom
his worshippers attributed the invention of letters, and
whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its kings.
Our own names for the days of the week still recall to
us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
17
German homeland. "Wednesday is Woden's-day, as
Thursday is the, day of Thunder, the god of air and storm
and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of peace and joy
and fruitt'ulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
maidens, brought increase to every Held and stall they
visited. Saturday commemorates an obscure god Ssetere ;
Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death.
Eostre, the god of the dawn or of the spring, lends his
name to the Christian festival of the Eesurrection.
Behind these floated the dim shapes of an older mytho-
logy ; " Wyrd," the death-goddess, whose memory lingered
long in the "Weird*" of northern superstition ; or the Shield-
maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells
us, " wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled
the thrilling javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy
lay deities of wood and fell or hero-gods of legend and
song ; Xicor, the water-sprite who survives in our nixies
and " Old Nick " ; Weland, the forger of weighty shields
and sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the
" Weyland's smithy " of Berkshire ; Egil, the hero -archer,
whose legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell. A
nature- worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of
a priesthood ; and though a priestly class existed it seems
at no time to have had much weight among Englishmen.
As each freeman was his own judge and his own lawmaker,
so he was his own house-priest ; and English worship lay
commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father offered to
the gods of his hearth.
It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of
the older gods of flood and fell that we must look for the
real religion of our fathers. The song of Beowulf, though
the earliest of English poems, is as we have it now a poem
of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
missionary of the days of Baeda and Boniface who gathered
in the very homeland of his race the legends of its earlier
prime. But the thin veil of Christianity which he has
flung over it fades away as we follow the hero-legend of
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449
577.
The
English
Temper.
18
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
677.
our fathers ; and the secret of their moral temper, of their
conception of life breathes through every line. Life was
built with them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the
P rou( l self-consciousness of noble souls. " I have this folk
ruled these fifty winters," sings a hero-king as he sits
death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. " Lives there
no folk-king of kings about me not any one of them dare
in the war-strife welcome my onset ! Time's change and
chances I have abided, held my own fairly, sought not to
snare men ; oath never sware I falsely against right. So
for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I sit
here, wounded with death-wounds ! " In men of such a
temper, strong with the strength of manhood and full of
the vigour and the love of life, the sense of its shortness
and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a pathetic
poetry. " Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, " that
sickness or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or
the fire ring thee, or the Hood whelm thee, or the sword
grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age o'ertake thee, and thine
eye's brightness sink down, in darkness." Strong as he
might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that
encompassed him, that girded his life with a thousand
perils and broke it at so short a span. " To us," cries
Beowulf in his last fight, " to us it shall be as our Weird
betides, that "Weird that is every man's lord ! " But the
sadness with which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries
of life and death had nothing in it of the unmanly
despair which bids men eat and drink for to-morrow they
die. Death leaves man man and master of his, fate. The
thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the
thought of doom. "Well shall a man do when in the
strife he minds but of winning longsome renown, nor for
his life cares ! " " Death is better than life of shame ! "
cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up
his strife with the fiend, " go the weird as it will." If life
is short, the more cause to work bravely till it is over.
" Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work ; let
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
19
him. that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death
come ! "
The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness
which drove them to take part in the general attack of the
German race on the Empire of Rome. For busy tillers
and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart
fighters ' an d their world was a world of war. Tribe warred
O
with tribe, and village with village; even within the
township itself feuds parted household from household, and
passions of hatred and vengeance were handed on from father
to son. Their mood was above all a mood of fighting men,
venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness and
cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring
from war, by personal courage and loyalty to plighted word,
by a high and stern sense of manhood and the worth of
man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already a charac-
teristic of the race. War was the Englishman's " shield-
play " and " sword-game " ; the gleeman's verse took fresh
fire as he sang of the rush of .the host and the crash of its
shield-line. Their arms and weapons, helmet and mailshirt,
tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short broad
dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them
much of the legend and the art which gave colour and
poetry to the life of Englishmen. Each sword had its
name like a living thing. And next to their love of war
came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it
pictures, we catch the salt whiff of the sea. The English-
man was as proud of his sea-craft as of his war-craft ;
sword in teeth he plunged into the sea to meet walrus and
sea-lion ; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy waters
of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was
the love he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond
playfulness of English verse the ship was "the wave-
floater," " the foam-necked," " like a bird " as it skimmed
the wave-crest, " like a swan " as its curved prow breasted
the " swan-road " of the sea.
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
English
Piracy.
20
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain
499-
577.
Britain.
Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part
in the general movement of the German nations. While
Goth and Lombard were slowly advancing over mountain
and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed faster over the
sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of fight,
had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack
of vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick
peat-bog one of the war-keels of these early pirates. The
boat is flat-bottomed, seventy feet long and eight or nine
feet wide, its sides of oak boards fastened with bark ropes
and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the waves with a
freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
kuives were found heaped together in its hold. Like the
galleys of the Middle Ages such boats could only creep
cautiously along from harbour to harbour in rough weather ;
but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them admirably
for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were
already making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom en-
abled them to beach the vessel on any fitting coast ; and a
step on shore at once transformed the boatmen into a war-
band. From the first the daring of the English race broke
out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in
the fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with
which they seized either sword or oar. " Foes are they,"
sang a Eoman poet of the time, " fierce beyond other foes
and cunning as they are fierce ; the sea is their school of
war and the storm their friend ; they are sea-wolves that
prey on the pillage of the world ! "
Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to
the Empire, and they were naturally the first to touch
the Eoman world ; before the close of the third century
indeed their boats appeared in such force in the English
Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The
piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the
shores of a land which, dear as it is now to English-
men, had not as yet been trodden by English feet. This
land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 21
coast the island was the westernmost province of the CHAP. I.
Eoman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year before Christ a ^
descent of Julius Csesar revealed it to the Eoman ^n^gst
world ; and a century after Cesar's landing the Emperor Britain
Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly 4^9.
carried out. Before thirty years were over the bulk of S77
the island had passed beneath the Eoman sway and the
Eoman frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth
and of Clyde. The work of civilization followed fast on
the work of the sword. To the last indeed the distance of
the island from the seat of. empire left her less Eornanized
than any other province of the west. The bulk of the
population scattered over the country seem, in spite of
imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to
their old language, and to have retained some traditional
allegiance to their native chiefs. But Eoman civilization
rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere
the city was thoroughly Eoman. In towns such as
Lincoln or York, governed by their own municipal officers,
guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a
network of magnificent roads which reached from one
end of the island to the other, manners, language, political
life, all were of Eome.
For three hundred years the Eoman sword secured order
and peace without Britain and within, and with peace and
order came a wide and rapid prosperity. Commerce sprang
up in ports amongst which London held the first rank ;
agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral re-
sources of the province were explored in the tin mines
of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset or Northumber-
land, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But
evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told
at last on the province of Britain. Wealth and popu-
lation alike declined under a crushing system of taxation,
under restrictions which fettered industry, under a des-
potism which crushed out all local independence. And
YOL. I. 3
22
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain,
449-
577.
Conqttests
of Jute
anil
Saxon.
with decay within came danger from without. For
centuries past the Roman frontier had held back the
barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the Euphrates,
the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the
Danube or the Ehine. In Britain a wall drawn from
Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the
Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from
Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It
was this mass of savage barbarism which broke upon the
Empire as it sank into decay. In its western dominions
the triumph of these assailants was complete. The Franks
conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths con-
quered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a
kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the
border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths
ruled at last in Italy itself.
It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in
the opening of the fifth century withdrew her legions from
Britain, and from that moment the province was left to
struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these its only
enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabit-
ants then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats
of Saxon pirates, as we have seen, were swarming off its
eastern and southern coasts. For forty years Britain held
bravely out against these assailants ; but civil strife broke
its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last on
the fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom
while striving to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian
against barbarian. By the usual promises of land and
pay a band of warriors was drawn for this purpose from
Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at
their head.] If by English history we mean the history of
EngTishrnen in the land which from that time they made
their own, it is with this lauding of Hengest's war-bandj
that English history begins. They landed on the shores of
the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as E_bb_sfleet. No
spat can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot wEich first
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
23
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
felt the tread of English feet. There is little to catch the CHAP. I.
eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of ground with a few grey
cottages dotted over it, cut off now-a-days from the sea by
a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But taken as a
whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the
right the white curve of Eamsgate cliffs looks down on the
crescent of Pegwell Bay ; far away to the left across grey
marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark the site of Eich-
borough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly towards
Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms
the national tradition which fixed here the landing place
of our fathers ; for the physical changes of the country
since the fifth century have told little on its main features-
At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of sea parted
Thanet from the mainland of Britain ; and through this
inlet the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with
a fair wind to what was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfieet.
The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was
quickly done ; and the Picts are said to have been scattered
to the winds in a battle fought on the eastern coast of
Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over when
danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates
must have nocked from the Channel to their settlement in
Thanet ; the inlet between Thanet and the mainland was
crossed, and the Englishmen won their first victory over the
Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at the
village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of
the Cray drove the British forces in terror upon London ;
but the ground was soon won back again, and it was not
till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had gone on
along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive struggle
at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so
terrible that from this moment ail hope of saving Northern
Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was only on its
southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Ten
years later, in 475, the long contest was over, and with the
fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to
24
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
CHAP. I. which they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the
work of the first English conqueror was done.
The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes,
the smallest of the three tribes who were to blend in the
English people. But the greed of plunder now told on the
great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to the Ehine,
and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along
the strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the
weald and the sea. Nowhere has the physical aspect of
the country more utterly changed. A vast sheet of
scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of
the Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles
from the borders of Kent to the Hampshire Downs, ex-
tending northward almost to the Thames and leaving only
a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was
guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Con- .
queror ; and the fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491
established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "^Elle
and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of
the conquerors, "and slew all tha.t were therein, nor
was there afterwards one Briton left." But Hengest and
file's men had touched hardly more than the coast,
and the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved
for a fresh band of Saxons, a tribe known as the
Gewissas, who landed under Cerdic and Cynric on the
shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed in 495
to the great downs or Gwent where Winchester offered
so rich a prize. Nowhere was the strife fiercer than
here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory at
Charford ended the struggle 'for the "Gwent" and set
the crown of the West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic.
But the forest-belt around it checked any further advance ;
and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
under a new leader. Arthur, and threw back the invaders
as they pressed westward through the Dorsetshire wood-
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 25
lands in a great overthrow at Badbury or Mount Badon. CHAP. I.
The defeat was followed by a long pause in the Saxon, Th ?
advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas conquest
rested a series of victories whose history is lost was giving Britain,
to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast district north
of the mouth of the Thames. It is probable however that
the strength of Camulodunum, the predecessor of our
modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants a
slow and doubtful one ; and even when its reduction enabled
the East-Saxons to occupy the territory to which they
have given their name of Essex a line of woodland
which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Forests
checked their further advance into the island.
Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Conquests
Aylesford only the outskirts of Britain were won. The
invaders were masters as yet but of Kent, Sussex, Hamp-
shire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head, from
the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still
remained unconquered : and there was little in the years
which followed Arthur's triumph to herald that onset of
the invaders which was soon to make Britain England.
Till now, its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern
sea, from the Saxons and the. Jutes. But the main work
of conquest was to be done by the third, by the tribe
which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which
was to absorb that of Saxon oFTTute arid to stamjTitself
01 the people which sprang from the union of the
couquerors as on the land that they won. The Engle had
probably been settling for years along the coast of
Xorthumbria and in the great district which was cut off
1'rom the rest of Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the
later East-Anglia. But it was not till the moment we
have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto
held the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance
in the Humber and the Trent. This great river-line led
like a highway into the heart of Britain ; and civil strife
26
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449-
577.
of West-
Saxons.
seems to have broken the strength of British resistance.
But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
One part of the English force marched from th e Humber
over the Yorkshire wolds to found what was called the
kingdom of the Deirans. Under the Empire political
power had centred in the district between the Humber and
the Eoman wall ; York was the capital of Eoman Britain ;
villas of rich landowners studded the valley of the Ouse ;
and the bulk of the garrison maintained in the island lay
camped along its northern border. But no record tells us
how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made them-
selves masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only
by their later settlements that we follow their march into
the heart of Britain. Seizing the valley of the Don and
whatever breaks there were in the woodland that then
filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the
Engle followed the curve of the latter river, and struck
along the line of its tributary the Soar. Here round the
Eoman Eatae, the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a
tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small body
pushed further southwards, and under the name of " South -
Engle " occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present
Northamptonshire. But the mass of the invaders seem to
have held to the line of the Trent and to have pushed
westward to its head- waters. Eepton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen,
whose older name was soon lost in that of Mercians, or
Men of the March. Their settlement was in fact a new
march or borderland between conqueror and conquered ;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of
Cannock Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire
enabled the Briton to make a fresh and desperate stand.
It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the
Engle that roused the West-Saxons to a new advance. For
thirty years they had rested inactive within the limits of
the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort of Old
Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs and
1.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
27
a march of King Cutliwulf on the Thames made them
masters in 571 of the districts which now form Oxfordshire
and Berkshire. Pushing along the upper valley of Avon
to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from
their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn.
Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued
under their British kings to resist this onset, became in
577 the spoil of an English victory at Deorham, and the
line of the great western river lay open to the arms of the
conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the
borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the
Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light,,
went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat
which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet
in verses still left to us sings piteously the death-song of
Uriconium, " the white town in the valley," the town of
white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The
torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins where
the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier
days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan, " without fire,
without light, without song," their stillness broken only by
the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh
drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
CHAP. i.
The
English
Conquest
of
Britain.
449
577
CHAPTEE II.
THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS.
577796.
WITH the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of
Britain was complete. Eastward of a line which may be
roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland
and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the Forest of Arden
to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the
main become England. And within this new England a
Teutonic society was settled on the wreck of Home. So
far as the conquest had yet gone it had been complete.
Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English
ground. Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew
back from the land which their conquerors had won ; and
eastward of the border line which the English sword had
drawn all was now purely English.
It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain
from that of the other provinces of Rome. The conquest of
Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by the Lombards proved
little more than a forcible settlement of the one or the
other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long
course of ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the
tongue, not of the Frank, but of the Gaul whom he over-
came ; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all but unknown
in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to
the point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession
of the people whom the English conquered. It was not
DOCK I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 29
that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at times they seem to CHAP. II.
have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other x^
Germans who attacked the Empire ; nor have we any ground Ki'n'fcoms,
for saying that they, unlike the Burgundian or the Erank, 577-
were utterly strange to the Roman civilization. Saxon 796 '
mercenaries are found as well as Frank mercenaries in
the pay of Rome ; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must
have familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to
be found in the Imperial provinces of the West. What
really made the difference between the fate of Britain
and that of the rest of the Roman world was the stubborn
courage of the British themselves. In all the world- wide
struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land
was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul
no native resistance met Erank or Visigoth save from the
brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No popular
revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric
in Italy. But in Britain the invader was met by a courage
almost equal to his own. Instead of quartering themselves
quietly, like their fellows abroad, on subjects who were
glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute, the English
had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard
fighting.
This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural
obstacles of the gravest kind. Everywhere in the Roman
world the work of the conquerors was aided by the
civilization of Rome. Vandal or Frank marched along
Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe
and crossed river or ravine on the Roman bridge. It was
so doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain. But
though Britain had long been Roman, her distance from
the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any other
province of the West. Socially the Roman civilization
had made little impression on any but the townsfolk, and
the material civilization of the island was yet more back-
ward than its social. Its natural defences threw obstacles
30
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
577-
796.
With-
drawal
of the,
Britons.
CHAP. II. in its invaders' way. In the forest belts which stretched
over vast spaces of country they found barriers which in
all cases checked their advance and in some cases finally
stopped it. The Kentishme'n and the South Saxons were
brought utterly to a standstill by the Andredsweald. The
East Saxons could never pierce the woods of their western
border. The Pens proved impassable to the Northfolk and
the Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long and
terrible struggle that the West-Saxons could hew their way
through the forests which sheltered the " Gwerit " of the
southern coast. Their attempt to break out of the circle of
woodland which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless for
thirty years ; and in the height of their later power they
were thrown back from the forests of Cheshire.
It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well as
the moral circumstances of Britain that we can understand
the character of its earlier conquest. Field by field, town
by town, forest by forest, the land was won. And as each
bit of ground was torn away by the stranger, the Briton
sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly and fight
for the next. There is no need to believe that the clearing
of the land meant so impossible a thing as the general
slaughter of the men who held it. Slaughter there was,
no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like Anderida
whose resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But for
the most part the Britons were not slaughtered ; they were
defeated and drew back. Such a withdrawal was only
made possible by the slowness of the conquest. For it is
not .only the stoutness of its defence which distinguishes
the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of
the Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the resistance
of the Britons was greater than that of the other pro-
vincials of Rome so the forces of their assailants were
less. Attack by sea was less easy than attack by land,
and the numbers who were brought across by the boats
of Hengest or Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which
followed Theodoric or Chlodewig across the Alps or the
I.] EAKLY ENGLAND. 449-1071. 31
lihirie. Landing in small parties, and but gradually rein- CHAP. II.
forced by after- comers, the English invaders could only ^
slowly and fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of Kingdoms
any joint action among the assailants told in the same way. $^_
Though all spoke the same language and used the same 796-
laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
Franks ; and though all were bent on winning the same
land, each band and each leader preferred their own
separate course of action to any collective enterprize.
Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain The
could not fail to be a very different matter from the English
rapid and easy overrunning of such countries as Gaul.
How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent
alone and sixty to complete the conquest of Southern
Britain, and that the conquest of the bulk of the island
was -only wrought out after two centuries of bitter warfare.
But it was just through the length of the struggle
that of all the German conquests this proved the most
thorough and complete. So far as the English sword in
these earlier days had reached, Britain had become England,
a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen. Even
if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round
the homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of
their household words mingled with the English tongue,
doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main facts
untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the
civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had disappeared from
the greater part of the land which had been his own ; and
the tongue x the religion, the laM r s of his English conquerors,
reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire and
from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen,
but a prelude to the settlement of his conqueror. What
strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was
the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of
32 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though
^ they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion,
social life, administrative order, still remained Eoman.
Kingdoms.
- _ Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where
796 - Eome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole
organization of government and society disappeared with
the people who used it. Eoman roads indeed still led to
desolate cities. Eoman camps still crowned hill and down.
The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds
of field and farm for the new settlers. The Eoman church,
the Eoman country-house, was left standing, though reft
of priest and lord. But Eome was gone. The mosaics,
the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our
English fathers, but of a world which our fathers' sword
swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners,
its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of
the completeness of this destruction of all Eoman life than
the religious change which passed over the land. Alone
among the German assailants of Eome the English stood
aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow.
The new England was a heathen country. Homestead and
boundary, the very days of the week, bore the names of
new gods who displaced Christ.
As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house
which recall to us the wealth and culture of Eoman
Britain, it is hard to believe that a conquest which
left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than
a curse to the land over which it passed. But if the
new England which sprang from the wreck of Britain
seemed for the moment a w r aste from which the arts,
the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hope-
lessly away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler
life than that which had been destroyed. The base
of Eoman society here as everywhere throughout the
Eoman world was the slave, the peasant who had
been crushed by tyranny, political and social, into serf-
dom. The base of the new English society was the
r .j EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 33
freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting CHAP. II.
for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he
dealt with the material civilization of Britain while the
struggle went on, it was impossible that such a man could s?7-
be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no sooner over
than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the
home of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted
stones that marked the site of the villa he had burned.
The settlement of the English in the conquered land
was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
society in its cornpletest form to the soil of Britain. The
slowness of their advance, the small numbers of each
separate band in its descent upon the coast, made it
possible for the invaders to bring with them, or to call to
them when their work was done, the wives and children,
the Iset and slave, even the cattle they had left behind
them. The first wave of conquest was but the prelude to
the gradual migration of a whole people. It was Eng-
land which settled down on British soil, England with
its own language, its own laws, its complete social fabric,
its system of village life and village culture, its town-
ship and its hundred, its principle of kinship, its
principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates
or stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and
fitted by a common temper and common customs to draw
together into our English nation in the days to come, that
our fathers left their German home-land for the land in
which we live. Their social and political organization re-
mained radically unchanged. In each of the little king-
doms which rose on the wreck of Britain the host camped on
the land it had Avon, and the divisions of the host supplied
here as in its older home the rough croundwork of local
o o
distribution. The land occupied by the hundred warriors
who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps
the local hundred ; but it is needless to attach any notion
of precise uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in
the area of their settlement, to such a process as this, any
34 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. more than to the army organization which the process of
^ distribution reflected. From the large amount of public land
Kingdoms, which we find existing afterwards it has been conjectured
577_ with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
7 ' small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal,
and this unoccupied ground became " folk-land," the com-
mon property of the tribe as at a later time of the nation.
What ground was actually occupied may have been as-
signed to each group and each family in the group by lot,
and Eorl and Ceorl gathered round them their Iset and slave
as in their homeland by the Ehine or the Elbe. And
with the English people passed to the shores of Britain
all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For
distant and dim as their life in that older England may
have seemed to us, the whole after-life of Englishmen was
there. In its village-moots lay our Parliament ; in the
gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our Shak-
spere ; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our
Drakes and our Nelsons. Even the national temper was
fully formed. Civilization, letters, science, religion itself,
have done little to change the inner mood of Englishmen.
That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the fight,
that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent
awe of the mysteries of life and death which lay deep in
English souls then as now, passed with Englishmen to
the land which Englishmen had won.
The j^t though English society passed thus in its complete-
ness to the soil of Britain its primitive organization was
affected in more ways than one by the transfer. In the first
place conquest begat the King. It seems probable that
the English had hitherto known nothing of Kings in their
own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace
time with the customary government of village-reeve and
hundred-reeve and Ealdorman, while it gathered at fighting
times under war leaders whom it chose for each campaign.
But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged
against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader
z.J EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 35
whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such as those CHAP. li.
of Wessex or Mercia might follow; and the ceaseless ^
character of a struggle which left few intervals of rest or siifJ^onL
peace raised these leaders into a higher position than that 577-
of temporary chieftains. It was no doubt from this cause
that w r e find Hengest and his son ^Esc raised to the kingdom
in Kent, or ^Elle in Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric among
the West Saxons. The association of son with father in
this new kingship marked the hereditary character which
distinguished it from the temporary office of an Ealdornian.
The change was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less
than the modern conception of kingship would lead us to
imagine. Hereditary as the succession was within a single
house, each successive King was still the free choice of his
people, and for centuries to come it was held within a people's
right to pass over a claimant too weak or too wicked for
the throne. In war indeed the King w r as supreme. But in
peace his power was narrowly bounded by the customs of
his people and the rede of his wise men. Justice was not
as yet the King's justice, it was the justice of village and
hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-
moot. It was only with the assent of the wise men that
the King could make laws and declare war and assign public
lands and name public officers. Above all, should his will
be to break through the free customs of his people, he was
without the means of putting his will into action, for the
one force he could call on was the host, and the host was
the people itself in arms.
With the new English King rose a new order of English
nobles. The social distinction of the Eorl was founded
on the peculiar purity of his blood, on his long descent
from the original settler around whom township and thorpe
grew up. A new distinction was now to be found in
service done to the King. From the earliest times of
German society it had been the wont of young men
greedy of honour or seeking training in arms to bind
themselves as " comrades " to king or chief. The leader
86
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. fBOOii
CHAP. II.
The
English
Kingdoms'
577-
796.
whom they chose gave them horses, arms, a seat in his
mead hall, and gifts from his hoard. The " comrade " on the
other hand the gesith or thegn, as he was called bound
himself to follow and fight for his lord. The principle of per-
"sonal dependence as distinguished from the warrior's general
duty to the folk at large was embodied in the thegn.
" Chieftains fight for victory," says Tacitus ; " comrades for
their chieftain." When one of Beowulf's " comrades " saw
his lord hard bested " he minded him of the homestead
he had given him, of the folk right he gave him as his
father had it ; nor might he hold back then." Snatching
up sword and shield lie called on his fellow-thegns to
follow him to the fight. " I mind me of the day," he cried,
'' when we drank the mead, the day we gave pledge to our
lord in the beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge
that we would pay him back our war-gear, our helms and
our hard swords, if need befel him. Unmeet is it, me-
thinks, that we should bear back our shields to our home
unless we guard our lord's life." The larger the band of such
" comrades," the more power and repute it gave their lord.
It was from among the chiefs whose war-band was strongest
that the leaders of the host were commonly chosen ; and as
these leaders grew into kings, the number of their thegns
naturally increased. The rank of the " comrades " too
rose with the rise of their lord. The king's thegns were
his body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his
will. They were his nearest and most constant counsellors.
As the gathering of petty tribes into larger kingdoms
swelled the number of eorls in each realm and in a cor-
responding degree diminished their social importance, it
raised in equal measure the rank of the king's thegns. A
post among them was soon coveted and won by the greatest
and noblest in the land. Their service was rewarded by
exemption from the general jurisdiction of hundred-court
or shire-court, for it was part of a thegn's meed for his
service that he should be judged only by the lord he served.
Other meed was found in grants of public land which made
i.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
37
577-
796 '
The Her
them a local nobility, no longer bound to actual service CHAP. II
in the king's household or the king's war-band, but still f^
bound to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than
those which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leacler of the
tribe. In a word, thegnhood contained within itself the
germ of that later feudalism which was to battle so fiercely
with the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew.
But the strife between the conquering tribes which at
once followed on their conquest of Britain was to bring
about changes even more momentous in the developement
of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle
were making themselves masters of central and southern
Britain, the English who had landed on its northernmost
shores had been slowly winning for themselves the coast
district between the Forth and the Tyne which bore the
name of Bernicia. Their progress seems to have been
small till they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by
Ida the " Flame-bearer " who found a site for his King's
town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough ; nor was it
till the reign of his fourth son ^thelric that they gained
full mastery over the Britons along their western border.
But once masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen
turned to conquer their English neighbours to the south,
the men of Deira, whose first King /Ella was now sinking
to the grave. The struggle filled the foreign markets with
English slaves, and- one of the most memorable stories in
our history shows us a group of such captives as they
stood in the market-place of Eome, it may be in the
great Forum of Trajan which still in its decay recalled
the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their
fair faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who
passed by. " From what country do these slaves come ? "
Gregory asked the trader who brought them. The slave-
dealer answered " They are English," or as the word ran
in the Latin form it would bear at Eome "they are
Angles." The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humour.
" Not Angles but Angels " he said, " with faces so angel-
VOL. I. 4
38 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. like ! From what country come they ? " " They come "
f^, said the merchant " from Deira." " De ird ! " was the
K^mfdoiis untranslatable word-play of the vivacious Boman " aye,
577- plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's mercy i
796. ^d what is the name of their king ? " They told him
" yElla," and Gregory seized on the word as of good omen.
"Alleluia shall be sung in ^Ella's land," he said, and
passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought
to sing it.
While Gregory was thus playing with ^Ella's name the
old King passed away, and with his death in 589 the
resistance of his kingdom seems to have ceased. His
house fled over the western border to find refuge among
the Welsh, and JEthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in
triumph. A new age of our history opens in this sub-
mission of one English people to another. When the two
kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of
national formation began. If a new England sprang out
of the mass of English states which covered Britain after
its conquest, we owe it to the gradual submission of the
smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common political
head. The difference in power between state and state
which inevitably led to this process of union was due to
the character which the conquest of Britain was now
assuming. Up to this time all the kingdoms which had
been established by the invaders had stood in the main on
a footing of equality. All had taken an independent
share in the work of conquest. Though the oneness of a
common blood and a common speech was recognized by
all we find no traces of any common action or common
rule. Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five
English and the five Saxon kingdoms, which occupied
Britain south of the Humber, the relations of each member
of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely
local. It was only locally that East and West and South
and North English were grouped round the Middle Eng-
lish of Leicester, or East and West and South and North
I.] EAELY ENGLAND. 4491071. 39
Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In CHAP.
neither instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy,
or of the rule of one member of the group over the
others ; while north of the Humber the feeling between
the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who 796i
had settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility
rather than of friendship. But this age of isolation, of
equality, of independence, had now come to an end. The
progress of the conquest had drawn a sharp line between
the kingdoms of the conquerors. The work of half of
them was done. In the south of the island not only Kent
but Sussex, Essex, and Middlesex were surrounded by
English territory, and hindered by that single fact from all
further growth. The same fate had befallen the East
Engle, the South Engle, the Middle and the North
Engle. The West Saxons on the other hand and the
West Engle, or Mercians, still remained free to conquer
and expand on the south of the Humber, as the English-
men of Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north
of that river. It w r as plain therefore that from this
moment the growth of these powers would throw their
fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with tin
ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new
arrangement of political forces. The greater kingdoms
would in the end be drawn to subject and absorb the
lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman and
Briton would be added a struggle between Englishman
and Englishman.
It was through this struggle and the establishment of Kent.
a lordship on the part of the stronger and growing states
over their weaker and stationary fellows that the English
kingdoms were to make their first step towards union in
a single England. Such an overlordship seemed destined
but a few years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The
victories of Ceawlin and Cuthwulf left it the largest of
the English kingdoms. None of its fellow states seemed
able to hold their own against a power which stretched
'40 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHIP. II. from the Chil terns to the Severn and from the Channel to
the Ouse. But after its defeat in the inarch upon Chester
English Weissex suddenly broke down into a chaos of warring
^j_ ' tribes ; and her place was taken by two powers whose rise
796. f. oreatness was as sudden as her fall. The first of
these was Kent. The Kentish King JEthelberht found
himself hemmed in on every side by English territory ;
and since conquest over Britons was denied him he sought
a new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at the head
of the conquerors of the south. The break up of Wessex
no doubt aided his attempt ; but we know little of the
causes or events which brought about his success. "We know
only that the supremacy of the Kentish King was owned
at last by the English peoples of the east and centre of
Britain. But it was not by her political action that Kent
was in the end to further the creation of a single England ;
for the lordship which ^Ethelberht built up was doomed to
fall for ever with his death, and yet his death left Kent
the centre of a national union far wider as it was far more
enduring than the petty lordship which stretched over
Eastern Britain. Years had passed by since Gregory
pitied the English slaves in the market-place of Rome.
As Bishop of the Imperial City he at last found himself
in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to
the faith, and an opening was given him by ^Ethelberht's
marriage with Bercta, a daughter of the Frankish King
Charibert of Paris. Bercta like her Frankish kindred was
a Christian; a Christian Bishop accompanied her from
Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of
St. Martin beside the royal city of Canterbury, was given
them for their worship. The King himself remained true
to the gods of his fathers ; but his marriage no doubt en-
couraged Gregoiy to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at
the head of a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the
English people. The missionaries landed in 597 in the
Isle of Thanet, at the spot where Hengest had landed
more than a century before ; and JEthelberht received
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
41
577-
796 '
them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above CHAP. II.
Minster where the eye now-a-days catches miles away ^
over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. The
King listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine as
the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from
Gaul rendered it in the English tongue. " Your words
are fair," jEthelberht replied at last with English good
sense, " but they are new and of doubtful meaning." For
himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his
fathers, but with the usual religious tolerance of the
German race he promised shelter and protection to the
strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bear-
ing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ,
and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their
Church. " Turn from this city, Lord," they sang
" Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house,
for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came
the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry
which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from
the name of the Yorkshire king in the Eoman market-
place, " Alleluia ! "
It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing Christian
of Hengest became yet better known as the landing-place En 9 lan ^-
of Augustine. But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was
in no small measure a reversal and undoing of the first.
" Strangers from Rome " was the title with which the
missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of
the monks as they chaunted their solemn litany was in one
sense a return of the Roman legions who withdrew at the
trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and the
thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his
Jutish fathers had slaughtered or driven out that ^Ethel-
berht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury,
the earliest royal city of German England, became a
centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became
again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its
worship, its correspondence, its literature. But more than
42
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
The
English
Kingdoms.
577-
796.
^Ethel-
frith.
the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically
his landing renewed that union with the Western world
which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new
England was admitted into the older commonwealth of
nations. The civilization, art, letters, which had fled
before the sword of the English conquerors returned with
the Christian faith. The great fabric of the Roman law
indeed never took root in England, but it is impossible
not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman
missionaries in the fact that codes of the customary
English law began to be put in writing soon after their
arrival.
A year passed before ^Ethelberht yielded to the preaching
of Augustine. But from the moment of his conversion the
new faith advanced rapidly and the Kentish men crowded
to baptism in the train of their king. The new religion
was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy
which ^Ethelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms.
Sseberht, King of the East-Saxons, received a bishop sent
from Kent, and suffered him to build up again a Christian
church in what was now his subject city of London, while
the East- Anglian King Rsedwald resolved to serve Christ
and the older gods together. But while .ZEthelberht was
thus furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canter-
bury, the see to which Augustine was consecrated, the
growth of Northumbria was pointing it out as the coming
political centre of the new England. In 593, four years
before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, yEthelric
was succeeded by his son ^Ethelfrith, and the new king
took up the work of conquest with a vigour greater than
had yet been shown by any English leader. For ten years
he waged war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a tract
which stretched along his western border from Dum-
barton to Carlisle. The contest ended in a great battle
at Dregsa's Stan, perhaps Dawston in Liddesdale ;
and .^Ethelfrith turned to deliver a yet more crushing
blow on his southern border. British kingdoms still
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 43
stretched from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn ; CHAP. II.
and had their line remained unbroken the British resist- T^C
ance might yet have withstood the English advance. It Kingdoms
was with a sound political instinct therefore that ^Ethel- 577-
frith marched in 607 upon Chester, the point where the
kingdom of Cumbria, a kingdom which stretched from the
Lime to the Dee, linked itself to the British states of
what we now call Wales. Hard by the city two thousand
monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settle-
ments which were characteristic of Celtic Christianity, and
after a three days' fast a crowd of these ascetics followed
the British army to the field. ^Ethelfrith watched the wild
gestures of the monks as they stood apart from the host
with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his rneu slay
them in the coming fight. <: Bear they arms or no," said
the King, " they war against us when they cry against us
to their God," and in the surprise and rout which followed
the monks were the first to fall.
With the battle of Ciiester Britain, as a single political
body, ceased to exist. By their victory at Deorham the
West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dorset, Somerset,
Devon, and Cornwall from the general body of their race.
By ^Ethelfrith's victory at Chester and the reduction of
southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of
Britain was broken into two several parts. From this
time therefore the character of the English conquest of
Britain changes. The warfare of Briton and Englishman
died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms
against separate British kingdoms, of North umbria against
Cumbria and Strathclyde, of Mercia against modern
Wales, of Wessex against the tract of British country
from Mendip to the Land's End. But great as was the
importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of
Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes
of England itself. The drift towards national unity had
already begun, but from the moment of ^thelfrith's vic-
tory this drift became the main current of our history-
44 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its con-
^ querors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the
K?nfdoms n P e f plunder ; while the severance of the British king-
577- doins took from their enemies the pressure of a common
7 J*J?' danger. The conquests of ^Ethelfrith left him without a
rival in military power, and he turned from victories over
the Welsh, as their English foes called the Britons, to the
building up of a lordship over his own countrymen.
Eadwine. The power of JEthelberht seems to have declined with
old age, and though the Essex men still owned his supre-
macy, the English tribes of Mid-Britain shook it off.
So strong however had the instinct of union now become,
that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation.
Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle -English and South-
English now owned the lordship of the East-English King
Ksedwald. The shelter given by Kaedwald to ^Ella's son
Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian attack.
Fortune however deserted ^Ethelfrith, and a snatch of
northern song still tells of the day when the river Idle by
Eetford saw his defeat and fall. But the greatness of
Northumbria survived its King. In 617 Eadwine was
welcomed back by his own men of Deira ; and his conquest
of Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which
the Bernician conquest of Deira had first brought about.
The greatness of Northumbria now reached its height.
Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a genius
for civil government which shews how utterly the mere
age of conquest had passed away. With him began the
English proverb so often applied to after kings : " A woman
with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea in
Eadwine's day." Peaceful communication revived along
the deserted highways ; the springs by the roadside were
marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set beside each
for the traveller's refreshment. Some faint traditions
of the Eoman past may have flung their glory round
this new " Empire of the English ; " a royal standard
of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode
!.] EARLY ENGLAND. 449-1071. 45
through the villages ; a feather tuft attached to a spear, CHAP. li.
the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the Th^
streets. The Northumbrian king became in fact supreme KfnJ&ms.
over Britain as no king of English blood had been before. 577-
Northward his frontier reached to the Firth of Forth, and
here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded a city which
bore his name, Edinburgh, Ead wine's burgh. To the west
his arms crushed the long resistance of Elmet, the district
about Leeds ; he was master of Chester, and the fleet he
equipped there subdued the isles of Anglesea and Man.
South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the
five English states of Mid- Britain. The West-Saxons re-
mained awhile independent. But revolt and slaughter
had fatally broken their power when Eadwine attacked
them. A story preserved by Bseda tells something of the
fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection
of the south to the overlordship of Northumbria. In an
Easter-court which he held in his royal city by the river
Derweut, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy of
Wessex, who brought a message from its king. In the
midst of the conference Eumer started to his feet, drew
a dagger from his robe, and rushed on the Northum-
brian sovereign. Lilla, one of the King's war-band, threw
himself between Eadwine and his assassin ; but so furious
was the stroke that even through Lilla's body the dagger
still reached its aim. The king however recovered from
his wound to march on the West-Saxons ; he slew or sub-
dued all who had conspired against him, and returned
victorious to his own country.
Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King's Conversion
daughter as a wife, a step which probably marked political U mbria.
subordination; and with the Kentish queen had come
Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall stooping
form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round
a thin worn face, were long remembered in the North.
Moved by his queen's prayers Eadwine promised to become
Christian if he returned successful from Wessex ; and the
46 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on the
f^ new faith to which he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay
xFnfrSoms then as now i* 1 ^ ie light it threw on the darkness which
^j_ encompassed men's lives, the darkness of the future as of
? 96 - the past. " So seems the life of man, king," burst forth
an aged Ealdorman " as a sparrow's flight through the hall
when a man is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm
fire lighted on the hearth but the chill rain-storm without.
The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment
in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying
forth from the other vanishes into the wintry darkness
whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man
in our sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know
not. If this new teaching tell us aught certainly of these,
let us follow it." Coarser argument told on the crowd.
" None of your people, Eadwine, have worshipped the
gods more busily than I," said Coifi the priest, " yet there
are many more favoured and more fortunate. Were these
gods good for anything they would help their worshippers."
Then leaping on horseback, he hurled his spear into the
sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the rest of the
Witan embraced the religion of the king.
Penda. But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall
without a struggle. Even in Kent a reaction against the
new creed began with the death of ^Ethelberht. The
young Kings of the East Saxons burst into the church
where the Bishop of London was administering the
Eucharist to the people, crying " Give us that white
bread you gave to our father Saba," and on the bishop's
refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of
reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion ; but Mercia,
which had as yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria,
sprang into a sudden greatness as the champion of the
heathen gods. Its King, Penda, saw in the rally of the
old religion a chance of winning back his people's freedom
and giving it the lead among the tribes .about it. Origin-
ally mere settlers along the Upper Trent, the position of
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
47
the Mercians on the Welsh border invited them to widen
their possessions by conquest while the rest of their
Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of ex-
pansion. Their fights along the frontier too kept their war-
like energy at its height. Penda must have already asserted
his superiority over the four other English tribes of Mid-
Britain before he could have ventured to attack Wessex
and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and
Magesaetas on the Severn. Even with this accession of
strength however he was still no match for Northumbria.
But the war of the English people with the Britons seems
at this moment to have died down for a season, and the
Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had
parted the two races till now by allying himself with a
Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a joint attack on Eadwine.
The armies met in 633 at a place called Jfethfeld, and in
the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and slain.
Bemicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line
of ^Ethelfrith to its throne ; and after a year of anarchy
his second son, Oswald, became its King. The Welsh had
remained encamped in the heart of the north, and Oswald's
first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian
force gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged
itself at the new King's bidding to become Christian
if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon fell fighting
on the " Heaven's Field," as after times called the
field of battle ; the submission of Deira to the con-
queror restored the kingdom of Northumbria; and for
nine years the power of Oswald equalled that of Eadwine.
It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald
to this struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in
Bernicia the work of conversion which his victory began.
Paulinus fled from Northumbria at Eadwine's fall; and
the Pioman Church, though established in Kent, did
little in contending elsewhere against the heathen reaction.
Its place in the conversion of northern England was taken
by missionaries from Ireland. To understand the true
CHAP. II.
The
577-
796,
Oswald,
48 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. meaning of this change we must remember how greatly
^ the Christian Church in the west had been affected
Kingdoms, by the German invasion. Before the landing of the
^^_ English in Britain the Christian Church stretched in an
796< unbroken line across Western Europe to the furthest
coasts of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan
English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of
this great communion and broke it into two unequal parts.
On one side lay Italy, Spain, and Gaul, whose churches
owned obedience to and remained in direct contact" with
the See of Rome, on the other, practically cut off from the
general body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland.
But the condition of the two portions of Western Christen-
dom was very different. While the vigour of Christianity
in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare
struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by
invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such as it
has never known since. Christianity was received there
with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and letters and
arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and
Biblical knowledge which fled from the Continent took
refuge in its schools. The new Christian life soon
beat too strongly to brook confinement within the bounds
of Ireland itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the
island, had not been half a century dead when Irish
Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with
the mass of heathenism which was rolling in upon the
Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among the
Picts of the Highlands and amon^ the Frisians of the
o o
northern seas. An Irish missionary, Columban, founded
monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines. The canton
of St. Gall still commemorates in its name another Irish
missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled
wailing over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a
time it seemed as if the course of the world's history was
to be changed, as if the older Celtic race that Eoman and
German had swept before them had turned to the moral
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
49
577-
796,
Aidan.
conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin CHAP. II.
Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Churches of ^" e
fV>p ~V\ T pt English
Kingdoms.
On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast
of Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the
famous mission-station of lona. It was within its walls
that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his accession to
the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from
among its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to
his call obtained little success. He declared on his return
thai among a people so stubborn and barbarous as the
Northumbrian folk success was impossible. " Was it their
stubbornness or your severity ? " asked Aidan, a brother
sitting by ; " did you forget God's word to give them the
milk first and then the meat ? " All eyes turned on the
speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned mission, and
Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his bishop's see in the
island-peninsula of Liudisfarne. Thence, from a monastery
which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island,
preachers poured forth over the heathen realms. Aidan
himself wandered on foot, preaching among the peasants
of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his own court the
King acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their
efforts to convert his thegns. A new conception of king-
ship indeed began to blend itself with that of the warlike
glory of jEthelfrith or the wise administration of Eadwine,
and the moral 'power which was to reach its height in
Alfred first dawns in the story of Oswald. For after-
times the memory of Oswald's greatness was lost in the
memory of his piety. " By reason of his constant habit of
praying or giving thanks to the Lord he was wont wherever
he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees." As he
feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble
of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor
at his gate told him of a multitude that still waited fasting
without. The King at once bade the untasted meat before
him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish be parted
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and
blessed it. " May this hand," he cried, " never grow old."
Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as
577_ that of his predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than
79e. j n Eadwine men saw some faint likeness of the older
Emperors ; once indeed a writer from the land of the Picts
calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain." His
power was bent to carry forward the conversion of all
England, but prisoned as it was to the central districts
of the country heathendom fought desperately for life.
Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was
one continuous battle with the new religion ; but it was
a battle rather with the supremacy of Christian North-
umbria than with the supremacy of the Cross. East-
Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two
powers ; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from
the Mercian rule. But his doom was the doom of Eadwine,
and in a battle called the battle of the Maserfeld he was
overthrown and slain For a few years after his victory at
the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathenism
triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his over-
lordship as it had owned that of Oswald, its King threw
off the Christian faith which he had embraced but a few
years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira seems to
have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though distracted
by civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused
to yield. Year by year the Mercian King carried his
ravages over the north ; once he reached even the royal
city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bamborough. De-
spairing of success in an assault, he pulled down the
cottages around, and piling their wood against its walls
fired the mass in a fair wind that drove the flames on
the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing," cried
Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Fame, as he saw
the smoke drifting over the city, and a change of wind so
ran the legend of Northumbria's agony drove back the
flames on those who kindled them. But burned and
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 51
harried as it was, Bernicia still fought for the Cross. CHAP. n.
Oswiu, a third sou of ^Ethelfrith, held his ground stoutly fhe
against Penda's inroads till their cessation enabled him Kingdoms,
to build up again the old Northumbrian kingdom by 577-
a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was 7 J^'
never henceforth to V e dissolved ; and its influence was
at once seen in the renewal of Christianity throughout
Britain. East Anglia, conquered as it was, had clung to
its faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again. Penda's
own son, whom he had set over the Middle English,
received baptism and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last
the missionaries of the new belief appeared fearlessly
among the Mercians themselves. Penda gave them no
hindrance. In words that mark the temper of a man of
whom we would willingly know more, Baeda tells us that
the old King only " hated and scorned those whom he saw
not doing the works of the faith they had received." His
attitude shows that Penda looked with the tolerance of his
race on all questions of creed, and that he was fighting less
for heathenism than for political independence. And now
the growing power of Oswiu called him to the old struggle
with Northumbria. In 655 he met Oswiu in the field of
"Winweed by Leeds. It was in vain that the Northumbrian
sought to avert Penda's attack by offers of ornaments and
costly gifts. " If the pagans will not accept them," Oswiu
cried at last, " let us offer them to One that will ; "-and he
vowed that if successful he would dedicate his daughter to
Cod, and endow twelve monasteries in his realm. Victory
at last declared for the faith of Christ. Penda himself
fell on the field. The river over which the Mercians fled
was swollen with a great rain ; it swept away the frag-
ments of the heathen host, and the cause of the older gods
was lost for ever.
The terrible struggle between heathendom and Chris- Oswiu.
tianity was followed by a long and profound peace. For
three years after the battle of Winwsed Mercia was
governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu's name. The
52 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
LAP II winning of central England was a victory for Irish Chris
tianity as well as for Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathen-
dom was dead with Penda. " Being thus freed," Bseda tells
577 us, " the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve the
796. t r ue King, Christ." Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia,
the Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in
the bishopric of the missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to
whom Lichfield is still dedicated. Ceadda was a monk of
Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he travelled
on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theo-
dore with his own hands lifted him on horseback. The old
Celtic poetry breaks out in his death-legend, as it tells us
how voices of singers singing sweetly descended from heaven
to the little cell beside St. Mary's Church where the bishop
lay dying. Then " the same song ascended from the roof
again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came."
It was the soul of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come
with a choir of angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda.
'uihbert. In ISTorthumbria the work of his fellow missionaries
has almost been lost in the glory of Cuthbert. No
story better lights up for us the new religious life of
the time than the story of this Apostle of the Low-
lands. Born on the southern edge of the Lamrnermoor,
Cuthbert found shelter at eight years old in a widow's
house in the little village of Wrangholm. Already in
youth his robust frame had a poetic sensibility which
caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher
things, and a passing attack of lameness deepened the
religious impression. A traveller coming in his white
mantle over the hillside and stopping his horse to tend
Cuthbert's injured knee seemed to him an angel. The
boy's shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still
famous as a sheep walk, though a scant herbage scarce
veils the whinstone rock. There meteors plunging into
the night became to him a company of angelic spirits
carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his
longings slowly settled into a resolute will towards a
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 53
religious life. In 651 he made his way to a group of CHAP. II.
straw-thatched log-huts in the midst of untilled solitudes ^
where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in x^loins,
the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land 577-
of poetry and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, 796 '
Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and Annan-water, are
musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy. Agricul-
ture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and
drainage and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into
farm and meadow. But to see the Lowlands as they were
in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and farm away
again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and
there with clusters of wooden hovels and crossed by
boggy tracks, over which travellers rode spear in hand and
eye kept cautiously about them. The Xorthumbrian pea-
santry among whom he journeyed were for the most part
Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference they
yielded to their thegns in nominally accepting the new
Christianity as these had yielded to the king. But they
retained their old superstitions side by side with the new
worship ; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance
on their heathen charms and amulets ; and if trouble befell
the Christian preachers who came settling among them,
they took it as proof of the wrath of the older gods.
When some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne
for the construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with
the monks who were at work on them out to sea, the rustic
bystanders shouted, " Let nobody pray for them ; let
nobody pity these men ; for they have taken away from us
our old worship, and how their new-fangled customs are to
be kept nobody knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert
wandered among listeners such as these, ' choosing above
all the remoter mountain villages from whose roughness
and poverty other teachers turned aside. Unlike his Irish
comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from
village to village ; the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians
listened willingly to one who was himself a peasant of the
VOL. L 5
54
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
The
English
Kingdoms.
577-
796.
Ccedmon.
Lowlands, and who had caught the rough Northumbrian
burr along the banks of the Leader. His patience, his
humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for
him, and not less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the
peasant-preacher for the hard life he had chosen. " Never
did man die of hunger who served God faithfully," he
would say, when nightfall found them supperless in the
waste. " Look at the eagle overhead ! God can feed us
through him if He will " and once at least he owed his
meal to a fish that the scared bird let fall. A snowstorm
drove his boat on the coast of Fife. " The snow closes
the road along the shore," mourned his comrades ; " the
storm bars our way oversea." " There is still the way of
heaven that lies open," said Cuthbert.
While missionaries were thus labouring among its
peasantry, Northumbria saw the rise of a number of
monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict ties of the Bene-
dictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model of the
family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person
who sought devotional retirement. The most notable and
wealthy of these houses was that of Streoneshalh, where
Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on the
cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern Sea.
Hild was a Northumbrian Deborah whose counsel was
sought even by kings ; and the double monastery over
which she ruled became a seminary of bishops and
priests. The sainted John of Beverley was among her
scholars. But the name which really throws glory
over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from whose
lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first great
English song. Though well advanced in years, Csedmon
had learned nothing of the art of verse, . the alliterative
jingle so common among his fellows, " wherefore being
sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for glee's sake to sing
in turn, he no sooner saw the harp corne towards him than
he rose from the board and went homewards. Once
when he had done thus, and gone from the feast to the
i.J EAELY ENGLAND. 4491071. 55 ,
stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there CHAP. II.
appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him ^
by name, ' Sing, Csedmon, some song to Me.' ' I cannot sfngdoms.
sing,' he answered ; ' for this cause left I the feast and ^^_
came hither.' He who talked with him ans \vered ' How- 796 '
ever that be, you shall sing to Me.' ' What shall I sing ? '
rejoined Csedmon. ' The beginning of created things,'
replied He. In the morning the cowherd stood before
Hild and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike con-
chided ' that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by
the Lord.' They translated for Caedmon a passage in Holy
Writ, ' bidding him, if he could, put the same into verse/
The next morning he gave it them composed in excellent
verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine grace
in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on
him the monastic life." Piece by piece the sacred story
was thus thrown into Caedmon's poem. " He sang of the
creation of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the
history of Isra'el ; of their departure from Egypt and
entering into the Promised Land ; of the incarnation,
passion, and resurrection of Christ, and of His ascension ;
of the terror of future judgement, the horror of hell -pangs,
and the joys of heaven."
But even while Csedmon was singing the glories of typSfffi
Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing away.
The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its fall. Only a few
years after Penda's defeat the Mercians threw off Oswiu's
yoke and set Wulf here, a son of Penda, on their throne.
They were aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious
strife which was now rending the Northumbrian realm.
The labour of Aidan, the victories of Oswald and Oswiu,
seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church.
The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses
whose foundation followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for
their ecclesiastical tradition, riot to Kome but to Ireland ;
and quoted for their guidance the instructions, not of
Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims of supremacy
56 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
. . .
CHAP. II. over the whole English Church might be pressed by the
^ see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as
Kingdoms ** existed in the North of England was the Abbot of lona.
But Oswiu's queen, brought with her from Kent the loyalty
796. O f ti^ Kentish Church to the Eoman see ; and the visit
of two young thegus to the Imperial city raised their
love of Eome into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of
these,. Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce the usages
in which the Irish Church differed from the Roman as
schismatic ; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred
so hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon
in 664 a great council at Whitby, where the future ecclesi-
astical allegiance of his realm should be decided. The
points actually contested were trivial enough. Colman,
Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish
fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping
Easter : Wilfrid pleaded for the- liornan. The one dis-
putant appealed to the authority of Coluniba, the other to
that of St. Peter. " You own," cried the King at last to
Colman, " that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom
of heaven has He given such power to Columba ? " The
bishop could but answer " No." " Then will I rather obey
the porter of heaven," said Oswiu, " lest when I reach its
gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back on
me, and there be none to open." The humorous tone of
Oswiu's decision could not hide its importance, and the
synod had no sooner broken up, than Colman, followed by
the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of their
English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed
away to lona. Trivial in fact as were the actual points
of difference which severed the Eoman Church from the
Irish, the question to which communion" Northumbria
should belong was of immense moment to the after
fortunes of England. Had the Church of Aidan finally
won, the later ecclesiastical history of England would
probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid of [that
power of organization which was the strength of the
I.]
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
57
Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish home
took the clan system of the country as the basis of its
government. Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical contro-
versies became inextricably confounded ; and the 'clergy,
robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no
element save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of
wandering bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by
hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from
morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing
influences which contact with a wider world alone can give,
this is a picture which the Irish Church of later times
presents to us. It was from such a chaos as this that
England was saved by the victory of Home in the Synod
of Whitby. But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet
greater danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church
it must have remained spiritually isolated from the bulk
of the Western world. Fallen as Rome might be from its
older greatness, it preserved the traditions of civilization,
of letters and art and law. Its faith still served as a bond
which held together the nations that sprang from the
wreck of the Empire. To fight against Rome w r as, as
Wilfrid said, " to fight against the world." To repulse
Rome was to condemn England to isolation. Dimly as
such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu's
mind, it was the instinct of a statesman that led him to
set aside the love and gratitude of his youth and to link
England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization
undertaken by a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom
Rome despatched in 668 to secure England to her sway
as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more decisive
step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly
in the organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church
of England, as we know it to-day, is the work, so far as its
outer form is concerned, of Theodore. His work was
determined in its main outlines by the previous history of
the English people. The conquest of the Continent had
CHAP. II.
796 '
58 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHU>. II. been wrought either by races which were already Chris-
^" tian, or by heathens who bowed to the Christian faith
English O f the nations they conquered. To this oneness of religion
^L " between the German invaders of the Empire and their
7 ^ 6 - Eomau subjects was owing the preservation of all that
survived of the Roman world. The Church everywhere
remained untouched. The Christian bishop became the
defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his
Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the
German and his subjects, the one bulwark against bar-
baric violence and oppression. To the barbarian, on the
other hand, he was the representative of all that was
venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters,
and of art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people
had been driven out together. When Theodore came to
organize the Church of England, the very memory of the
older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had
passed away. The first missionaries to the Englishmen,
strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves neces-
sarily to the courts of the kings, who were their earliest
converts, and whose conversion was generally followed by
that of their people. The English bishops were thus ai
first royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally
nothing but the kingdom. In this way realms which arc
all but forgotten are commemorated in the limits of existing-
sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an obscure
kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original
kingdom of Mercia may be recovered by following the
map of the ancient bishopric of Lichfield. In adding
many sees to those he found Theodore was careful to make
their dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarca-
tions. But he soon passed from this extension of the
episcopate to its organization. IP. his arrangement oi
dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them round
the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesi-
astical canons, Theodore did unconsciously a political work
The old divisions of kingdoms and tribes about him
s.J EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 59
divisions which had sprung for the most part from mere CHAP. II.
accidents of the conquest, were now fast breaking down. The
The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed Khfgxioina
by the three larger ones, and of these three Mercia and 5 ~^_
Wessex were compelled to bow to the superiority of 796 '
N"ortlmmbria. The tendency to national unity which was
to characterize the new England had thus already declared
itself; but the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred
form and surrounded with divine sanctions a unity which
as yet rested on no basis but the sword. The single throne
of the one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds
to the thought of a single throne for their one temporal
overlord. The regular subordination of priest to bishop,
of bishop to primate, in the administration of the Church,
supplied a mould on which the civil organization of the
state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the councils
gathered by Theodore were the first of our national
gatherings for general legislation. It was at a much later
time that the Wise Men of Wessex, or Northumbria, or
Mercia learned to come together in the Witenagemote of
all England. The synods which Theodore convened as
religiously representative of the whole English nation led
the way by their example to our national parliaments. The
canons which these synods enacted led the way to a
national system of law.
The organization of the episcopate was followed by the Wulfhere.
organization of the parish system. The mission-station
or monastery from which priest or bishop went forth on
journey after journey to preach and baptize naturally dis-
appeared as the land became Christian. The missionaries
turned into settled clergy. As the King's chaplain became
a bishop and the kingdom his diocese, so the chaplain of an
English noble became the priest and the manor his parish.
But this parish system is probably later than Theodore,
and the system of tithes which has been sometimes
coupled with his name dates only from the close of the
eighth century. What was really due to him was the
60 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BCOK
CHAP. II. organization of the episcopate, and the impulse which this
^ gave to national unity. But the movement towards unity
English found a sudden check in the revived strength of Mercia.
Kingdoms.
5 ~ Wulfhere proved a vigorous and active ruler, and the
796. peaceful reign of Oswiu left him free to build up again
during seventeen years of rule (657-675) that Mercian
overlordship over the tribes of mid-England which had
been lost at Penda's death. He had more than his father's
success. Not only did Essex again own his supre-
macy but even London fell into Mercian hands. The West-
Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all
their settlements to the north of that river were annexed
to the Mercian realm. Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached
even south of the Thames, for Sussex in its dread of
West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlord-
ship, and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two
outlying settlements of the Jutes the Isle of Wight and
the lands of the Meonwaras along the Southampton water
which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian
arms. The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went
hand in hand with its military advance. The forests of its
western bolder, the marshes of its eastern coast, were being
cleared and drained by monastic colonies, whose success
shows the hold which Christianity had now gained over
its people. ' Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild
western woodlands' and in the yet wilder fen-country on
the eastern border of the kingdom which stretched from the
" Holland," the sunk, hollow land of Lincolnshire, to the
channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters and
reedy islets wrapped in its own dark mist- veil and tenanted
only by flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either
quarter the new faith made its way. In the western
woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey round
which gathered the town of Evesham, and the eastern
fen-land was soon filled with religious houses. Here
through the liberality of King Wulfhere rose the abbey of
Peterborough. Here too, Guthlac, a youth of the royal
I
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 61
race of Mercia, sought a refuge from the world in the CHAP. n.
solitudes of Crowland, and so great was the reverence he ^
won, that only two years had passed since his death when Kingdoms,
the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over his tomb. Earth 577-
was brought in boats to form a site ; the buildings rested
on oaken piles driven into the marsh ; a great stone
church replaced the hermit's cell ; and the toil of the new
brotherhood changed the pools around them into fertile
meadow-land.
In spite however of this rapid recovery of its strength Ecgfrith.
by Mercia Northumbria remained the dominant state in
Britain : and Ecgfrith, who succeeded Oswiu in 670, so
utterly defeated Wulfhere when war broke out between
them that he was glad to purchase peace by the surrender
of Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased more
hardly had not Ecgfrith's ambition turned rather to con-
quests over the Briton than to victories over his fellow
Englishmen. The war between Briton and Englishman
which had languished since the battle of Chester had
been revived some twelve years before by an advance of
the West-Saxons to the south-west. Unable to save the
possessions of Wessex north of the Thames from the grasp
of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwalh, sought for compensation
in an attack on his Welsh neighbours. A victory at
Bradford on the Avon enabled him to overrun the country
near Mendip which had till then been held by the
Britons ; and a second campaign in 658, which ended in a
victory on the skirts of the great forest that covered
Somerset to the east, settled the West-Saxons as con-
querors round the sources of the Parret. It may have
been the example of the West-Saxons which spurred
Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon his British neighbours
in the west which widened the bounds of his kingdom.
His reign marks the highest pitch of Northumbrian power.
His armies chased the Britons from the kingdom of Cum-
bria and made the district of Carlisle English ground.
A large part of the conquered country was bestow r ed upon
(J2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
IAP. II. the see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by
one whom we have seen "before labouring as the Apostle
of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new mission-
577_ station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of
796. Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of
Tweed. He remained there through the great secession
which followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became
prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with
endless disputes against which his patience and good
humour struggled in vain. "Worn out at last, he fled to a
little island of basaltic rock, one of the Fame group not far
from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for the most part
with kelp and sea- weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf,
dug down within deep into the rock, and roofed with logs
and straw. But the reverence for his sanctity dragged
Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne. He
entered Carlisle, which the King had bestowed upon the
bishopric, at a moment when all Northumbria was waiting
for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith's against the
Britons in the north. Tiie Firth of Forth had long been
the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of
it owned Ecgfrith's supremacy. In 685 however the King
resolved on their actual subjection and marched across the
Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed on Northumbria,
and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses
which had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on
its King, when his navy, setting out a year before from
the newly-conquered western coast, swept the Irish shores
in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved
the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent
over a Eoman fountain which still stood unharmed amongst
the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious bystanders thought they
caught words of ill-omen falling from the old man's lips.
"Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour
the peril of the fight is over and done." " Watch and
pray," he said, when they questioned him on the morrow ;
I] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 63
" watch and pray." In a few days more a solitary fugitive CHAP. n.
escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had turned
desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife :
and that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a
ghastly ring of corpses, 011 the far-off moorland of 796 -
Nectansmere.
The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, Mercian
for while the Picts pressed on the kingdom from the 9 reatnesf
north ^Ethelred, Wulf here's successor, attacked it on the
Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace
which left him master of Middle England and free to
attempt the direct conquest of the south. Eor the moment
this attempt proved a fruitless one. Mercia was still too
weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping from
Xorthumbria's hands, while Wessex which seemed her
destined prey rose at this moment into fresh power under
the greatest of its early kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king
whose reign covered the long period from 688 to 728, carried .
on during the whole of it the war which Cent wine had begun.
He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the
Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier
of his new conquests by a wooden fort on the banks of the
Tone which has grown into the present Taunton. The
West-Saxons tTius became masters of the whole district
which now bears the name of Somerset. The conquest of
Sussex and of Kent on his eastern border made Ine master
of all Britain south of the Thames, and his repulse of a
new Mercian King Ceolred in a bloody encounter at Wod-
nesburh in 714 seemed to establish the threefold division of
the English race between three realms of almost equal power.
But able as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to
hush the civil strife that was the curse of Wessex, and a
wild legend tells the story of the disgust which drove him
from the world. He had feasted royally at one of his country
houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his queen bade
him turn back thither. The king returned to find his house
stripped of curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the
(J4 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he had slept
^ with ^Ethelburh rested a sow with her farrow of pigs. The
KFiig g doms scene had no need of the queen's comment : " See, my lord,
^j_ how the fashion of this world passeth away !" In 726 he
^? g sought peace in a pilgrimage to Home. The anarchy which
had driven' Ine from the throne broke out in civil strife
which left Wessex an easy prey to Jjlthelbald, the suc-
cessor of Ceolred in the Mercian realm. ^Ethelbald took
up with better fortune the struggle of his people for su-
premacy over the south. He penetrated to the very heart
of the West-Saxon kingdom,, and his siege and capture of
the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For
twenty years the overlordship of Mercia was recognized
by all Britain south of the Humber. It was at the head
of 'the forces not of Mercia only but of East-Anglia, Kent,
and Essex, as well as of the West-Saxons, that ^Ethelbald
marched against the Welsh on his western border.
Bccda. In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King
found grounds for a hope that -Northern Britain would also
yield to his sway. But the dream of a single England was
again destined to be foiled. Fallen as Nortlmmbria was
from its old glory, it still remained a great power. Under
the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Aldfrith and
Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of
Western Europe. No schools were more famous than, those
of Jarrow and York. The whole learning of the age seemed
to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. Bseda the
Venerable Bede as later times styled him was born about
ten years after the Synod of Whitby beneath the shade of a
great abbey which Benedict Biscop was rearing by the mouth
of the Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil
life was wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict's house
which was founded by his scholar Ceolfrid. Bseda never
stirred from Jarrow. " I spent my whole life in the same
monastery," he says, " and while attentive to the rule of
my order and the service of the Church, my constant
pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or writino-." The
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 65
words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more touching in CHAI-. II.
its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English f^
scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to King^oins.
knowledge, the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and ^j_
teaching and writing, dawned for Englishmen in the story 7 ^'
of Bceda. While still young he became a teacher, and six
hundred monks besides strangers that flocked thither for
instruction formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to
imagine how among the toils of the schoolmaster and the
duties of the monk Breda could have found time for the
composition of the numerous works that made his name
famous in the West. But materials for study had accumu-
lated in Xorthumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and
Benedict Biscop and the libraries which were forming at
Wearmouth and York The tradition of the older Irish
teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into that
path of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed
his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came
to him from the school which the Greek Archbishop
Theodore founded beneath the walls of Canterbury. His
skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from a Roman
cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict
Biscop. Little by little the young scholar thus made nini-
self master of the whole range of the science of his time ;
he became, as Burke rightly styled him, "the father of
English learning." The tradition of the older classic
culture was first revived for England in his quotations of
Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and
Ovid. Vergil cast over him the same spell that he cast
over Dante ; verses from the ^neid break his narratives ot
martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the
great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach
of spring. His work was done with small aid from others.
" I am my own secretary," he writes ; " I make my own
notes. I am my own librarian." But forty-five works
remained after his death to attest his prodigious industry.
In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most
6 g HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. important among these were the commentaries and homilies
^ upon various books of the Bible which he had drawn from
English t ] ie wr itlno-s of the Fathers. But he was far from confining
kingdoms.
^^ himself to theology. In treatises compiled as text-books
796. f ol , his scholars Bseda threAv together all that the world
had then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in
physics and music, in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric,
arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopaedic character of
his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman.
He loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English
song, his last work was a translation into English of the
Gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that broke
from his lips were some English rimes upon death.
But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the
work which immortalizes his name. In his " Ecclesiastical
History of the English Nation," Bseda was at once the
founder of medieval history and the first English historian.
All that we really know of the century and a half that
follows the landing of Augustine we know from him.
Wherever his own personal observation extended, the story
is told with admirable detail and force. He is hardly less
full or accurate in the portions which he owed to his
Kentish friends, Alcvvine and Nothelm. What he owed to
no informant was his exquisite faculty of story-telling,
and yet no story of his own telling is so touching as the
story of his death. Two weeks before the Easter of 735
the old man was seized with an extreme weakness and loss
of breath. He still preserved however his usual pleasant-
ness and gay good-humour, and in spite of prolonged
sleeplessness continued his lectures to the pupils about
him. Verses of his own English tongue broke from time
o O
to time from the master's lip rude rimes that told how
before the " need-fare," Death's stern " must go," none can
enough bethink him what is to be his doom for good or
ill, The tears of Ba^da's scholars mingled with his song.
"We never read without weeping," writes one of them.
So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and still master
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 67
and pupils toiled at their work, for Basda longed to bring CHAP.
to an end his version of St. John's Gospel into the English
tongue and his extracts from Bishop Isidore. " I don't
want my boys to read a lie," he answered those who would 577-
have had him rest, " or to work to no purpose after I am 796 '
gone." A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness
grew upon him, but he spent the whole clay in teaching,
only saying cheerfully to his scholars, "Learn with what
speed you may ; I know not how long I may last." The
dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again the old
man called his scholars round him and bade them write.
" There is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the
morning drew on, <; and it is hard for thee to question
thyself any longer." " It is easily done," said Baeda ;
" take thy pen and write quickly." Amid tears and fare-
wells the day wore on to eventide. " There is yet one
sentence unwritten, dear master," said the boy. " Write
it quickly," bade the dying man. " It is finished now,"
said the little scribe at last. " You speak truth," said the
master ; " all is finished now." Placed upon the pavement,
his head. supported in his scholar's arms, his face turned to
the spot where he was wont to pray, Baada chanted the
solemn " Glory to God." As his voice reached the close
of his song he passed quietly away.
First among English scholars, first among English theo- Fall of
logians, first among English historians, it is in the monk of j a ^ "
.Tarrow that English literature strikes its roots. In the
six hundred scholars who gathered round him for instruc-
tion he is the father of our national education. In his
physical treatises he is the first figure to which our science .
looks back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar's life was
broken by the growing anarchy of Nbrthumbria, and by
threats of war from its Mercian rival. At last ^Ethelbald
marched on a state which seemed exhausted by civil dis-
cord and ready for submission to his arms. But its king
Eadberht showed himself worthy of the kings that had gone
before him, and in 740 he threw back yEthelbald's attack iu
68
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
English
Kingdoms
577-
796.
Offa.
CHAP II. a repulse which not only ruined the Mercian ruler's hopes
of northern conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
Ai reac iy goaded to revolt by exactions, the West-Saxons
were roused to a fresh struggle for independence, and after
twelve years of continued outbreaks the whole people
mustered at Burford under the golden dragon of their
race. The fight was a desperate one, but a sudden panic
seized the Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a
decisive victory freed Wessex from the Mercian yoke.
Four years later, in 757, its freedom was maintained by
a new victory at Secandun ; but amidst the rout of his
host ^Ethelbald redeemed the one hour of shame that had
tarnished his glory ; he refused to fly, and fell fighting on
the field.
But though Eadberht might beat back the inroads of the
Mercians and even conquer Strathclyde, before the anarchy
of his own kingdom he could only fling down his sceptre
and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne. From
the death of Baeda the history of Northumbria became in
fact little more than a wild story of lawlessness and blood-
shed. King after king was swept away by treason and
revolt, the country fell into the hands of its turbulent
nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land w r as scourged
by famine and plague. An anarchy almost as complete
fell on Wessex after the recovery of its freedom. Only in
Mid-England was there any sign of order and settled rule.
The two crushing defeats at Burford and Secandun, though
they had brought about revolts which stripped Mercia of
all the conquests it had made, were far from having broken
the Mercian power. Under the long reign of Offa, which
went on from 755 to 796, It rose again to all but its old
dominion. Since the dissolution of the temporary alliance
which Penda formed with the Welsh King Cadwallon the
war with the Britons in the west had been the one great
hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under Offa
Mercia braced herself to the completion jof her British
conquests. Beating back the Welsh from Hereford,
i.J EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 69
and carrying his own ravages into the heart of Wales, CHAP. II.
Offa in 779 drove the King of Powys from his capital, ^
which changed its old name of Pengwern for the signifi- Kingdoms,
cant English title of the Town in the Scrub or Bush, 5 ~^_
Scrobbesbyryg, Shrewsbury. Experience however had 796 '
taught the Mercians the worthlessuess of raids like these
and Offa resolved to create a military border by planting a
settlement of Englishmen between the Severn, which had
till then served as the western boundary of the English
race, and the huge " Offa's Dyke " which he drew from the
mouth of Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later
conquests of the West-Saxons, the old plan of extermina-
tion was definitely abandoned and the Welsh who chose to
remain dwelled undisturbed among their English con-
querors. From these conquests over the Britons Offa
turned to build up again the realm which had been
shattered at Secandun. But his progress was slow. A
reconquest of Kent in 774 woke anew the jealousy of
the West-Saxons ; and though Offa repulsed their attack .
at Bensington in 777 the victory was followed by several
years of inaction. It was not till Wessex was again
weakened by fresh anarchy that he was able to seize
East Anglia and restore his realm to its old bounds under
Wulfhere. Further he could not go. A Kentish revolt
occupied him till his death .in 796, and his successor
Cenwulf did little but preserve the realm he bequeathed
him. At the close of the eighth century the drift of the
English peoples towards a national unity was in fact
utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria had been
foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia
had broken down before the resistance of Wessex. A
threefold division seemed to have stamped itself upon the
land ; and so complete was the balance of power between
the three realms which parted it that no subjection of one
to the other seemed likely to fuse the English tribes into
an English people.
VOL. 1.^-6
CHAPTER III
WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN.
796-947.
The THE union which each English kingdom in turn had failed
Northmen. ^ Q ^ n g a |3 OU t W as brought about by the pressure of
the Northmen. The dwellers in the isles of the Baltic
or on either side of the Scandinavian peninsula had lain
hidden till now from Western Christendom, waging their
battle for existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, and
stormy seas. It was this hard fight for life that left its
stamp on the temper of Dane, Swede, or Norwegian
alike, that gave them their defiant energy, their ruthless
daring, their passion for freedom and hatred of settled rule.
Forays and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty
livelihood, and at the close of the eighth century these raids
found a wider sphere than the waters of the northern seas.
Tidings of the wealth garnered in the abbeys and towns of
the new Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the coasts of
Northern Gaul ; and just before Offa's death their boats
touched the shores of Britain. To men of that day it must
have seemed as though the world had gone back three
hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth
their pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or Cerdic.
There was the same wild panic as the black boats of the
invaders struck inland along the river-reaches or moored
round the river isles, the same sights of horror, firing of
homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to
BOOK I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 71
slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the CHAP. III.
market-place, as when the English themselves had attacked wessex
Britain. Christian priests were again slain at the altar Northman,
by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion, govern- 795-
ment disappeared before these Northmen as before the 947
Northmen of three centuries before.
In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Jarrow Ecgberht
and Holy Island, and the presence of the freebooters soon
told on the political balance of the English realms. A
great revolution was going on in the south, where Mercia
was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulfs death
wbile the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by
a new king, Ecgberht. In Offa's days Ecgbeiht had failed
in his claim of the crown of Wessex and had been driven
to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He remained
there through the memorable year during which Charles'
the Great restored the Empire of the West, and returned
in 802 to be quietly welcomed as King by the West-
Saxon people. A march into the heart of Cornwall and the
conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in the
south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia which
broke out in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched
into the heart of Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at
Ellandun gave all England south of Thames to the West-
Saxons and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of
East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia.
Two great overthrows at their hands had already spent
its strength when Ecgberht crossed the Thames in 827, and
the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without a struggle
to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than
those of supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream of a
union of all England drew him to the north. Northumbria
was still strong ; in learning and arts it stood at the
head of the English race ; and under a king like Eadberht
it would have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had
withstood ^Ethelbald. But the ruin of Jarrow and Holy
Island had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn by civil
72 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAV III strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed
to meet the Northmen, Northumbria sought union and
and the deliverance in subjection to a foreign master. Its thegns
Northmen. " . . . , , .,
_ met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the supremacy
9 _^- of Wessex.
With the submission of Northumbria the work which
^aPtiM Oswiu and JEthelbald had failed to do was done, and the
Northmen. w hole English race was for the first time knit together
under a single rule. The union came not a moment too
soon. Had the old severance of people from people, the
old civil strife within each separate realm gone on it is
hard to see how the attacks of the Northmen could have
been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland ,
and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Char-
mouth in Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht,
when he hastened to meet them, from the field. His
victory the year after at Hengestdun won a little rest for
the land ; but ^thelwulf who mounted the throne on
Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was
only beaten off by years of hard fighting. .^Ethelwulf
fought bravely in defence of his realm ; in his defeat at
Charmouth as in a final victory at Acleain 851 he led his
troops in person against the sea-robbers ; and his success
won peace for the land through the short and uneventful
reigns of his sons JEthelbald and JEthelberht: But the
northern storm burst in full force upon England when a
third son, ^Ethelred, followed his brothers on the throne.
The Northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland
and the coast of Gaul ; they were masters of the sea ; and
from west and east alike they closed upon Britain. While
one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north of the
Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on
the coast of East Anglia under Hubba and marched the next
year upon York. A victory over two claimants of its crown
gave the pirates Northumbria ; and their two armies united
at Nottingham in 868 for an attack on the Mercian realm,
Mercia was saved by a march of King ^Ethelred to Not-
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
73
796-
tingham, but the peace he made there with the Northmen CHAP. III
left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, wessex
whose under-King, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their
leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows.
His martyrdom by the heathen made Eadmund the St.
Sebastian of English legend ; in later days his figure
gleamed from the pictured windows of every church along
the eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmunds -
bury rose over his relics. With him ended the line of East-
Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only
conquered but divided among the soldiers of the pirate
host, and their leader Guthrum assumed its crown. Then
the Northmen turned to the richer spoil of the great
abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up
in flames, and their monks fled or were slain among the
ruins. Mercia, though still spared from actual conquest,
cowered panic-stricken before the Northmen, and by pay-
ment of tribute owned them as its overlords.
In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone,
and England north of the Thames had been torn from the
overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a change could only have
been made possible by the temper of the conquered king-
doms. To them the conquest was simply their transfer
from one overlord to another, and it may be that in all
there were men who preferred the overlordship of the
Northman to the overlordship of the West-Saxon. But
the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face
with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight,
not for supremacy, but for life. As yet the land 'seemed
paralyzed by terror. With the exception of his one march
on Nottingham, King ^Ethelred had done nothing to save
his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the pirates no
sooner pushed up Thames to Beading in 871 than the
West-Saxons, attacked on their own soil, turned fiercely at
bay. A desperate attack drove the Northmen from Ash-
down on the heights that overlooked the Vale of White
Horse, but their camp in the tongue of land between the
Wessex
74
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
796-
947.
CHAP. III. Kennet and Thames proved impregnable. J^thelred died
Wessex in tne midst of tne stru ggl e an( * nis brother Alfred, who
and the now became king, bought the withdrawal of the pirates
and a few years' breathing-space for his realm. It was
easy for the quick eye of Alfred to see that the Northmen
had withdrawn simply with the view of gaining firmer
footing for a new attack ; three years indeed had hardly
passed before Mercia was invaded and its under-King
driven over sea to make place for a tributary of the in-
vaders. From Eepton half their host marched northwards
to the Tyne, while Guthrum led the rest into his kingdom
of East-Anglia to prepare for their next year's attack on
Wessex. In 876 his fleet appeared before Wareham, and
when driven thence by Alfred, the Northmen threw them-
selves into Exeter. Their presence there was likely to stir
arising of the Welsh, and through the winter Alfred girded
himself for this new peril. At break of spring his army
closed round the town, a hired fleet cruised off the coast to
guard against rescue, and the defeat of their fellows at Ware-
ham in an attempt to relieve them drove the pirates to
surrender. They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
Gloucester. But .ZElfred had hardly disbanded his troops
when his enemies, roused by the arrival of fresh hordes eager
lor plunder, reappeared at Chippenham, and in the opening
of 878 marched ravaging over the land. The surprize of
Wessex was complete, and for a month or two the general
panic left no hope of resistance. Alfred, with his small
band of followers, could only throw himself into a fort
raised hastily in the isle of Athelney among the marshes of
the Parret, a position from which he could watch closely
the movements of his foes. But with the first burst of
.spring he called the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and
still gathering troops as he moved marched through Wilt-
shire on the Northmen. He found their host at Ediugton,
defeated it in a great battle, and after a siege of fourteen
days forced them to surrender and to bind themselves by a
solemn peace or " frith " at Wedmore in Somerset. In form
i.J EARLY ENGLAND. 449-1071.
the Peace of Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of CHAP. III.
Britain to its invaders. All Korthumbria, all East-Anglia, Wessex
all Central England east of a line which stretched from Northmen.
Thames' mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along the 796-
94.T
Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to Chester,
was left subject to the Northmen. Throughout this 'Dane-
lagh' as it was called the conquerors settled down
among the conquered population as lords of the soil, thickly
in Northern Britain, more thinly in its central districts,
but everywhere guarding jealously their old isolation and
gathering in separate ' heres ' or armies round towns which
were only linked in loose confederacies. The peace had
in fact saved little more than Wessex itself. But in
saving Wessex it saved England. The spell of terror was
broken. The tide of invasion turned. From an attitude
of attack the Northmen were thrown back on -an attitude
of defence. The whole reign of Alfred was a preparation
for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back from the
pirates the land they had won.
What really gave England heart for such a struggle sElfred.
was the courage and energy of the King himself. Alfred
was the noblest as he was the most complete embodi-
ment of all that is great, all that is loveable, in the
English temper. He combined as no other man has ever
combined its practical energy, its patient and enduring
force, its profound sense of duty, the reserve and self-control
that steadies in it a wide outlook and a restless daring,
its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, its sensi-
tiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and
passionate religion. Religion indeed was the groundwork
of Alfred's character. His temper was instinct with
piety. Everywhere throughout his writings that remain
to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir him to
outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he was no mere
saint. He felt none of that scorn of the world about him
which drove the nobler souls of his day to monastery or
hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness and constant
76 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism. His rare
geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave
Northmen c l ur an ^ charm to his life. A sunny frankness and
7 "^i_ ' openness of spirit breathes in the pleasant chat of his
94 7- books, and what he was in his books he showed himself in
his daily converse. Alfred was in truth an artist, and
both the lights and- shadows of his life were those of the
artistic temperament. His love of books, his love of
strangers, his questionings of travellers and scholars, betray
an imaginative restlessness that longs to break out of the
narrow world of experience which hemmed him in. At
one time he jots down news of a voyage to the unknown
seas of. the north. At another he listens to tidings which
his envoys bring back from the churches of Malabar.
And side by side with this restless outlook of the artistic
nature he showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its
vivid apprehension of unseen danger, its craving for affec-
tion, its sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself rather
than with his reader that he communed as thoughts of the
foe without, of ingratitude and opposition within, broke
the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius. " Oh, what a
happy man was he," he cries once, " that man that had a
naked sword hanging over his head from a single thread ;
so as to me it always did ! " " Desirest thou power ? " he
asks at another time. "But thou shalt never obtain it
without sorrows sorrows from strange folk, and yet
keener sorrows from thine own kindred." " Hardship and
sorrow ! " he breaks out again, " not a king but would
wish to be without these if he could. But I know that he
cannot ! " The loneliness which breathes in words like
these has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt
of men and the judgements of men. But cynicism found
no echo in the large and sympathetic temper of JElfred.
He not only longed for the love of his subjects, but for
the remembrance of " generations " to come. Nor did his
inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and
versatile activity. To the scholars he gathered round him
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 77
he seemed the very type of a scholar, snatching every hour CHAP. ill.
he could find to read or listen to books read to him. The wessex
singers of his court found in him a brother singer, gathering N o?thmen.
the old songs of his people to teach them to his children, 7 "^_
breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple verse, 9A7 -
solacing himself in hours of depression with the music of
the Psalms. He passed from court and study to plan
buildings and instruct craftsmen in gold- work, to teach
even falconers and dog-keepers their business. But all this
versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good
sense. Alfred was a thorough man of business. He was
careful of detail, laborious, methodical. He carried in his
bosom a little handbook in which he noted things as they
struck him now a bit of family genealogy, now a prayer,
now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on
the bridge. Each hour of the day had its appointed task ;
there was the same order in the division of his revenue and
in the arrangement of his court.
Wide however and various as was the King's temper,
its range was less wonderful than its harmony. Of the
narrowness, of the want of proportion, of the predominance
of one quality over another which goes commonly with an
intensity of moral purpose Alfred showed not a trace.
Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, poet and
saint, his character kept that perfect balance which charms
us in no other Englishman save Shakspere. But full
and harmonious as his temper was, it was the temper of a
king. Every power was bent to the work of rule. His
practical energy found scope for itself in the material and
administrative restoration of the wasted land. His intel-
lectual activity breathed fresh life into education and
literature. His capacity for inspiring trust and affection
drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and
began the upbuilding of a new England. And all was
guided, controlled, ennobled by a single aim. " So long as
I have lived," said the King as life closed about him, " I
have striven to live worthily." Little by little men came
78 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK.
CHAP. III. to know what such a life of worthiness meant. Little by
Wessex little they came to recognize in JElfred a ruler of higher
Northmen an( ^ no ^ er stamp than the world had seen. Never had it
j"o_ seen a King who lived solely for the good of his people.
94 7 - Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal
aim to devote himself solely to the welfare of those whom
he ruled. It was this grand self-mastery that gave him his
power over the men about him. Warrior and conqueror
as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the warrior's .
dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wed-
more struck the key-note of his reign. But still more is
it this height and singleness of purpose, this absolute
concentration of the noblest faculties to the noblest aim,
that lifts Alfred out of the narrow bounds of Wessex. It'
the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the com-
parison of him with the few whom the world owns as its
greatest men, he rises to their level in the moral grandeur
of his life. And it is this which has hallowed his memory
among his own English people. " I desire," said the King
in some of his latest words, " I desire to leave to the men
that come after me a remembrance of me in good works."
His aim has been more than fulfilled. His memory has
come down to us with a living distinctness through the
mists of exaggeration and legend which time gathered
round it. The instinct of the people has clung to him
with a singular affection. The love which he won a thousand
years ago has lingered round his name from that day to
this. While every other name of those earlier times has
all but faded from the recollection of Englishmen, that of
Alfred remains familiar to every English child.
English The secret of Alfred's government lay in his own vivid
tre ' energy. He could hardly have chosen braver or more
active helpers than those whom he employed both in his
political and in his educational efforts. The children
whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their
time. But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and
what work was to be done was done by the King himself.
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 449- -1071. 79
His first efforts were directed to the material restoration CHAP. III.
of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw its towns wessex
built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys Northmen
founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, 7 ~^_
the laws codified and amended. Still more strenuous were 9 ^Z*
Alfred's efforts for its moral and intellectual restoration.
Even in Mercia and Northumbria the pirates' sword had left
few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Baeda, and
matters were even worse in Wessex which had been as yet
the most ignorant of the English kingdoms. " When I began
to reign," said Alfred, " I cannot remember one priest south
of the Thames who could render his service-book into
English." For instructors indeed he could find only a
few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop,
Asser. " Formerly," the King writes bitterly, " men came
hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction, and now
when we desire it we can only obtain it from abroad."
But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own
island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the
White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia ;
envoys bore his presents to the churches of India and
Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried Peter's-pence
to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his "inter-
course was closest, and it was from them that he drew
the scholars to aid him in his work of education. A scholar
named Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his
new abbey at Winchester; and John, the old Saxon, was
fetched from the abbey of Corbey to rule a monastery and
school that Alfred's gratitude for his deliverance from the
Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The real work
however to be done was done, not by these teachers but
by the King himself. ^Elfred established a school for the
young nobles in his court, and it was to the need of books
for these scholars in their own tongue that we owe his
most remarkable literary effort. He took his books as he
found them they were the popular manuals of his age
the Consolation, of Boethius, the Pastoral of Pope Gregory,
80
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP III the compilation of Orosius, then the one accessible hand-
f U11 i vel ' sa l hi stor y> an d the history of his own
Wsx
and the
Northmen.
and the rteoole bv Bseda. He translated these works into English.
Jr . *
796-
947.
.
but he was far more than a translator, he was an editor
for the people. Here he omitted, there he expanded. He
enriched Orosius by a sketch of the new geographical
discoveries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to
his selections from Bseda. In one place he stops to explain
his theory of government, his wish for a thicker popula-
tion, his conception of national welfare as consisting in
a due balance of priest, soldier, and churl. The mention
of Nero spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of
power. The cold Providence of Boethius gives way to an
enthusiastic acknowledgement of the goodness of God.
As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal
mantle, and he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me,"
he prays with a charming simplicity, " if any know Latin
better than I, for every man must say what he says and do
what he does according to. his ability." But simple as was
his aim, Alfred changed the whole front of our literature.
Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one
great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose
she had none. The mighty roll of the prose books that
fill her libraries begins with the translations of Alfred,
and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It seems
likely that the King's rendering of Bseda's history gave the
first impulse towards the compilation of what is known as
the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was certainly
thrown into its present form during his reign. The meagre
lists of the Kings of Wessex and the bishops of Win-
chester, which had been preserved from older times, were
roughly expanded into a national history by insertions
from Ba?da : but it is when it reaches the reign of Alfred
that the chronicle suddenly widens into the vigorous
narrative, full of life and originality, that marks the gift
of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does
from age to age in historic value, it remains the first
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 81
vernacular history of any Teutonic people, and save for CHAP. III.
the Gothic translations of Ulfilas, the earliest and most wessex
venerable monument of Teutonic prose. Ncrthme e n.
But all this literary activity was only a part of that 7 ^_
general upbuilding of Wessex by which Alfred was pre- 947 '
paring for a fresh contest with the stranger. He knew
that the actual winning back of the Danelagh must be a
work of the sword, and through these long years of peace
he was busy with the creation of such a force as might
match that of the Northmen. A fleet grew out of the
little squadron which ^Elfred had been forced to man
with Frisian seamen. The national fyrd or levy of all
freemen at the King's call was reorganized. It was now
divided into two halves, one of which served in the field
while the other guarded its own burhs and townships and
served to relieve its fellow when the men's forty days cf
service were ended. A more disciplined military force
was provided by subjecting all owners of five hides of
land to thegn-service, a step which recognized the change
that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and in
which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How
effective these measures were was seen when the new
resistance they met on the Continent drove the Northmen
to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet steered
for the Andreds weald, while the sea-king Hasting entered
the Thames. Alfred held both at bay through the year
till the men of the Danelagh rose at their comrades' call.
Wessex stood again front to front with the Northmen. But
the King's measures had made the realm stfong enough to
set aside its old policy of defence for one of vigorous
attack. His son Eadward and his son-in-law ^Ethelred,
whom he had set as Ealdorman over what remained of
Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active as the
King. The aim of the Northmen was to rouse again the
hostility of the Welsh, but while /Elfred held Exeter
against their fleet Eadward and ^Ethelred caught their army
near the Severn and overthrew it with a vast slaughter at
82 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. Buttington. The destruction of their camp on the Lea by
TV^Jex the united English forces ended the war ; in 897 Hasting
and the a o- a jn withdrew across the Channel, and the Danelagh made
Northmen, o 111 -n -,
796- P eace - ^ was w ith tne P eace ne nacl won stlli a oout him
9*7. that Alfred died, in 901, and warrior as his son Eadw^rd
had shown himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest.
It was not till 910 that a fresh rising of the Northmen
forced Alfred's children to gird themselves to the conquest
of the Danelagh.
Eachoard "While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister ^Ethelflaed,
the Elder. ^ whoge hands ^ t h e i rec i' s d e3i tk left English Mercia,
attacked the " Five Boroughs," a rude confederacy which
had taken the place of the older Mercian kingdom. Derby
represented the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln
the Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English, Stamford
the province of t^c Gyrwas, Nottingham probably that of
the Southwnbrians. Each of these " Five Boroughs " seems
to have been ruled by its earl with his separate " host ; "
within each twelve " lawmen " administered Danish law,
while a common justice-court existed for the whole con-
federacy. In her attack on this powerful league ^Ethel-
fleed abandoned the older strategy of battle and raid for
that of siege and fortress-building. Advancing along the
line of Trent, she fortified Tamworth and fStafford on
its head- waters ; when a rising in Gwent called her back
to the Welsh border, her army stormed Brecknock ; and
its king no sooner fled for shelter to the Northmen in
whose aid he had risen than TEthelflaed at once closed
on Derby. Raids from Middle-England failed to draw the
Lady of Mercia from her prey ; and Derby was hardly her
own when, turning southward, she forced the surrender of
Leicester. The brilliancy of his sister's exploits had as
yet eclipsed those of the King, but the son of Alfred was
a vigorous and active ruler ; he had repulsed a dangerous
inroad of the Northmen from France, summoned no doubt
by the cry of distress from their brethren in England, and
had bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection of
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 83
forts at Hertford and Witham. On the death of JEthelflsed CHAP. III.
iu 918 he came boldly to the front. Annexing Mercia to wTsTex
Wessex, and thus gathering the whole strength of the NorthmeV
kingdom into his single hand, he undertook the systematic 7 ~^_
reduction of the Danelagh. South of the Middle-English and 947 '
the Fens lay a tract watered by the Ouse and the Nen
originally the district of a tribe known as the South-
English, and now, like the Eive Boroughs of the north,
grouped round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and
Northampton. The reduction of these was followed by
that of East-Anglia ; the Northmen of the Fens submitted
with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham.
Eadward's Mercian troops had already seized Manchester ;
he himself was preparing to complete his conquests, when
in 924 the whole of the North suddenly laid itself at his
feet. Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the
Britons of Strathclyde " chose him to father and lord."
The triumph was his last Eadward died in 925, but the ^Ethelstan.
reign of his son Jithelstan, Alfred's golden-haired grandson
whom the King had girded as a child with a sword set in a
golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt, proved even more
glorious than his own. In spite of its submission the
North had still to be won. Dread of the Northmen had
drawn Scot and Cumbrian to their acknowledgement of
Eadward's overlordship, but ^Ethelstan no sooner incor-
porated Northumbria with his dominions than dread of
Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelagh. The
Scot King Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cum-
brian, and Welshman with the Northmen. The league
was broken by Atheist an's rapid action in 926; the North-
Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march iu his
armies, and to attend his councils ; the West- Welsh of
Cornwall were reduced to a like vassalage, and finally
driven from Exeter, which they had shared till then with
its English inhabitants. But ten years later the same
league called vEthelstan again to the North ; and though
Constantine was punished by an army which wasted his
84 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. kingdom while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness the
Wessex English army had no sooner withdrawn than Northumbria
Northmen rose ^ n ^37 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from
796- Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and
e47 - Cumbrian fought beside the Northmen against the West-
Saxon King ; but his victory at Brunanburh crushed the
confederacy and won peace till his death. His sonEadmund
was but a boy at his accession in 940, and the North again
rose in revolt. The men of the Five Boroughs joined their
kinsmen in Northumbria ; once Eadmund was driven to a
peace which left him King but south of the Watling
Street ; and only years of hard fighting again laid the
Danelagh at his feet.
Dunstan. But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword.
The completion of the West-Saxon realm was in fact
reserved for the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a
priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of ecclesiastical
statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey
and ended in Laud. He is still more re'markable in him-
self, in his own vivid personality after eight centuries of
revolution and change. He was born in the little hamlet
of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a man of
wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winches-
ter. It must have been in his father's hall that the fair,
diminutive boy, with his scant but beautiful hair, caught
his love for "the vain songs of heathendom, the trifling
legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterwards roused
against him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might
have derived his passionate love of music, and his custom
of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit. Wan-
dering scholars of Ireland had left their books in the
monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the
Rhine and the Danube ; and Dunstan plunged into the
study of sacred and profane letters fill his brain broke
down in delirium. So famous became his knowledge
in the neighbourhood that news of it reached the court
of ^Ethelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for
i.J EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 85
a burst of ill-will among the courtiers. They drove him CHAP. III.
from the king's train, threw him from his horse as he wessex
passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of Northmen,
their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The out-
ra^e ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a
O
monk. But the monastic 'profession was then little more
than a vow of celibacy and his devotion took no ascetic turn.
His nature in fact was sunny, versatile, artistic ; full of
strong affections, and capable of inspiring others with
affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory,
a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an
artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefatiga-
ble worker at books, at building, at handicraft. As his
sphere began to widen we see him followed by a train
of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting,
designing. One morning a lady summons him to her
house to design a robe which she is embroidering, and as
he bends with her maidens over their toil his harp hung
upon the wall sounds without mortal touch tones which
the excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.
From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider Conquest
sphere of activity by the accession of Eadmund. But the f the
old jealousies revived at his reappearance at court, and
counting the game lost Dunstan prepared again to with-
draw. The King had spent the day in the chase ; the red
deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs,
and his horse only checked itself on the brink of the
ravine at the moment when Eadmund in the bitterness of
death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was
at once summoned on the King's return. " Saddle your
horse," said Eadmund, " and ride with me." The royal
train swept over the marshes to his home ; and the King,
bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the
abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury. Dunstan became
one of Eadmund's councillors and his hand was seen in the
settlement of the Nerth. It was the hostility of the states
around it to the West-Saxon rule which had roused so
VOL. I. 7
86 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK I.
CHAP. III. often revolt in the Danelagh ; but from this time we hear
Wessex nothing more of the hostility of Bernicia, while Strathclyde
Northmen was conquered by Eadmund and turned adroitly to
796_ account in winning over the Scots to his cause. The
9 ^' greater part of it was granted to their King Malcolm on
terms that he should be Eadmund's fellow-worker by sea
and land. The league of Scot and Briton was thus finally
broken up, and the fidelity of the Scots secured by their
need of help in holding down their former ally. The
settlement was soon troubled by the young King's death.
As he feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946, Leofa,
a robber whom Eadmund had banished from the land,
entered the hall, seated himself at the royal board, and
drew sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him retire.
The King sprang in wrath to his thegn's aid, and seizing
Leofa by the hair, flung him to the ground; but in the
struggle the robber drove his dagger to Eadmund's heart.
His death at once stirred fresh troubles in the North ; the
Danelagh rose against his brother and successor, Eadred,
and some years of hard fighting were needed before it
was again driven to own the English supremacy. But
with its submission in 954 the work of conquest was done-
Dogged as his fight had been, the Northman at last owned
himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final
triumph all resistance came to an end. The Danelagh
ceased to be a force in English politics. North might part
anew from South ; men of Yorkshire might tigain cross
swords with men of Hampshire ; but their strife was
henceforth a local strife between men of the same people ;
it was a strife of Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of
Englishmen with Northmen.
CHAPTER IV.
FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY.
9541071.
THE fierceness of the Northman's onset had hidden the
real character of his attack. To the men who first fronted
the pirates it seemed as though the story of the world had
gone back to the days when the German barbarians first
broke in upon the civilized world. It was so above all in
Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's own
attack on the island was seen in the Northmen's attack on
it. Boats of marauders from the northern seas again
swarmed off the British coast ; church and town were again
the special object of attack ; the invaders again settled
on the conquered soil ; heathendom again proved stronger
than the faith of Christ. But the issues of the two at-
tacks showed the mighty difference between them. When
the English ceased from their onset upon Roman Britain
lioman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of con-
querors stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern
storm on the other hand left land, people, government
unchanged. England remained a country of Englishmen.
The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and
Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife
between Briton and Englishman was in fact a strife between
men of different races, while the strife between Northman
and Englishman was a strife between men whose race was
the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men
88
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
iv utterly alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its
L HAT*. 1 V . J i i
. culture, its wealth, as they were strange to the social
Fe and a the m degradation which Rome had brought on its province.
-k y ' But the Northman was little more than an Englishman
1071". bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its
origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere
throughout Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere
else were the fighters men of one blood and one speech.
But just for this reason the union of the combatants was
nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the
house of Alfred only hastened a process of fusion which
was already going on. From the first moment of his
settlement in the Danelagh the Northman had been
passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few ; they
were scattered among a large population ; in tongue, in
manner, in institutions there was little to distinguish
them from the men among whom they dwelt. Moreover
their national temper helped on the process of assimila-
tion. Even in France, where difference of language and
difference of custom seemed to interpose an impassable
barrier between the Northman settled in Normandy and
his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In
England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was
even quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded.
In a few years a Northman in blood was Archbishop of
Canterbury and another Northman in blood was Archbishop
of York.
The three The fusion might have been delayed if riot wholly averted
Northern ^y continued descents from the Scandinavian homeland.
But with Eadred's reign the long attack which the North-
man had directed against western Christendom came, for a
while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed
its results had been immense. It had f utterly changed the
face of the west. The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of
Charles the Great, had been alike dashed to pieces. But
break and change as it might, Christendom had held the
Northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power which had
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 89
grown up on the western seas had disappeared like a dream. CHAP. IV.
In Ireland the Northman's rule had dwindled to the hold- Feudalism
ing of a few coast towns. In France his settlements had Monarchy,
shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In England 95^-
every Northman was a subject of the English King. Even 1 ^f-
the Empire of the Seas had passed from the Sea-Kings'
hands. It was an English and not a Scandinavian fleet
that for fifty years to come held mastery in the English
and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory in fact the
struggle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate
boats still hung off headland and coast ; stray vikings still
shoved out in spring-tide to gather booty. But for nearly
half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet made its way
to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
energies of the Northmen were in fact absorbed through.
these years in the political changes of Scandinavia itself.
The old isolation of fiord from fiord and dale from dale
was breaking down. The little commonwealths which had
held so jealously aloof from each other were* being drawn
together whether they would or no. In each of the three
regions of the north great kingdoms were growing up. In
Sweden King Eric made himself lord of the petty states
about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the same
way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway, though it lingered
long, followed at last in the same track. Legend told how
one of its many rulers, Harald of Westfold, sent his men
to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had ch'osen for
wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts
at his petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald
vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he had made all
Norway his own. So every springtide came war and host-
ing, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord
settled the matter, and Harald " Ugly-Head " as men called
him while the strife lasted was free to shear his locks again
and became Harald " Fair-Hair." The Northmen loved no
master, and a great multitude fled out of the country, some
pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some swarming
90
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Feudalism
and the
Monarchy.
954-
1071.
England
and its
King.
to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out
again and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrurn's
host in the Rhine country or follow Eolf to his fights oil
the Seine. But little by little the land settled down into
order, and the three Scandinavian realms gathered strength
for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our after
history.
But of the new danger which threatened it in this union
of the north England knew little. The storm seemed to
have drifted utterly away; and the land passed from a
hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of peace.
Here as elsewhere the Northman had failed in his purpose
of conquest ; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty
work. In shattering the empire of Charles the Great he
had given birth to the nations of modern Europe. In his
long strife with Englishmen he had created an English
people. The national union which had been brought about
for a moment by the sword of Ecgberht / was a union of
sheer force which broke down at the first blow of the sea-
robbers. The black boats of the Northmen were so many
wedges that split up the fabric of the roughly-built realm.
But the very agency which destroyed the new England
was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it
a life that made its union real. The peoples who had so
long looked on each other as enemies found themselves
fronted by a common foe. They were thrown together by
a common danger and the need of a common defence.
Their common faith grew into a national bond as religion
struggled hand in hand with England itself against the
heathen of the north. They recognized a common king
as a common struggle changed Alfred and his sons from
mere leaders of West Saxons into leaders of all English-
men in their fight with the stranger, yind when the work
which Alfred set his house to do was done, when the yoke
of the Northman was lifted from the last of his conquests,
Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with
the battle for a common freedom and a common country,
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 91
knew themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an CHAP. IV.
English people. Feudalism
The new people found its centre in the King. The Monarchy,
heightening of the royal power was a direct outcome 954.-
of the war. The dying out of other royal stocks left 1 ^ t "
the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship.
But it was the war with the Northmen that raised Alfred
and his sons from tribal leaders into national kings.
The long series of triumphs which wrested the land from
the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty ; while the
wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed
the kings further and further from their people, lifted
them higher and higher above the nobles, and clothed
them more and more with a mysterious dignity. Above
all the religious character of the war against the Northmen
gave a religious character to the sovereigns who waged
it. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the son
of Woden, became yet more sacred as "the Lord's
Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he was
pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good
government ; but his " hallowing " invested him also with
a power drawn not from the will of man or the assent
of his subjects but from the will of God, and treason
against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign
lifted the sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop,
once ranked equal with him in value of life, sank to the
level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman himself, once the
hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate
of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every
shire by that of the royal shire-reeves, officers despatched to
levy the royal revenues and to administer the royal justice.
Among the later nobility of the thegns personal service with
such a lord was held not to degrade but to ennoble. "Dish-
thegn"aud "bower-thegn," "house-thegn" and"horse-thegn''
found themselves great officers of state ; and the develope-
ment of politics, the wider extension of home and foreign
affairs were already transforming these royal officers into a
92 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. standing council or ministry for the transaction of the
Feudalism ordinary administrative business and the reception of
M andthe judicial appeals. Such a ministry, composed of thegns
954- or Palates nominated by the king, and constituting
IOTI. j n itself a large part of the Witenagemote when that
assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the
actual control of affairs more and more into the hands of
the sovereign himself.
Growth of But the king's power was still a personal power. He had
Feudal- t o |j e everywhere and to see for himself that everything he
willed was done. The royal claims lay still far ahead
of the real strength of the Crown. There was a want of
administrative machinery in actual connexion with the
government, responsible to it, drawing its force directly from
it, and working automatically in its name even in moments
when the royal power was itself weak or wavering. The
Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose
personal action was felt everywhere throughout the realm,
whose dread lay on every reeve and ealdorman. But with
a weak king the Crown was weak. Ealdormen, provincial
witanagemotes, local jurisdictions, ceased to move at the
royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was
loosened or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old
provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance and
isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the Crown fell
to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we
have reached the royal power and the national union it
embodied had to battle with fresh tendencies towards
national disintegration which sprang like itself from the
struggle with the Northman. The tendency towards per-
sonal dependence and towards a social organization based
on personal dependence received an overpowering impulse
from the strife. The long insecurity of a century of warfare
drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to seek protection
more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman
"commended " himself to a lord who promised aid, and as
the price of this shelter he surrendered his freehold to
EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
receive it back as a fief laden with conditions of military CHAP. IV.
service. The principle of personal allegiance which was Feudalism
embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended Monarchy,
to widen into a theory of general dependence. From 954-
^Elired's day it was assumed that no man could exist 1O71
without a lord. The " lordless man " became a sort of
outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the
older English constitution, died down more and more into
the " villein," the man who did suit and service to a
master, who followed him to the field, who looked to his
court for justice, who rendered days of service in his
demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns
around the greater nobles, and these around the provincial
ealdormen. The ealdormen had hardly been dwarfed into
lieutenants of the national sovereign before they again
began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which
follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following
a Mercian or Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though
it were against the lord of the land. Even the constitu-
tional forms which sprang from the old English freedom
tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding
power. In the " great meeting " of the Witenagemote or
Assembly of the Wise lay the rule of the realm. It repre-
sented the whole English people, as the wise-moots of each
kingdom represented the separate peoples of each ; and its
powers were as supreme in the wider field as theirs in
the narrower. It could elect or depose the King. To it
belonged the higher justice, the imposition of taxes, the
making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the control of
wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of
great officers of state. But such a meeting necessarily
differed greatly in constitution from, the Witans of the
lesser kingdoms. The individual freeman, save when the
host was gathered together, could hardly take part in its
deliberations. The only relic of its popular character lay
at last in the ring of citizens who gathered round the
Wise Men at London or Winchester, and shouted their
9 4 H1STOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. " aye " or " nay " at the election of a king. Distance and
Feudalism the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser
Monarchy, thegns as rare as that of the freemen ; and the national
954.- council practically shrank into a gathering of the ealdor-
1071 - m en, the bishops, and the officers of the crown.
Feudalism The old English democracy had thus all but passed
and the . , oligarchy of the narrowest kind. The feudal move-
Monarchy. A . . J .
ment which in other lands was breaking up every nation
into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at their head
who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king
threatened to break vp England itself. What hindered its
triumph was the power of the Crown, and it is the story
of this struggle between the monarchy and these tenden-
cies to feudal isolation which fills the period between the
death of Eadred and the conquest of the Norman. It was
a struggle which England shared with 'the rest of the west-
ern world, but its issue here was a peculiar one. In other
countries feudalism won an easy victory over the central
government. In England alone the monarchy was strong
enough to hold feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might
be, the English ealdorman never succeeded in becoming
really hereditary or independent of the Crown. Kings as
weak as ^thelred could drive ealdormen into exile and
could replace them by fresh nominees. If the Witenagemote
enabled the great nobles to bring their power to bear
directly on the Crown, it preserved at any rate a feeling
of national unity and was forced to back the Crown against
individual revolt. The Church too never became feuda-
lized. The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop
remained a great social and political power. As local in
area as the ealdorman, for the province was his diocese
and he sat by his side in the local Witenagemote, he fur-
nished a standing check on the independence of the great
nobles. But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the
monarchy, it was strong enough to paralyze its action.
Neither of the two forces could master the other, but each
could weaken the other, and throughout the whole period
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 95
of their conflict England lay a prey to disorder within and CHAP. IV.
to insult from without. Feudalism
The first sign of these troubles was seen when the Monarchy
death of Eadred in 955 handed over the realm to a child 9 ~^_
King, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig was swayed by a 1O71
woman of high lineage, ^thelgifu; and the quarrel
between her and the older counsellors of Eadred broke
into open strife at the coronation feast. On the young
King's insolent withdrawal to her chamber Dunstan,
at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back
to his seat. But the feast was no sooner ended than a
sentence of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the
triumph of ^Ethelgifu was crowned in 957 by the marriage
of her daughter to the King and the spoliation of the
monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new
Queen was Eadwig's kinswoman the religious opinion of
the day regarded his marriage as incestuous, and it was
followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958 Arch-
bishop Odo parted the King from his wife by solemn
sentence ; while the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in
revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's brother Eadgar their king,
and recalled Dunstan. The death of Eadwig a few months
later restored the unity of the realm ; but his successor
Eadgar was only a boy of fourteen and throughout his
reign the actual direction of affairs lay in the hands of
Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of Canterbury set him
at the head of the Church as of the State. The noblest
tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our chroniclers.
His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a
work was best done by the simple enforcement of peace.
During the years of rest in which the stern hand of the
Primate enforced justice and order Northman and English-
man drew together into a single people. Their union was
the result of no direct policy of fusion ; on the contrary
Dunstan's policy preserved to the conquered Danelagh
its local rights and local usages. But he recognized
the men of the Danelagh as Englishmen, he employed
96
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Feudalism
and the
Monarchy.
954-
1O71.
Eadward
the
Martyr.
Northmen in the royal service, and promoted them to
high posts in Church and State. For the rest he trusted
to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion was
marked by a memorable change in the name of the
land. Slowly as the conquering tribes had learned to
know themselves by the one national name of English-
men, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name
on the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's
day that the name of Britain passed into the name of
Engla-land, the land of Englishmen, England. The same
vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during
these years of national union told on the growth of material
prosperity. Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its
extension is seen in the complaint that men learned
fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane. The laws
of -ZEthelred which provide for the protection and regu-
lation of foreign trade only recognize a state of things
which grew up under Eadgar. " Men of the Empire,"
traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, " Men of
Rouen," traders from the new Norman duchy of the Seine,
were seen in the streets of London. It was in Eadgar's
day indeed that London rose to the commercial greatness
it has held ever since.
Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still
in the prime of manhood when he died in 975. His
death gave a fresh opening to the great nobles. He had
bequeathed the Crown to his elder son Eadward ; lout the
Ealdorman of East Anglia, ^thelwine, rose at once to set
a younger child, ^Ethelred, on the throne. But the two
primates of Canterbury and York who had joined in setting
the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in setting
it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as
before master of the realm. The boy's reign however was
troubled by strife between the monastic party and their
opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short by his
murder at Corfe, and with the accession of JSthelred, the
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 97
power of Dunstan made way for that of Ealdorman /Ethel- CHAP. IV.
wine and the Queen-mother. Some years of tranquillity Feudalism
followed this victory; but though /Ethelwine preserved Monarchy,
order at home he showed little sense of the danger which 954.-
threatened from abroad. The North was girding itself for 1071 -
a fresh onset on England. The Scandinavian peoples had
drawn together into their kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden,
and Nonvay ; and it was no longer in isolated bands but
in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests
in the South. As^Ethelred drew to manhood some chance
descents on the coast told of this fresh stir in the North,
and the usual result of the Northman's presence was seen
in new risings among the Welsh.
In 991 Ealdorman Brihtnoth of East Anglia fell in JEthelred.
battle with a Norwegian force at Maldon, and the with-
drawal of the pirates had to be bought by money.
JEthelwine too died at this moment, and the death
of the two Ealdormen left ^Ethelred free to act as King.
But his aim was rather to save the Crown from his
nobles than England from the Northmen. Handsome
and pleasant of address, the young King's pride showed
itself in a string of imperial titles, and his restless and
self-confident temper drove him to push the preten-
sions of the Crown to their furthest extent. His aim
throughout his reign was to free himself from the dicta-
tion of the great nobles, and it was his indifference to
their " rede " or counsel that won him the name of
" -JSthelred the Kedeless." From the first he struck boldly
at his foe?, and /Elfgar, the Ealdorman of Mercia, whom
the death 'of his rival ^Ethelwine left supreme in the realm,
was driven by the King's hate to desert to a Danish
force which he was sent in 992 to drive from the coast.
JEthelred turned from his triumph at home to meet
the forces of the Danish and Norwegian Kings, Swegen
and Olaf, which anchored off London in 994. His policy
throughout was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for intrigues
98 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. which, parted the invaders till troubles at home drew both
Feudalism a g ain to tlie North, ^thelred took quick advantage of
Monarchy h* 8 success at home and abroad ; the place of the great
954- ealdormen in the royal councils was taken by court-thegns,
1071. j n whom we see the rudiments of a ministry, while the
King's fleet attacked the pirates' haunts in Cumberland
and the Cotentin. But in spite of all this activity the
news of a fresh invasion . found England more weak and
broken than ever. The rise of the " new men " only
widened the breach between the court and the great
nobles, and their resentment showed itself in delays
which foiled every attempt of ^Ethelred to meet the
pirate-bands who still clung to the coast.
Swegen. They came probably from the other side of the Channel,
and it was to clear them away as well as secure himself
against Swegen's threatened descent that ^Ethelred took
a step which brought England in contact with a land
over-sea. Normandy, where the Northmen had settled a
hundred years before, was now growing into a great power,
and it was to win the friendship of Normandy and to close
its harbours against Swegen that ^Ethelred in 1002 took
the Norman Duke's daughter, Emma, to wife. The same
dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the
Northern mercenaries whom the King had drawn to settle
in the land as a fighting force against their brethren ; and
an order of JEthelred brought about a general massacre of
them on St. Brice's day. Wedding and murder however
proved feeble defences against Swegen. ' His fleet reached
the coast in 1003, and for four years he marched through
the length and breadth of Southern and Eastern England,
" lighting his war-beacons as he went " in blazing home-
stead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to
prepare for a later and more terrible onset. But there was
no rest for the realm. The fiercest of 'the Norwegian jarls
took his place, and from Wessex the war extended over
Mercia and East Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury was taken
and sacked, ^Elf heah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich,
I.] EAKLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 99
and there in default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes CHAP. IV.
set him in the midst of their husting, pelting him with Feudalism
bones and skulls of oxen, till one more pitiful than the Monarchy,
rest clove his head with an axe. Meanwhile the court was 954^
torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels between the 1 ^ 1 -
court-thegns in their greed of power and yet fiercer
quarrels between these favourites and the nobles whom
they superseded in the royal councils. The King's policy
of finding aid among his new ministers broke down
when these became themselves ealdormen. With their
local position they took up the feudal claims of independ-
ence ; and Eadric, whom ^Ethelred raised to be Ealdor-
man of Mercia, became a power that overawed the Crown.
In this paralysis of the central authority all organization
and union was lost. '' Shire would not help other " when
Swegen returned in 1013. The war was terrible but short.
Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried, churches
plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one exception
of London, there was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and
Winchester flung open their gates. The thegns of Wessex
submitted to the Northmen at Bath. Even London was
forced at last to give way, and yEthelred fled over-sea
to a refuge in Normandy.
He was soon called back again. In the opening of 1014 Onut.
Swegen died suddenly at Gainsborough ; and the spetl of
terror was broken. The Witau recalled " their own born
lord," and JEthelred returned to see the Danish fleet under
Swegen's son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to
plan a more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as he
was, Cnut showed from the first the vigour of his temper.
Setting aside his brother he made himself King of
Denmark ; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh
attack on England, whose King and nobles were again
at strife, and where a bitter quarrel between Ealdorman
Eadric of Mercia. and ^Ethelred's son Eadmund Ironside
broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of Eadric
to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open
100 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. England to his arms ; , Wessex and Mercia submitted to
Feudalism nim > and tllou e n tne Io y alt 7 of London enabled Eadm-und,
and^the w hen his father's death raised him in 1016 to the throne,
954- to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a
lOTi. decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition
which this wrested from him at Olney were soon fol-
lowed by the young King's death. Cnut was left master
of the realm. His first acts of government showed
little but the temper of the mere Northman, passionate,
revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst
for blood. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given him the
Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the King's signal ;
a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadnmnd Iron-
side, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into
Hungary by his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as
this the ypung conqueror rose abruptly into a wise and
temperate king. His aim during twenty years seems to
have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign
character of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had
begun.
Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner
in the sense that the Norman was a foreigner after him.
His language differed little from the English tongue. He
brought in no new system of tenure or government.
Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as
a native king. He dismissed his Danish host, and retain-
ing only a trained band of household troops or " hus-carles "
to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support within
his realm on the justice and good government he secured
it. He fell back on " Eadgar's Law," on the old constitu-
tion of the realm, for his rule of government ; and owned
no difference between Dane and Englishman among his
subjects. He identified himself even with the patriotism
which had withstood the stranger. The Church had
been the centre of the national resistance; Archbishop
^Elfheah had been slain by Danish hands. But Cnut
sought the friendship of the Church ; he translated
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 449-1071. 101
yElfheah's body with great pomp to Canterbury ; he atoned CHAP. IV.
for Ills father's ravages by gifts to the religious houses ; he Feudalism
protected English pilgrims even against the robber-lords of Monarchy.
the Alps. His love for monks broke out in a song which 9^4-
he composed as he listened to their chaunt at Ely. 1 ^J 1 -
L /
' Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed
by" across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their
abbey. " Eow, boatmen, near the land, and hear we these
monks sing." A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve
years of rule to his English subjects marks the grandeur
of his character and the noble conception he had formed
of kingship. ' I have vowed to God to lead a right life
in all things," wrote the King, " to rule justly and piously
my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement
to all. If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was
just, through headiness or negligence of youth, I am ready,
with God's help, to amend it utterly." No royal officer,
either for fear of the King or for favour of any, is to
consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor
" as they would value ray friendship and their own well-
being." He especially denounces unfair exactions : " I
have no need that money be heaped together for me by
unjust demands." "I have sent this letter before me,"
Cnut ends, " that all the people of my realm may rejoice
in my well-doing ; for as you yourselves know, never have
1 spared, nor will I spare, to spend myself and my toil in
what is needful and good for my people."
C nut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. Cnut and
With him began the long internal tranquillity which was Gotland.
from this time to be the key-note of the national history.
Without, the Dane was no longer a terror ; on the contrary
it was English ships and English soldiers who now
appeared in the North and followed Cnut in his cam-
paigns against Wend or Norwegian. Within, the exhaus-
tion which follows a long anarchy gave fresh strength to
the Crown,' and Cnut's own ruling temper was backed by
the force of hus-carles at his disposal The four Earls of
YOL. 18
1Q2 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. Northumberland, Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia, whom
Feudalism * ie set in the P iace of tne older ea ldormen, knew them-
Monarchy sel ves to De the creatures of his will ; the ablest indeed of
95A- their number, Godwine, Earl of Wessex, was the minister
1071. or c } ose counsellor of the King. The troubles along the
Northern border were ended by a memorable act of policy.
From Eadgar's day the Scots had pressed further and
further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of their
King Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham in 1018
made him master of Northern Northumbria. In 1031
Cnut advanced to the North, but the quarrel ended in a
formal cession of the district between the Forth and the
Tweed, Lothian as it was called, to the Scot-King on his
doing homage to Cnut. The gain told at once on the
character of the Northern kingdom. The Kings of the
Scots had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and Celtic
peoples ; but from the moment that Lothian with its
English farmers and English seamen became a part of
their dominions it became the most important part. The
Kings fixed their seat at Edinburgh, and in the midst of
an English population passed from Gaelic chieftains into
the Saxon rulers of a mingled people.
Omits But the greatness of Cnut's rule hung solely on the
Sons. greatness of his temper, and the Danish power was shaken
by his death in 1035. The empire he had built up at
once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed both England
and Denmark to his son Harthacnut ; but the boy^'s
absence enabled his brother, Harold Harefoot, to acquire
all England save Godwine's earldom of Wessex, and in the
end even Godwine was forced to submit to him. Harold's
.death in 1040 averted a conflict between the brothers, and
placed Harthacnut quietly on the throne. But the love
which Cnut's justice had won turned to hatred before the
lawlessness of his successors. The long peace sickened
men of their bloodshed and violence. " Never was a
bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes came,"
ran a popular song, when Harold's men seized Alfred,
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071.
a brother of Eadmimd Ironside, who returned to England CHAP. IV.
from Normandy where he had found a refuge since his Feudalism
father's flight to its shores. Every tenth man among his Monarchy,
followers was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and yElfred's
eyes torn out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage than his
predecessor, dug up his brother's body and flung it into
a marsh ; while a rising at Worcester against his hus-
carles was punished by the burning of the town and the
pillage of the shire. The young King's death was no less
brutal than his life ; in 1042 " he died as he stood at his
drink in the house of Osgod Clapa at Lambeth." England
wearied of rulers such as these : but their crimes helped
her to free herself from the impossible dream of Cnut.
The North, still more barbarous than herself, could give
her no new element of progress or civilization. It was
the consciousness of this and a hatred of rulers such as
Harold and Harthacnut which co-operated with the old
feeling of reverence for the past in calling back the line of
^Elfred to the throne.
It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history Eadward
that it needs the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, ^
the quick perception of what is possible, which distin-
guished the adroit politician whom the death of Cnut
left supreme in England. Originally of obscure origin, .
Godwine's ability had raised him high in .the royal favour;
he was allied to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with
the earldom of Wessex, and at last made the Viceroy or
justiciar of the King in the government of the realm. In
the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill at
the head of a body of English troops, but his true field of
action lay at home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active adminis-*
trator, Godwine united vigilance, industry, and caution
with a singular dexterity in the management of men.
During the troubled years that followed the death of Cnut
he did his best to continue his master's policy in securing
the internal union of England under a Danish sovereign
and in preserving her connexion with the North. But at
104
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1071 .
CHAP. IV. the death of Harthacnut Cnut's policy had become irnpos-
Feudaiism sible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
M a ona*chy w i tn ^ ne ^ e ^ PP u l ar feeling which called Eadward, the
5_ one living son of JEthelred, to the throne. Eadward had
ii ve( j from his youth in exile at the court of Normandy.
A halo of tenderness spread in after-time round this last
King of the old English stock ; legends told of his pious
simplicity, his blithe ness and gentleness of mood, the
holiness that gained him his name of "Confessor" and
enshrined him as a Saint in his abbey-church at West-
minster. Gleemen sang in manlier tones of the long peace
and glories of his reign, how warriors and wise counsellors
stood round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton
obeyed him. His was the one figure that stood out bright
against the darkness when England lay trodden under foot
by Norman conquerors ; and so dear became his memory
that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in
his name. Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or
Henry called for the "good laws of Eadward the Con-
fessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past that the
exile really returned to the throne of Alfred ; there was
something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate com-
plexion, his transparent womanly hands ; and it is almost
as a shadow that he glides over the political stage. The
work of government was done by sterner hands.
Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in
the hands of its three Earls, Siward of Northumbria,
Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of Wessex, and it seemed
as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation against
which ^Ethelred had struggled was to triumph with the
death of Cnut. What hindered this severance was the
greed of Godwine. Siward was isolated in the North :
Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of Mercia. But the
Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of
England, seized district after district for his house. His
son Swegen secured an earldom in the south-west ; his son
Harold became Earl of East Anglia ; his nephew Beorn was
Godwine.
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 105
established in Central England : while the marriage of his CHAP. IV.
daughter Eadgyth to the King himself gave Godwine a Feudalism
hold upon the throne. Policy led the Earl, as it led his Monarchy,
son, rather to aim at winning England itself than at break- 954-
irig up England to win a mere fief in it. But his aim 1O71 '
found a sudden check through the lawlessness of his son
Swegeu. Swegen seduced the abbess of Leominster, sent
her home again with a yet more outrageous demand of her
hand in marriage, and on the King's refusal to grant it
fled from the realm. Godwine's influence secured his
pardon, but on his very return to seek it Swegen murdered
his cousin Beorn who had opposed the reconciliation and
again fled to Flanders. A storm of national indignation
followed him over-sea. The meeting of the Wise men
branded him as " nithing," the " utterly worthless," yet in a
year his father wrested a new pardon from the King and
restored him to his earldom. The scandalous inlawing of
such a criminal left Godwine alone in a struggle which
soon arose with Eadward himself. The King was a
stranger in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally
with the home and friends of his youth and exile. He
spoke the Norman tongue. He used in Norman fashion a
seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites in the
highest posts of Church and State, Foreigners such as
these, though hostile to the minister, .were powerless
against Godwine's influence and ability, and when at a
later time they ventured to stand alone against him they
fell without a blow. But the general ill-will at Swegen's
inlawing enabled them to stir Eadward to attack the Earl,
and in 1051 a trivial quarrel brought the opportunity of
a decisive break with him. On his return from a visit
to the court Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of
the King's sister, demanded quarters for his train in
Dover. Strife arose, and many both of the burghers and
foreigners were slain. All Godwine's better nature with-
stood Eadward when the King angrily bade him exact
vengeance from the town for the affront of his kinsman ;
106 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. and he claimed a fair trial for the townsmen. But
Feudalism Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and the
Monarchy quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine at once
954- gathered his forces and marched upon Gloucester,
1071. demanding the expulsion of the foreign favourites. But
even in a just quarrel the country was cold in his support.
The Earls of Mercia and Northumberland united their
forces to those of Eadward at Gloucester, and marched
with the King to a gathering of the Witenagemote at
London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but Swegen's
outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of Wessex. declining
with his usual prudence a useless struggle, withdrew over-
sea to Flanders.
Harold. But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall.
Great as were Godwine's faults, he was the one man who
now stood between England and the rule of the strangers
who flocked to the Court ; and a year had hardly passed
when he was strong enough to return. At the appearance
of his fleet in the Thames in 105:2 Eadward was once
more forced to yield. The foreign prelates and bishops
fled over-sea, outlawed by the same meeting of the AVise
men which restored Godwine to his home. But he re-
turned only to die, and the direction of affairs passed
quietly to his son Harold. Harold came to power un-
fettered by the obstacles which beset his father, and for
twelve years he was the actual governor of the realm.
The courage, the ability, the genius for administration,
the ambition and subtlety of Godwine were found again in
his son. In the internal government of England he fol-
lowed out his father's policy while avoiding its excesses.
Peace was preserved, justice administered, and the realm
increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work and em-
broidery became famous in the markets of Flanders and
France. Disturbances froin without were crushed sternly
and rapidly ; Harold's military talents displayed them-
selves in a campaign against Wales, and in the boldness
and rapidity with which, arming his troops with weapons
i.-J EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 107
adapted for mountain conflict, he penetrated to the heart CHAP. IV.
of its fastnesses and reduced the country to complete sub- Feudalism
mission. With the gift of the Northumbrian earldom on Monarchy.
Siward's death to his brother Tostig all England save a 954-
small part of the older Mercia lay in the hands of the 1O Z 1-
house of God wine, and as the waning health of the King,
the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who had
returned from Hungary as his heir, and the childhood of
the JEtheling Eadgar who stood next in blood, removed
obstacle after obstacle to his plans, Harold patiently but
steadily moved forward to the throne.
But his advance was watched by one even more able and Nor-
ambitious than himself. For the last half century England
had been drawing nearer to the Norman land which fronted
it across the Channel. As we pass now-a-days through
Normandy, it is English history which is round about us.
The name of hamlet after hamlet has memories for
English ears ; a fragment of castle wall marks the home of
the. Bruce, a tiny village preserves the name of the Percy,
The very look of the country and its people seem familiar
to us ; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls
the build and features of the small English farmer ; the
fields about Caen, with their dense hedgerows, their elms,
their apple- orchards, are the very picture of an English
country-side. Huge cathedrals lift thems'elves over the
red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately
fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of Alfred
or Dunstan, while the windy heights that look over orchard
and meadowland are crowned with the square grey keeps
which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Eichmond and the
banks of Thames. It was Eolf the Ganger, or Walker, a
pirate leader like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this
land from the French king, Charles the Simple, in 912, at
the moment when Alfred's children were beginning their
conquest of the English Danelagh. The treaty of Clair-on-
Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of
the coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore.
108 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. Rolf, like Guthrum, was baptized, received the King's
Feudalism daughter in marriage, and became his vassal for the terri-
M a onarchy toi 7 which now took the name of " the Northman's land "
g or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly
1O71 - on the Dane. No such ties of blood and speech tended to
unite the Northman with the French among whom he
settled along the Seine as united him to the Englishmen
among whom he settled along the Htimber. William
Longsword, the son of Eolf, though wavering towards
France and Christianity, remained a Northman in heart ;
he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest of
the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St.
Michael's Mount to the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his
boy among the Northmen of Bayeux where the Danish
tongue and fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk of the
Normans, with the child Duke Eichard, fell away for the
time from Christianity, while new pirate-fleets came
swarming up the Seine. To the close of the century the
whole people were still " Pirates " to the French around
them, their land the " Pirates' land," their Duke the
" Pirates' Duke." Yet in the end the same forces which
merged the Dane in the Englishman told even more power-
fully on the Dane in France. No race has ever shown a
greater power of absorbing all the nobler characteristics of
the peoples with whom they came in contact, or of infusing
their own energy into them. During the long reign of
Duke Eichard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword,
a reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen North-
men pirates became French Christians and feudal at heart.
The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux and in a few
local names. As the old Northern freedom died silently
away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles
and the " Pirates' land " sank into the most loyal of the
fiefs of France.
Duke From the moment of their settlement on the Frankish
William, the NormanS had been jealously watched by the
EARLY ENGLAND, 4491071.
109
954-
1071.
English kings ; and the anxiety of .^thelred for their CHAP. IV.
friendship set a Norman woman on the English throne. Feudalism
The marriage of Emma with ^Ethelred brought about a Monarch?
clqse political connexion between the two countries. It
was in Normandy that the King found a refuge from
Swegen's invasion, and his younger boys grew up in exile
at the Norman court. Their presence there drew the eyes
of every Norman to the rich land which offered so tempt-
ing a prey across the Channel. The energy which they had
shown in winning their land from the Franks, in absorb-
ing the French civilization and the French religion, was
now showing itself in adventures on far-off shores, in
crusades against the Moslem of Spain or the Arabs of Sicily.
It was this spirit of adventure that roused the Norman
Duke Eoberfc to sail against England in Cnut's day under
pretext of setting ^Ethelred's children on its throne, but
the wreck of his fleet in a storm put an end to. a project
which might bave anticipated the work of his son. It
was that son, William the Great, as men of his own day
styled him, William the Conqueror as he was to stamp
himself by one event on English history, who was now
Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomit-
able will, his large and patient statesmanship, the lofti-
ness of aim which lifts him out of the pjetty incidents
of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there
never had been a moment from his boyhood when he was
not among the greatest of men. His life from the very
first was one long mastering of difficulty after difficulty.
The shame of his birth remained in his name of "the
Bastard." His father Robert had seen Arlotta, a tanner's
daughter of the town, as she washed her linen in a little
brook by Falaise; and loving her he had made her the mother
of his boy. The departure of Eobert on a pilgrimage
from whicli he never returned left William a child-ruler
among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom;
treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to man-
hood ; and disorder broke at last into open revolt. But in.
110
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Feudalism
and the
Monarchy.
954-
1O71.
William
and
France.
1047 a fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-es-dimes
beside Caen left the young Duke master of his duchy
and he soon made his mastery felt. " Normans " said a
Norman poet " must be trodden down and kept under foot,
for he only that bridles them may use them at his need."
In the stern order he forced on the land Normandy from
this hour felt the bridle of its Duke.
Secure at home, William seized the moment of Godwine's
exile to visit England, and received from his cousin, King
Eadward, as he afterwards asserted, a promise of succes-
sion to his throne. Such a promise however, unconfirmed
by the Witenagemote, was valueless ; and the return of
Godwine must have at once cut short the young Duke's
hopes. He found in fact work enough to do in his own
duchy, for the discontent of his baronage at the stern
justice of his rule found support in the jealousy which his
power raised in the states around him, and it was only
after two great victories at Mortemer and Varaville and
six years of hard fighting that outer and inner foes were
alike trodden under foot. In 1060 William stood first
among the princes of France. Maine submitted to his
rule. Britanny was reduced to obedience by a single march.
While some of the rebel barons rotted in the Duke's
dungeons find some were driven into exile, the land settled
down into a peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth
of wealth and culture. Learning and education found their
centre in the school of Bee, which the teaching of a Lombard
scholar, Lanfranc, raised in a few years into the most
famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc's first contact
with William, if it showed the Duke's imperious temper,
showed too his marvellous insight into men. In a strife
with the Papacy which William provoked by his marriage
with Matilda, a daughter of the Count of Flanders, Lan-
franc took the side of Eorne. His opposition was met by
a sentence of banishment, and the Prior had hardly set out
on a lame horse, the only one his house could afford, when
he was overtaken by the Duke, impatient that he should
I.] EAKLY ENGLAND. 4491071. HI
quit Normandy. " Give me a better horse and I shall go CHAP. IV.
the quicker," replied the imperturbable Lombard, and Feudalism
William's wrath passed into laughter and good will. From Monarchy,
that hour Lan franc became his minister and counsellor, 954.-
whether for affairs in the duchy itself or for the more 1O71t
daring schemes of ambition which opened up across the
Channel.
"William's hopes of the English crown are said to have William
J
been revived by a storm which threw Harold, while Enaland
cruising in the Channel, on the coast of Ponthieu. Its
count sold him to the Duke ; and as the price of return to
England William forced him to swear on the relics of
saints to support his claim to its throne. But, true or
no, the oath told little 011 Harold's course. As the child-
less King drew to his grave one obstacle after another was
cleared from the Earl's path. His brother Tostig had
become his most dangerous rival ; but a revolt of the
Northumbrians drove Tostig to Flanders, and the Earl
was al'le to win over the Mercian house of Leofric to his
cause by owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian
Earl Eadwine, as his brother's successor. His aim was in
fact attained without a struggle. In the opening of 1066
the nobles and bishops who gathered round the death-bed
of the Confessor passed quietly from it to. the election
and coronation of Harold. But at Eouen the news was
welcomed with a burst of furious passion, and the Duke of
Normandy at once prepared to enforce his claim by arms.
William did not claim the Crown. He claimed simply the
right which he afterwards used when his sword had won
it of presenting himself for election by the nation, and
he believed himself entitled so to present himself by the
direct commendation of the Confessor. The actual elec-
tion of Harold which stood in his way, hurried as it was,
he. did not recognize as valid. But with this constitu-
tional claim was inextricably mingled resentment at the
private wrong which Harold had done him, and a resolve
to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as
112
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Feudalism
and the
Monarchy.
954-
3.O71.
Stamford
"Bridge.
untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his
enterprize were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no
support within England itself. At home he had to extort
the consent of his own reluctant baronage ; to gather a
motley host from every quarter of France and to keep it
together for months ; to create a fleet, to cut down the very
trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels ; and to find
time amidst all this for the common business of govern-
ment, for negotiations with Denmark and the Empire, with
France, Britanny, and Anjou, with Flanders arid with
Eome which had been estranged from England by Arch-
bishop Stigand's acceptance of his pallium from one who
was not owned as a canonical Pope.
BmVhis rival's difficulties were hardly less than his own.
Harold was threatened with invasion not only by William
but by his brother Tostig, who had taken refuge in
Norway and secured the aid of its King, Harald Har-
drada. The fleet and army he had gathered lay watch-
ing for months along the coast. His one standing force
was his body of hus-carles, but their numbers only enabled
them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the other hand
the Land-fyrd or general levy of fighting-men was a body
easy to raise for any single encounter but hard to keep
together. To assemble such a force was to bring labour to
a standstill. The men gathered under the King's standard
were the farmers and ploughmen of their fields. The ships
were the fishing-vessels of the coast. In September the
task of holding them together became impossible, but
their dispersion had hardly taken place when the two
clouds which had so long been gathering burst at once
upon the realm. A change of wind released the landlocked
armament of William; but before changing, the wind
which prisoned the Duke brought the host of Tostig and
Harald Hardrada to the cdast of Yorkshire. The King
hastened with his household troops to the north and
repulsed the Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stam-
ford Bridge, but ere he could hurry back to London the
I.]
EAELY ENGLAND. 4491071.
113
954
1O71.
Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who
had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off
Pevensey, was ravaging the coast to bring his rival to an
engagement. His merciless ravages succeeded in draw-
ing Harold from London to the south ; but the King
wisely refused to attack with the troops he had hastily sum-
moned to his banner. If he was forced to give battle, he
resolved to give it on ground he had himself chosen, and
advancing near enough to the coast to check William's
ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known after-
wards as that of Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex downs
near Hastings. His position covered London and drove
WiLliam to concentrate his forces. With a host subsist-
ing by pillage, to concentrate is to starve ; and no alter-
native was left to the Duke but a decisive victory or ruin.
On the fourteenth of October William led his men at
dawn along the higher ground that leads from Hastings to
the battle-field which Harold had chosen. From the mound
of Telham the Normans saw the host of the English
gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on
the height of Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right;
on the left, the most exposed part of the position, the hus-
carles or body-guard of Harold, men in full armour and
wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden Dragon
of Wessex and the Standard of the King. The rest of the
ground was covered by thick masses of half-armed rustics
who had flocked at Harold's summons to the fight with the
stranger. It was against the centre of this formidable
position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood,
while the mercenary forces he had gathered in France and
Britanny were ordered to attack its flanks. A general
charge of the Norman foot opened the battle; in front
rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and
catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland.
He was the first of the host who struck a blow, and he
was the first to fall. The charge broke vainly on the
stout stockade behind which the English warriors plied
114 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. axe and javelin with fierce cries of " Out, out," and the
Feudalism repulse of the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse
Monarchy ot tne Norman horse. Again and again the Duke rallied
( l them to the fatal stockade. All the fury of fight
1071. t j iat g] owec i j n hi s Norseman's blood, all the headlong
valour that spurred him over the slopes of Val-es-dunes,
mingled that day with the coolness of head, the dogged
perseverance, the inexhaustible faculty of resource which
shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton troops,
entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in
disorder, and as panic spread through the army a cry
arose that the Duke was slain. William tore off his
helmet ; " I live," he shouted, " and by God's help I will
conquer yet." Maddened by a fresh repulse, the Duke
spurred right at the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible
mace struck down Gyrth, the King's brother ; again dis-
mounted, a blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
unmannerly rider who would not lend him his steed.
Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle he turned the
flight he had arrested into the means of victory. Broken
as the stockade was by his desperate onset, the shield-wall
of the warriors behind it still held the Normans at bay
till William by a feint of flight drew a part of the English
force from their post of vantage. Turning on his disorderly
pursuers, the Duke cut them to pieces, broke through the
abandoned line, and made himself master of the central
ground. Meanwhile the French and Bretons made good
their ascent on either flank. At three the hill seemed won,
at six the fight still raged around the Standard where
Harold's hus-carles stood stubbornly at bay on a spot
marked afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey.
An order from the Duke at last brought nis archers to the
front. Their arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses
crowded around the King and as the' sun went down a
shaft pierced Harold's right eye. He fell between the
royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melly
over his corpse.
l.j EARLY ENGLAND. 4491071. 115
Xight covered the flight of the English army : but CJIAP. IV.
William was quick to reap the advantage of his victory. Feudalism
Securing Romney and Dover, he marched by Canterbury Monarch
upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work 9 ~^i_
for him as he advanced ; for Harold's brothers had fallen 1O ^ 1 -
with the King on the field of Senlac, and there was none
of the house of Godwine to contest the crown. Of the
old royal line there remained but a single boy, Eadgar the
^theling. He was chosen King; but the choice gave
little strength to the national cause. The widow of the
Confessor surrendered Winchester to the Duke. The
bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. The
citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by their
walls, gave Southwark to the flames. The throne of the
1 oy-king really rested for support on the Earls of Mercia
and Xorthumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and William,
crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching into
Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from their earl-
doms. The masterly movement forced the Earls to hurry
home, and London gave way at once. Eadgar himself
was at the head of the deputation who came to offer the
crown to the Xorraan Duke. "They bowed to him/'
says the English annalist, pathetically, " for need." They
bowed to the Norman as they had bowed to. the Dane,
and William accepted the crown in the spirit of Cnut.
London indeed was secured by the erection of a fortress
which afterwards grew into the Tower, but William desired
to reign not as a conqueror but as a lawful king. At
Christmas he received the crown at Westminster from
the hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of " Yea,
Yea," from his new English subjects. Fines from the
greater landowners atoned for a resistance which now
counted as rebellion ; but with this exception every mea-
sure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling as
a successor of Eadward or Alfred. As yet indeed the
greater part of England remained quietly aloof from him,
and he can hardly be said to have been recognized as king
116 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia. But to
the east of a line which stretched from Norwich to Dorset-
Feudalism , . . . ,
and the s hire his rule was unquestioned, and over this portion he
^_ 7 ruled as an English king. His soldiers were kept in strict
1071- order. No change was made in law or custom. The
privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ which
still remains, the most venerable of its muniments, among
the city's archives. Peace and order were restored. William
even attempted, though in vain, to learn the English tongue
that he might personally administer justice to the suitor*
in his court. The kingdom seemed so tranquil that only a
few months had passed after the battle of Senlac when
leaving England in charge of his brother, Gdo Bishop of
Bayeux, and his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, the King
returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The peace he
left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop Odo's tyranny forced
the Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne ;
while the Welsh princes supported a similar rising against
Norman oppression in the west. But as yet the bulk of the
land held fairly to the new king. Dover was saved from
Eustace ; and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge in
lands as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from
this time formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians
of the Eastern Emperors. William returned to take his
place again as an English King. It was with an English
force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with Exeter
at its head, and it was at the head of an English army that
he completed his work by marching to the North. His
march brought Eadwine and Morkere again to submission ;
a fresh rising ended in the occupation of York, and England
as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's feet.
The It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that
XT
aorman transformed the King into a conqueror. The signal for
this revolt came from Swegen, King of, Denmark, who had
for two years past been preparing to dispute England with-
the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet in the
Humber all northern, all western and south-western
I.] EARLY ENGLAND. 449-1071. 117
England rose as one man. Eadgar the ^Etheliug with a CHAP. IV.
baud of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland took the Feudalism
head of the Northumbrian revolt ; in the south-west the Monarchy,
men of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges 954-
of Exeter and Montacute ; while a new Norman castle at 1O71 -
Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the West. So ably
had the revolt been planned that even William was taken
by surprize. The outbreak was heralded by a storm of
York and the slaughter of three thousand Normans who
formed its garrison. The news of this slaughter reached
William as he was hunting in the forest of Dean ; and in
a wild outburst of wrath he swore " by the splendour of
God " to avenge himself on the North. But wrath went
hand in hand with the coolest statesmanship. The centre
of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and pushing rapidly
to the Humber with a handful of horsemen William bought .
at a heavy price its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turn-
ing westward with the troops that gathered round him he
swept the Welsh border and relieved Shrewsbury while
William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around Exeter. His
success set the King free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on
the North. After a long delay before the flooded waters of
the Aire he entered York and ravaged the whole country as
far as the Tees. Town and village were harried and burned,
their inhabitants were slain or driven over the Scottish
border. The coast was especially wasted that no hold
might remain for future landings of the Danes. Crops,
cattle, the very implements of husbandry were so merci-
lessly destroyed that a famine which followed is said to have
swept off more than a hundred thousand victims. Half a
century later indeed the land still lay bare of culture and
deserted of men for sixty miles northward of York. The
work of vengeance once over, William led his army back
from the Tees to York, and thence to Chester and the
West. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character
o memorably as in this terrible march. The winter was
hard, the roads choked with snowdrifts or broken by
VOL. I. 9
118 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK i.
CHAP. IV. torrents, provisions failed ; and his army, storm-beaten and
Feudalism f rce( i to devour its horses for food, broke out into mutiny
and the a ^ ne or der to cross the bleak moorlands that part York-
shire from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and
Britanny demanded their release from service. William
granted their prayer with scorn. On foot, at the head of
the troops which still clung to him, he forced his way by
paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with
his own hands to clear the road, and as the army descended
upon Chester the resistance of the English died away.
For two years William was able to busy himself in
castle-building and in measures for holding down the
conquered land. How effective these were was seen when
the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of
Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for
help to Scotland where Eadgar the ^theling had again
found refuge and where his sister Margaret had become
wife of King Malcolm. It was probably some assurance of
Malcolm's aid which roused. the Mercian Earls, Eadwine and
Morkere, to a fresh rising in 1071. But the revolt was at
once foiled by the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine
fell in an obscure skirmish, while Morkere found shelter
for a while in the fen country where a desperate band of
patriots gathered round an outlawed leader, Hereward.
Nowhere had William found so stubborn a resistance : but
a causeway two miles long was at last driven across the
marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom died in the
surrender of Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of
England that William marched to the North, crossed the
Lowlands and the Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his
camp upon the Tay to swear fealty at his feet.
BOOK II.
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS,
10711214.
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II.
10711214.
Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from this point
particularly valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of
Worcester remain the primary English authorities, while Simeon of
Durham gives much special infonnation on northern matters. For
the reign of William the Red the chief source of information is Eadmer,
a monk of Canterbury, in his ; 'Historia Novorum" and "Life of An-
selm." William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are both
contemporary authorities during that of Henry the First ; the latter
remains a brief but accurate annalist ; the former is the leader of a
new historic school, who treat English events as part of the history of
the world, and emulate classic models by a more philosophical arrange-
ment of their materials. To these the opening of Stephen's reign adds
the " Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail by one of the King's
clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.
All this wealth of historical material however suddenly leaves us in
the chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle dies out in the midst of
Stephen's reign, and the close at the same time of the works we have
noted leaves a blank in our historical literature which extends over
the early years of Henry the Second. But this dearth is followed by
a vast outburst of historical industry. For the Beket struggle we
have the mass of the Archbishop's own correspondence with that of
Foliot and John of Salisbury. From 1169 to 1192 our primary-
authority is the Chronicle known as that of Benedict of Peterborough,
whose authorship Professor Stubbs has shown to be more probably due
to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Neal. This is continued
to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of equally official value.
William of Newborough's history, which ends in 1198, is a work of
the classical school, like William of Malmesbury's. It is distinguished
by its fairness and good sense. To these may be added the Chronicle
of Ralph Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall, that
of Gervais of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh
of Lincoln.
But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second's time is shown
even more remarkably in the mass of general literature which liea
behind these distinctively historical sources, in the treatises of John
of Salisbury, the voluminous works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the
122 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
" Trifles " and satires of Walter Map, GlaiivilPs treatise on Law,
Richard Fitz-Neal's " Dialogue on the Exchequer," to which we owe
our knowledge of Henry's financial system, the romances of Gaimar
and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal. But this intellectual fer-
tility is far from ceasing with Henry the Second. The thirteenth
century has hardly begun when the romantic impulse quickens even
the old English tongue in the long poem of Layamon. The Chron-
icle of Richard of Devizes and an " Itinerarium Regis " supplement
Roger of Howden for Richard's reign. With John we enter upon the
Annals of Barnwell" and are aided by the invaluable series of the
Chroniclers of St. Albans. Among the side topics of the time, we
may find much information as to the Jews in Toovey's "Anglia
Judaica " ; the Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep
into social and monastic life ; the Cistercian revival may be traced in
the records of the Cistercian abbeys in Dugdale's Monasticon ; the
Charter Rolls give some information as to municipal history / and
constitutional developement may be traced in the documents collected
by Professor Stubbs in his " Select Charters."
CHAPTER I.
THE CONQUEROR.
10711085.
IN the five hundred years that followed the landing of The
Hengest Britain had become England, and its conquest
had ended in the settlement of its conquerors, in their con-
version to Christianity, in the birth of a national literature,
of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political order.
But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to
fuse the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation
had failed. The effort of Northumbria to extend her rule
over all England had been foiled by the resistance of
Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings
and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the ^country to a
seeming unity than local independence rose again at the
call of the Northmen. The sense of a single England deep-
ened with the pressure of the invaders ; the monarchy of
Alfred and his house broadened into an English kingdom;
but still tribal jealousies battled with national unity.
Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon, Northman
from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the
country roughly together, but a real national union had
yet to come. It came with foreign rule. The rule of the
Danish kings broke local jealousies as they had never been
broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwins
and the Confessor. But Cnut was more Englishman than
Northman, and his system of government was an English
124 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. system. The true foreign yoke was only felt when Eng-
^ land saw its conqueror in William the Norman.
Conqueror. y or ne arly a century and a half, from the hour when
loss William turned triumphant from the fens of Ely to the
hour when John fled defeated from Norman shores, our
story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy
were followed by kings from Aujou. But whether under
Norman or Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, con-
quered and ruled by men of strange blood and of strange
speech.. And yet it was in these years of subjection that
England first became really England. Provincial differ-
ences were finally crushed into national unity by the
pressure of the stranger. The firm government of her
foreign kings secured the land a long and almost un-
broken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense
of its oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened
by the political ability which in Henry the First gave
it administrative order and in Henry the Second built up
the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were
developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the
times. The wrong which had been done by the degrada-
tion of the free landowner into a feudal dependant was
partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk of the
English lords themselves into a middle class as they were
pushed from their place by the foreign baronage who
settled on English soil ; and this social change was accom-
panied by a gradual enrichment and elevation of the class
of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted
them at the close of this period into almost complete free-
dom. The middle-class which was thus created was rein-
forced by the upgrowth of a corresponding class in our towns.
Commerce and trade were promoted by the justice and
policy of the foreign kings ; and with their advance rose
the political importance of the trader.' The boroughs of
England, which at the opening of this period were for the
most part mere villages, were rich enough at its close to
buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for the
II ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
125
mightier part they were to play in the developement of our CHAP. I.
parliament. The shame of conquest, the oppression of ^he
the conquerors, begot a moral and religious revival which Conc i ueror -
raised religion into a living thing ; while the close con- Joes.
nexion with the Continent which foreign conquest brought
about secured for England a new communion with the
artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.
In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign William
kings that we owe not merely English wealth and English /j^J^,,
freedom but England herself. And of these foreign
masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In
William the wild impulses of the Northman's blood
mingled strangely with the cool temper of the modern states-
man. As he was the last, so he was the most terrible out-
come of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers
from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic
form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his
desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness
of his revenge. " No knight under Heaven," his enemies
owned, " was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-es-
dunes, horse and man went down before his lance. All
the fierce gaiety of his nature broke out in the warfare of
his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five
men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on
fist as if war and the chase were one. No man could
bend William's bow. His mace crashed its way through
a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He
rose to his greatest height at moments when other men
despaired. His voice rang out as a trumpet when his
soldiers fled before the English charge at Senlac, and his
rally turned the flight into a means of victory. In his
winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear
a road through the snowdrifts. And with the Northman's
daring broke out the Northman's pitilessness. When the
townsmen of Alenc,ou hung raw hides along their walls
126
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
1071-
1085.
His rule.
in scorn of the " tanner's " grandson, William tore out
his prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and
Conqueror, flung them into the town. Hundreds of Hampshire men
were driven from their homes to make him a huntino--
o
ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern
England a desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he
recked little. His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild
outbursts of passion, left William lonely even in his
court. His subjects trembled as he passed. " Stark man
he was " writes the English chronicler " and great awe
men had of him." His very wrath was solitary. " To no
man spake he and no man dared speak to him " when the
news reached him of Harold's seizure of the throne.. It
was only, when he passed from his palace to the loneliness
of the woods that the King's tempei unbent. " He loved
the. wild deer as though he had been their father."
It was the genius of William which lifted him out of
this mere Northman into a great general and a great states-
man. The wary strategy of his French campaigns, the
organization of his attack upon England, the victory at
Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance which
achieved the Conquest showed the wide range of his general-
ship. His political ability had shown itself from the first
moment of his accession to the ducal throne. William had
the instinct of government. He had hardly reached man-
hood when Normandy lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was
crushed. Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke
" could never love a robber," be he baron or knave. The
sternness of his temper stamped itself throughout upon his
rule. " Stark he was to men that withstood him," says
the Chronicler of his English system of government ; " so
harsh and cruel was he that none dared withstand his will.
Earls that did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds
W W O >
bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their
abbacies. He spared not his own brother: first he was
in the land, but the King cast him into bondage. If
a man would live and hold his lands, need it were
HO ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
127
joss.
he followed the King's will." Stern as such a rule CHAP. I.
was, its sternness gave rest to the land. Even amidst ^
the sufferings which necessarily sprang from the cir- Conqueror
cumstances of the Conquest itself, from the erection of
castles or the enclosure of forests or the exactions which
built up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen were
unable to forget " the good peace he made in the land,
so that a man might fare over his realm with a bosom full
of gold." Strange touches too of a humanity far in
advance of his age contrasted with this general temper
of the Conqueror's government. One of the strongest
traits in his character was an aversion to shed blood by
process of law ; he formally abolished the punishment of
death, and only a single execution stains the annuals of his
reign. An edict yet more honourable to his humanity put
an end to the slave-trade which had till then been carried
on at the port of Bristol. The contrast between the ruth-
lessness and pitifulness of his public acts sprang indeed
from a contrast within his temper itself. The pitiless
warrior, the stern and aweful king was a tender and
faithful husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence
of his bearing broke into gracious converse with pure and
sacred souls like Anselm. If William was " stark " to
rebel and baron, men noted that he was " mild to those
that loved God."
But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more
than the order and peace which he imposed upon the land.
Fortune had given him one of the greatest opportunities
ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius on the
destinies of a people ; and it is the way in which he seized
on this opportunity which has set William among the fore-
most statesmen of the world. The struggle which ended
in the fens of Ely had wholly changed his position. He
no longer held the land merely as its national and elected
King. To his elective right he added the right of
conquest. It is the way in which William grasped and
employed this double power that marks the originality of
William
128 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. his political genius, for the system of government which he
^" e devized was in fact the result of this double origin of his rule.
Conqueror, j^ represented neither the purely feudal system of the Con-
ices' tinent nor the system of the older English royalty : more
truly perhaps it may be said to have represented both. As
the conqueror of England William developed the military
organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the
secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
already prepared for such an organization. We have watched
the beginnings of English feudalism in the warriors, ths
" companions " or " thegns " who were personally attached
to the king's war-band and received estates from the folk-
land in reward for their personal services. In later times
this feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as
the bulk 'of the nobles folio w'ed the king's example and
bound their tenants to themselves by a similar process of
subinfeudation. The pure freeholders on the other hand,
the 'class which formed the basis of the original English
society, had been gradually reduced in number, partly
through imitation of the class above them, but more through
the pressure of the Danish wars and the social disturbance
consequent upon them which forced these freemen to
seek protectors among the- thegns at the cost of their
independence. Even before the reign of William there-
fore feudalism was superseding the older freedom in England
as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.
But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the
Conquest. The desperate and universal resistance of the
country forced William to hold by the sword what the sword
had won ; and an army strong enough to crush at any
moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation
of his throne. Such an army could only be maintained by
a vast confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the English
risings cleared the ground for its establishment. The greater
part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled into exile,
while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their
lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest.
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 129
We see the completeness of the confiscation in the vast CHAP. I.
estates which William was enabled to grant to his more ^
powerful followers. Two hundred manors in Kent with more Con ^ ueror
than an equal number elsewhere rewarded the services of loss"
his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's
counsellors Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like
the Mowbrays and the Clares. But the poorest soldier of
fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest Norman
rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord.
Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on
condition of its holder's service at the King's call ; a whole
army was by this means encamped upon the soil ; and
William's summons could at any hour gather an over-
whelming force around his standard.
Such a force however, effective as it was against the
conquered English, was hardly less formidable to the
Crown itself. When once it was established, William
found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal baron-
age, by the men whom he had so hardly bent to his will
in Normandy, and who were as impatient of law, as jealous
of the royal power, as eager for an unbridled military and
judicial independence within their own manors, here as
there. The political genius of the Conqueror was shown
in his appreciation of this danger and in the* skill with
which he met it. Large as the estates he granted were,
they were scattered over the country in such a way as to
render union between the great landowners or the here-
ditary attachment of great areas of population to any one
separate lord equally impossible. A yet wiser measure
struck at the very root of feudalism. When the larger
holdings were divided by their owners into smaller sub-
tenancies, the under-tenants were bound by the same con-
ditions of service to their lord as he to the Crown. " Hear,
my lord," swore the vassal as kneeling bareheaded and
without arms he placed his hands within those of his
superior, " I become liege man of yours for life and limb
and earthly regard ; and I will keep faith and loyalty to
130
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
BOOK
CHAP. I.
The
Conqueror.
1O71-
1085.
William
and
England.
you for life and death, God help me ! " Then the kiss of
his lord invested him with land as a "fief" to descend to
him and his heirs for ever. In other countries such a
vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes, be they king
or no. By the usage however which William enacted in
England eacli sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty
to his lord, swore fealty directly to the Crown, and loyalty
to the King was thus established as the supreme and
universal duty of all Englishmen.
But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so much in
these inner checks upon feudalism as in the counter-
balancing forces winch he provided without it. He was
not only the head of the great garrison that held England
down, he was legal and elected-King of the English people.
If as Conqueror he covered the country with a new
military organization, as the successor of Eadward he
maintained the judicial and administrative organization
of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance
of the laud between the greater nobles he struck a final
blow by the abolition of the four great earldoms. The
shire became the largest unit of local government, and in
each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs for its adminis-
tration concentrated the Afhole executive power in the
King's hands. The old legal constitution of the country
gave him the whole judicial power, and William was
jealous to retain and heighten this. While he preserved
the local courts of the hundred and the shire he strength-
ened the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems
even in the Confessor's day to have become more and
more a court of highest appeal with a right to call up
all cases from any lower jurisdiction to its bar. The
control over the national revenue which had rested even
in the most troubled times in the hands of the King was
O
turned into a great financial power by the Conqueror's
system. Over the whole face of the land a large part o'f
the manors were burthened with special dues to the Crown :
and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 131
these that William sent into each county the commissioners CHAP. I.
whose enquiries are recorded in his Domesday Book. A
jury empannelled in each hundred declared on oath tne
extent and nature of each estate, the names, number, and
condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the
Conquest, and the sums due from it to the Crown. These,
with the Danegeld or land-tax levied since the days of
^Ethelred, formed as yet the main financial resources of
the Crown, and their exaction carried the royal authority
in its most direct form home to every landowner. But to
these were added a revenue drawn from the old Crown
domain, now largely increased by the confiscations of the
Conquest, the. ever growing income from the judicial
" fines " imposed by the King's judges in the King's courts,
and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown on the
grant or renewal of every privilege or charter. A new
source of revenue was found in the Jewish traders, many
of whom followed "William from Normandy, and who were
glad to pay freely for the royal protection which enabled
them to settle in their quarters or " Jewries " in all the
principal towns of England.
William found a yet stronger check on his baronage in
the organization of the Church. Its old dependence on
the royal power was strictly enforced. Prelates were
practically chosen by the King. Homage was exacted
from bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be ex-
communicated save by the King's leave. No synod could
legislate without his previous assent and subsequent con-
firmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be
received within the realm save by his permission. The
King firmly repudiated the claims which were beginning
to be put forward by the court of Borne. When Gregory
VII. called on him to do fealty for his kingdom the King
sternly refused to admit the claim. " Fealty I have never
willed to do, nor will I do it now. I have never promised
it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to yours."
William's reforms only tended to tighten this hold of the
The
rn\ /
132 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. Crown on the clergy. Stigand was deposed ; and the eleva-
^ tion of Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed
Conqueror, ^y fa e re moval of most of the English prelates and by the
loss, appointment of Norman ecclesiastics in their place. The
new archbishop did much to restore discipline, and
William's own efforts were no doubt partly directed by
a real desire for the religious improvement of his realm.
But the foreign origin of the new prelates cut them off from
the flocks they ruled and bound them firmly to the foreign
throne ; while their independent position was lessened by
a change which seemed intended to preserve it. Ecclesi-
astical cases had till now been decided, like civil cases,
in shire or hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by
side with ealdorman or sheriff.' They were now withdrawn
from it to the separate court of the bishop. The change
was pregnant with future trouble to the Crown ; but for
the moment it told mainly in removing the bishop from
his traditional contact with the popular assembly and in
effacing the memory of the original equality of the religious
with the civil power.
William's In any struggle with feudalism a national king, secure
death. o f ^] ie SU pp rt of the Church, and backed by the royal
hoard at Winchester, stood in different case from the
merely feudal sovereigns of the Continent. The difference
of power was seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over
and the struggle which William had anticipated opened
between the baronage and the Crown. The wisdom of his
policy in the destruction of the great earldoms which had
overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at their
restoration made in 1075 by Eoger, the son of his minister
William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton, Ealf de Guader,
whom the King had rewarded for his services at Senlac
with the earldom of Norfolk. The rising was quickly sup-
pressed, Eoger thrown into prison, and Ealf driven over sea.
The intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in
William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under
pretence of aspiring by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo
II.] EITGLAND UNDER FOKEIGN KINGS. 10711214. 133
collected money and men, but the treasure was at once seized CHAP. I.
by tho royal officers and the Bishop arrested in the midst ^
of the court. Even at the King's bidding no officer would Conqueror
venture to seize on a prelate of the Church ; and it was ioas.
with his own hands that William was forced to effect his
arrest. The Conqueror was as successful against foes from
without as against foes from within. The fear of the Danes,
which had so long hung like a thunder-cloud over England,
pissed away before the host which William gathered in
1 385 to meet a great armament assembled by King Cnut.
A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, and the murder of
its King removed all peril from the North. Scotland,
already humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by
the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne ;
and after penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales
the King commenced its systematic reduction by settling
three of his great barons along its frontier. It was not
till his closing years that William's unvarying success was
troubled by a fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage
under his son Robert and by an attack which he was forced
to meet in 1087 from France; Its King mocked at the
Conqueror's unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which
bound him to his bed at Kouen. " King William has
as long a lying-in," laughed Philip, "as a woman
behind her curtains." " When I get up," William
swore grimly, "I will go to mass in Philip's-land and
bring a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a
thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they
be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make." At
harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along
the French border fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the
King rode down the steep street of Mantes which he had
given to the flames his horse stumbled among the embers,
and William was flung heavily against his saddle. He
was borne home to Kouen to die. The sound of the minster
bell woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St.
Gervais, overlooking the city it was the hour of prime
YOL. I. 10
134 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK n.
CHAP. I. and stretching out his hands in prayer the King passed
^ quietly away. Death itself took its colour from the savage
Conqueror. so iitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last
lossi breath left him, and the Conqueror's body lay naked and
lonely on the floor.
CHAPTER II.
THE NORMAN KINGS.
10851154.
WITH the death of the Conqueror passed the terror which William
had held the barons in awe, while the severance of his ** Bed.
dominions roused their hopes of successful resistance to
the stern rule beneath which they had bowed. William be-
queathed Normandy to his eldest son Eobert ; but William
the Red, his second son, hastened with his father's ring to
England where the influence of Lanfranc secured him the
crown. The baronage seized the opportunity to rise in
arms under pretext of supporting the claims of Robert,
whose weakness of character gave full scope for. the growth
of feudal independence ; and Bishop Odo, now freed from
prison, placed himself at the head of the revolt. The new
King was thrown almost wholly on the loyalty of his
English subjects. But the national stamp which William
had given to his kingship told at once. The English rallied
to the royal standard ; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the
one surviving Bishop of English blood, defeated the
insurgents in the West ; while the King, summoning the
freemen of country and town to his host under pain of
being branded as " nithing " or worthless, advanced with a
large force against Rochester where the barons were con-
centrated. A plague which broke out among the garrison
forced them to capitulate, and as the prisoners passed
through the royal army cries of " gallows and cord " burst
136
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
The
Norman
Kings.
1O85-
154.
from the English ranks. The failure of a later conspiracy
whose aim was to set on the throne a kinsman of the royal
house, Stephen of Albemarle, with the capture and im-
prisonment of its head, Robert Mowbray, the Earl of
Northumberland, brought home at last to the baronage
their helplessness in a strife with the King. The genius
of the Conqueror had saved England from the danger of
feudalism. But he had left as weighty a danger in the
power which trod feudalism under foot. The power of
the Crown was a purely personal power, restrained under
the Conqueror by his own high sense of duty, but capable
of becoming a pure despotism in the hands of his son.
The nobles were at his feet, and the policy of his minister,
Bishop Flambard of Durham, loaded their estates with
feudal obligations. Each tenant was held as bound to
appear if needful thrice a year at the royal court, to pay a
heavy fine or rent on succession to his estate, to contribute
aid in case of the King's capture in war or the knighthood
of the King's eldest son or the marriage of his eldest
daughter. An heir who was still a minor passed into the
King's wardship, and all profit from his lands went during
the period of wardship to the King. v If the estate fell to an
heiress, her hand was at the King's disposal and was
generally sold by him to the highest bidder. These rights of
" marriage " and " wardship " as well as the exaction of aids
at the royal will poured wealth into the treasury while they
impoverished and fettered the baronage. A fresh source
of revenue was found in the Church. The same principles
of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as to those
of the nobles ; and during the vacancy of a see or abbey
its profits, like those of a minor, were swept into the
royal hoard. William's profligacy and extravagance soon
tempted him to abuse this resource, and so steadily did
he refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom death
removed that at the close of his reign one archbishop-
rick., four bishopricks, and eleven abbeys were found to
be without pastors.
H.J ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 137
Vile as was this system of extortion and misrule but a CHAP.
single voice was raised in protest against it. Lanfranc had
been followed in his abbey at Bee by the most famous of
his scholars, Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like himself.
Friends as they were, no two men could be more strangely
unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the quiet
solitude of his mountain-valley, a tender-hearted poet-
dreamer, with a soul pure as the Alpine snows above him,
and an intelligence keen and clear as the mountain-air.
The whole temper of the man was painted in a dream of
his youth. It seemed to him as though heaven lay, a
stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, w r hile the
women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley became
harvest-maidens of its King. They reaped idly, and
Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily climbed the moun-
tain side to accuse them to their lord. As he reached
the palace the King's voice called him to his feet and he
poured forth his tale ; then at the royal bidding bread of
an unearthly whiteness was set before him, and he ate and
was refreshed. The dream passed with the morning ; but the
sense of heaven's nearness to earth, the fervid loyalty to
the service of his Lord, the tender restfulness and peace in
the Divine presence which it reflected lived on in the life
of Anselm. Wandering like other Italian . scholars to
Normandy, he became a monk under Lanfranc, and
on his teacher's removal to higher duties succeeded
him in the direction of the Abbey of Bee. No teacher
has ever thrown a greater spirit of love into his toil.
"Force your scholars to improve !" he burst out to another
teacher who relied on blows and compulsion. " Did you
ever see a craftsman fashion a fair image out of a golden
plate by blows alone ? Does he not now gently press it and
strike it with his tools, now with wise art yet more gently
raise and shape it ? What do your scholars turn into under
this ceaseless beating?" "They turn only brutal," was
the reply. " You have bad luck," was the keen answer,
"in a training that only turns men into, beasts." The
138
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
1085-
1154.
William
and
Anselm.
worst natures softened before this tenderness and patience.
Even the Conqueror, so harsh and terrible to others,
became another man, gracious and easy of speech, with
Anselm. But amidst his absorbing cares as a teacher, the
Prior of Bee found time for philosophical speculations to
which we owe the scientific inquiries which built up
the theology of the middle ages. His famous works were
the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit the
idea of God from the very nature of the human reason.
His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and
sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often the night
was a long watch till he could seize his conception and
write it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But
not even a fever of intense thought such as this could draw
Anselm's heart from its passionate tenderness and love.
Sick monks in the infirmary could relish no drink save the
juice which his hand squeezed for them from the grape-
bunch. In the later days of his archbishoprick a hare
chased by the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his
gentle voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman to stir
in the chase while the creature darted off again to the
woods. Even the greed of lands for the Church to which
so many religious men yielded found its characteristic
rebuke as the battling lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm
quietly close his eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep.
A stdden impulse of the Eed King drew the abbot
from these quiet studies into the storms of the world.
The see of Canterbury had long been left without a Primate
when a dangerous illness frightened the King into the pro-
motion of Anselm. The Abbot, who happened at the
time to be in England on the business of his house, was
dragged to the royal couch and the cross forced into his
hands. But William had no sooner recovered from his
sickness than he found himself face to face with an oppo-
nent whose meek and loving temper rose into firmness and
grandeur when it fronted the tyranny of the King. Much
of the struggle between William and the Archbishop turned
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
139
on questions such as the right of investiture, which have
little bearing on our history, but the particular question at
issue was of less importance than the fact of a contest at
all. The boldness of Anselm's attitude not only broke the
tradition of ecclesiastical servitude but infused through
the nation at large a new spirit of independence. The
real character of the strife appears in the Primate's answer
when his remonstrances against the lawless exactions
from the Church were met by a demand for a present
on his own promotion, and his first offer of five hundred
pounds was contemptuously refused. " Treat me as a free
man," Anselm replied, " and I devote myself and all that
I have to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you
shall have neither me nor mine." A burst of the Red
King's fury drove the Archbishop from court, and he finally
decided to quit the country, but his example had not been
lost, and the close of William's reigii found a new spirit of
freedom in England with which the greatest of the Con-
queror's sons was glad to make terms. His exile how-
ever left William without a check. Supreme at home, he
was full of ambition abroad. As a soldier the Red King
was little inferior to his father. Normandy had been
pledged to him by his brother Robert in exchange for a
sum which enabled the Duke to march in the first Crusade
for the delivery of the Holy Land, and a rebellion at Le
Mans was subdued by the fierce energy with which William
flung himself at the news of it into the first boat he found,
and crossed the Channel in face of a storm. " Kings never
drown," he replied contemptuously to the remonstrances of
his followers. Homage was again wrested from Malcolm
by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder which
enabled an army under Eadgar ^Etheling to establish
Edgar, the son of Margaret, as an English feudatory on
the throne. In Wales William was less triumphant, and
the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman cavalry
in the fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on
CHAP. II.
The
Norman
Kings.
1085
1154
140 HISTOttY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. the slower but wiser policy of the Conqueror. But triumph
^ and defeat alike ended in a strange and tragical close. In
^| n 1100 the Eed King was found dead by peasants in a glade
loss- f ^ e -^ ew Forest, with the arrow either of a hunter or
115A - an assassin in his breast.
Henry the Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy
First. j^n^ where his bravery had redeemed much of his earlier
ill-fame, and the English crown was seized by his younger
brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the baronage,
who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the union of
their estates on both sides the Channel under a single
ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it had thrown
Eufus, on the support of the .English, and the two great
measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a
charter, and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new
relation which this support brought about between the
people and their King. Henry's Charter is important, not
merely as a direct precedent for the Great Charter of John,
but as the first limitation on the despotism established by
the Conqueror and carried to such a height by his son.
The " evil customs " by which the Eed King had enslaved
and plundered the Church were explicitly renounced in it,
the unlimited demands made by both the Conqueror and
his son on the baronage exchanged for customary fees,
while the rights of the people itself, though recognized
more vaguely, were not forgotten. The barons were held
to do justice to their under-tenants and to renounce tyran-
nical exactions from them, the King promising to restore
order and the " law of Eadward," the old constitution of
the realm, with the changes which his father had intro-
duced. His marriage gave a significance to these promises
which the meanest English peasant could understand.
Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter of King Malcolm of
Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar ^Etheling.
She had been brought up in the nunnery of Eomsey by its
abbess, her aunt Christina, and the veil which she had
taken there formed an obstacle to her union with the King
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
141
which, was only removed by the wisdom of Anselm.
While Flambard, the embodiment of the Eed King's des-
potism, was thrown into the Tower, the Archbishop's recall
had been one of Henry's first acts after his accession.
Matilda appeared before his court to tell her tale in words
of passionate earnestness. She had been veiled in her
childhood, she asserted, only to save her from the insults of
the rude soldiery who infested the land, had flung the veil
from her again and again, and had yielded at last to the
tin womanly taunts, the actual blows of her aunt. " As
often as I stood in her presence," the girl pleaded, " I wore
the veil, trembling as I wore it with indignation and grief.
But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used to snatch
it from my head, fling it on the ground, and trample it
under foot. That was the way, and none other, in which I
was veiled." Anselm at once declared her free from con-
ventual bonds, and the shout of the English multitude
when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the
murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery of the
Norman nobles, who nicknamed the King and his spouse
Godric and Godgifu, was lost in the joy of the people at
large. For the first time since the Conquest an English
sovereign sat on the English throne. The blood of Cerdic
and Alfred was to blend itself with that of Rolf and the
Conqueror. Henceforth it was impossible that the two
peoples should remain parted from each other; so quick
indeed was their union that the very name of Norman had
passed away in half a century, and at the accession of
Henry's grandson it was impossible to distinguish between
the descendants of the conquerors and those of the con-
quered at Senlac.
Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm among
his subjects which enabled Henry to defy the claims of
his brother and the disaffection of his nobles. .Early in
1101 Eobert landed at Portsmouth to win the crown in
arms. The great barons with hardly an exception stood
aloof from the Kins. But the Norman Duke found
CHAP. II
The
Norman
Kings.
1085
1154.
Benrt/
and the.
Barons.
142 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. himself face to face with an English army which
The gathered at Anselm's summons round Henry's standard.
^ings 11 The temper of the English had rallied from the panic of
loss- Senlac. The soldiers who came to fight for their King
1154-. now j se feared the Normans." As Henry rode along their
lines showing them how to keep firm their shield-wall
against the lances of Robert's knighthood, he was met
with shouts for battle. But King and Duke alike shrank
from a contest in which the victory of either side would
have undone the Conqueror's work. The one saw his effort
was hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his
rival from the realm, and by a peace which the Count of
Meulan negotiated Eobert recDgnized Henry as King of
England while Henry gave up his fief in the Cotentin to
his brother the Duke. Robert's retreat left Henry free to
deal sternly with the barons who had forsaken him.
Robert de Lacy was stripped of his manors in Yorkshire ;
Robert Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk ; Ivo
of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to the Holy
Land as a pilgrim. But greater even than these was
Robert of Belesme, the son of Roger of Montgomery, who
held in England the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Arundel,
while in Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and
Alenc,on. Robert stood at the head of the baronage in
wealth and power : and his summons to the King's Court
to answer for his refusal of aid to the King was answered
by a haughty defiance. But again the Norman baronage
had to feel the strength which English loyalty gave to the
Crown. Sixty thousand Englishmen followed Henry to
the attack of Robert's strongholds along the Welsh border.
It was in vain that the nobles about the King, conscious
that Robert's fall left them helpless in Henry's hands,
strove to bring about a peace. The English soldiers shouted
" Heed not these traitors, our lord King Henry," and with
the people at his back the King stood firm. Only an early
surrender saved Robert's life. He was suffered to retire
to his estates in Normandy, but his English lands were
ii.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 1071-1214. 143
confiscated to the Crown. "Rejoice, King Henry," shouted CHAP. II.
the English soldiers, " for you began to be a free King on ^
that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme and drove I King a s 11
him from the land." Master of his own realm and en- IQSS-
riched by the confiscated lands of the ruined barons Henry x ^5'
crossed into Normandy, where the misgovernment of the
Duke had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk, and where
the outrages of nobles like Robert of Belesme forced the
more peaceful classes to call the King to their aid. In
1106 his forces met those of his brother on the field of
Tenchebray, and a decisive English victory on Norman soil
avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered duchy
became a dependency of the English crown, and Henry's
energies were frittered away through a quarter of a century
in crushing its revolts, the hostility of the French, and
the efforts of his nephew William the son of Robert, to
regain the crown which his father had lost.
With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was free to enter Henry s
on that work of administration which was to make his "
reign memorable in our history. Successful as his wars
had been he was in heart no warrior but a statesman, and
his greatness showed itself less in the field than in thc-
council chamber. His outer bearing like his inner temper
stood in marked contrast to that of his father. Well
read, accomplished, easy and fluent of speech, the lord of
a harem of mistresses, the centre of a gay court where
poet and jongleur found a home, Henry remained cool,
self-possessed, clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless
himself, and neither seeking nor desiring his people's love,
but wringing from them their gratitude and regard by
sheer dint of good government. His work of order was
necessarily a costly work ; and the steady pressure of his
taxation, a pressure made the harder by local famines and
plagues during his reign, has left traces of the grumbling
it roused in the pages of the English Chronicle. But even
the Chronicler is forced to own amidst his grumblings that
Henry " was a good man, and great was the awe of him."
144
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
1085
1154.
He had little of his father's creative genius, of that far-
reaching originality by which the Conqueror stamped
himself and his will on the very fabric of our history.
But he had the passion for order, the love of justice, the
faculty of organization, the power of steady and unwaver-
ing rule, which was needed to complete the Conqueror's
work. His aim was peace, and the title of the Peace-
loving King which was given him at his death showed
with what a steadiness and constancy he carried out his
aim. In Normandy indeed his work was ever and anon
undone by outbreaks of its baronage, outbreaks sternly
repressed only that the work might be patiently and calmly
taken up again where it had been broken off. But in
England his will was carried out with a perfect success.
For more than a quarter of a century the land had rest.
Without, the Scots were held in friendship, the Welsh
were bridled by a steady and well-planned scheme of
gradual conquest. Within, the licence of the baronage
was held sternly down, and justice secured for all. " He
governed with a strong hand," says Orderic, but the strong
hand was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant. " Great
was the awe of him," writes the annalist of Peterborough.
" No man durst ill-do to another in his days. Peace he
made for man and beast." Pitiless as were the blows he
aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they were blows
which his English subjects felt k> be struck in their cause.
" While he mastered by policy the foremost counts and
lords and the boldest tyrants, he ever cherished and
protected peaceful men and men of religion and men of
the middle class." What impressed observers most was
the unswerving, changeless temper of his rule. The stern
justice, the terrible punishments he inflicted on all who
broke his laws, were parts of a fixed system which differed
widely from the capricious severity of a mere despot.
Hardly less impressive was his unvarying success. Heavy
as were the blows which destiny levelled at him, Henry
bore and rose unconquered from all. To the end of his life
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
145
Henry's
Adminis-
tration.
the proudest barons lay bound and blinded in his prison. CHAP. II.
His hoard grew greater and greater. Normandy, toss as ^
she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last. In England ^f^s n
it was only after his death that men dared mutter what loTTs-
evil things they had thought of Henry the Peace-lover, or 1154j
censure the pitilessness, the greed, and the lust which had
blurred the wisdom and splendour of his rule.
His vigorous administration carried out into detail the
system of government which the Conqueror had sketched.
The vast estates which had fallen to the crown through
revolt and forfeiture were granted out to new men de-
pendent on royal favour. On the ruins of the great
feudatories whom he had crushed Henry built up a class
of lesser nobles, whom the older barons of the Conquest
looked down on in scorn, but who were strong enough
to form a counterpoise to their influence while they fur-
nished the Crown with a class of useful administrators
whom Henry employed as his sheriffs and judges. A new
organization of justice and finance bound the kingdom
more tightly together in Henry's grasp. The Clerks of
the Royal Chapel were formed into a body of secretaries
or royal ministers, whose head bore the title of Chancellor.
Above them stood the Justiciar, or Lieutenant- General of
the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the King
acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected
from the barons connected with the royal household, were
formed into a Supreme Court of the realm. The King's
Court, as this was called, permanently represented the
whole court of royal vassals which had hitherto been
summoned thrice in the year. As the royal council, it
revised and registered laws, and its " counsel and consent,"
though merely formal, preserved the principle of the older
popular legislation. As a court of justice it formed the
highest court of appeal : it could call up any suit from a
lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the
union of several sheriffdoms under some of its members
connected it closely with the local courts. As a financial
146
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1085
1154.
CHAP. II. body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collection
" of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the
Norman Q our t of Exchequer from the chequered table, much like
a chess-board, at which it sat and on which accounts were
rendered. In their financial capacity its justices became
" barons of the Exchequer." Twice every year the sheriff
of each county appeared before these barons and rendered
the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld
or land tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids from
the baronial estates, which formed the chief part of the
royal revenue. Local disputes respecting these payments
or the assessment of the town-rents were settled by a detach-
ment of barons from the court -who made the circuit of the
shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the judicial visi-
tations, the "judges' circuits," which still form so marked
a feature in our legal system.
Measures such as these changed the whole temper of the
Norman rule. It remained a despotism, but from this
moment it was a despotism regulated and held in check
by the forms of administrative routine. Heavy as was the
taxation under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffer-
ing throughout his reign from famine and plague, the peace
and order which his government secured through thirty
years won a rest for the land in which conqueror and
conquered blended into a single people and in which this
people slowly moved forward to a new freedom. But while
England thus rested in peace a terrible blow broke the
fortunes of her King. In 1120 his son, William the
"^Etheling," with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry
on his return from Normandy ; but the "White ship in
which he embarked lingered behind the rest of the royal
fleet till the guards of the King's treasure pressed its
departure. It had hardly cleared the harbour when the
ship's side struck on a rock, and in an instant it sank
beneath the waves. One terrible cry, ringing through the
silence of the night, was heard by the royal fleet ; but it
was not till the morning that the fatal news reached the
The
Angevin
Marriage,
li.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214 147
King. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the ground, CHAP. II.
and rose never to smile again. He had no other son, and ^
the circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more 1 ja2^ n
fiercely that William, the son of his captive brother Robert, IQBS-
was now his natural heir. Henry hated William while he 115A -
loved his own daughter Maud, who had been married to
the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been restored
by his death to her father's court. The succession of a
woman was new in English history ; it was strange to a
ieudal baronage. But when all hope of issue from a second
wife whom he wedded was over Henry forced priests and
nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress,
and affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the son of
the one foe whom he dreaded, Count Fulk of Aujou.
The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the wonder- Anjou.
ful history by which the Descendants of a Breton woodman
became masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, Maine,
and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Acquitaine and
Xormandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which
Xormandy had wort The legend of the father of their
races carries us back to the times of our own vElfred, when
the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along
Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the de-
bateable land between France and Britanny, 'dwelt Tortulf
the Forester, half-brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days
went, living in free outlaw-fashion in the woods about
Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his rough forest school
" how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear
hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost, how to
fear nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the
Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman won
broad lands along Loire, and his son Ingelger, who had
swept the Northmen from Touraine and the land to the
west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude,
became the first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf
and Ingelger is a mere creation of some twelfth century
jongleur. The earliest Count whom history recognizes is
148
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
The
Norman
Kings.
1085-
1154
Fulk the
Black.
Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes of
France who were now drawing nearer to the throne, and in
888 received from them in guerdon the western portion of
Anjou which lay across the Mayenne. The story of his
son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-
storms of his house. Alone of his race Fulk the Good
waged no wars: his delight was to sit in the choir of
Tours and to be called " Canon." One Martinmas eve
Fulk was singing there in clerkly guise when the French
King, Lewis d'Outrerner, entered the church. '' He sings
like a priest," laughed the King as his nobley pointed
mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon. But Fulk
was ready with his reply. " Know v my lord," wrote the
Count of Anjou, " that a King unlearned is a crowned
ass." Fulk was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, govern-
ing, enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner
of the wasted land. To him alone of his race men gave
the title of " the Good."
Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more
than a bold, dashing soldier, Fulk's sou, Geoffry Grey-
gown, sank almost into a vassal of his powerful neighbours,
the Counts of Blois and Champagne. But this vassalage
was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra,
Fulk the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first
in whom we can trace that marked type of character
which their house was to preserve through two hundred
years. He was without natural affection. In his youth
he burnt a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led
her to her doom decked out in his gayest attire. In his
old age he waged his bitterest war against his son, and
exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation which
men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. "You are
conquered, you are conquered ! " shouted the old man in
fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled like a
beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father's feet.
In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which
startled even superstitious ages in the early Plautagenets.
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 149
Eobber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of CHAP. II
ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the end of the world The
drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot and with the ^n^! 1
strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the 1055-
Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets 1 L 84 '
of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his
wild outcries of penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of
Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin,
by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his
lands. He secured the terrified friendship of the French
King by despatching twelve assassins to cut down before
his eyes the minister who had troubled it. Familiar as the
age was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoiled from
the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of
Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the
worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But neither the
wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke with a single
mishap the fifty years of his success.
At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important
of the greater provinces of France. At his death in 1040
it stood, if not in extent, at least in real power, first among
them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted, quick to resolve,
quicker to strike, Fulk's career was one long series of
victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate
general, and he had the gift of personal bravery, which
was denied to some of his greatest descendants. There
was a moment in the first of his battles when the day
seemed lost for Anjou ; a feigned retreat of the Bretons
drew the Angevin horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls,
and the Count himself was flung heavily to the ground.
Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he swept
down almost singly on the foe " as a storm-wind " (so rang
the pa3an of the Angevins) " sweeps down on the thick
corn-rows," and the field was won. But to these qualities
of the warrior he added a power of political organization,
a capacity for far-reaching combinations, a faculty of
statesmanship, which became the heritage of his race, and
VOL. L 11
HIBTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
CHAP. II. lifted them as high above the intellectual level of the
^ rulers of their time as their shameless wickedness de-
^Kiif's 11 graded them below the level of man. His overthrow of
loss- Britanny on the field of Conquereux was followed by the
USA. oradual absorption of Southern Touraine ; a victory at
Pontlevoi crushed the rival house of Blois; the seizure
of Saumur completed his conquests in the south, while
Northern Touraine was won bit by bit till only Tours
resisted the Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its
Count, Herbert Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.
Death of His work of conquest was completed by his son.
Henry. Q eo ff r y Martel wrested Tours from the Count of Blois,
and by the seizure of Le Mans brought his border to the
Norman frontier. Here however his advance was checked
by the genius of William the Conqueror, and with his
death the greatness of Anjou came for a while to an end.
Stripped of Maine by the Normans and broken by dis-
sensions within, the weak and profligate rule of Fulk
Eechin left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to
fresh energy with the accession of his son, Fulk of Jerusa-
lem. Now urging the turbulent Norman nobles to revolt,
now supporting Eobert's son, William, in his strife with
his uncle, offering himself throughout as the loyal sup-
porter of the French kingdom which was now hemmed in
on almost every side by the forces of the English king and
of his allies the Counts of Blois and Champagne, Fulk
was the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared.
It was to disarm his restless hostility that the King gave
the hand of Matilda to Geoffry the Handsome. But the
hatred between Norman and Angevin had been too bitter
to make such a marriage popular, and the secrecy with
which it was brought about was held by the barons to
free them from the oath they had previously sworn.
As no baron if he was sonless could give a husband
to his daughter save with his lord's consent, the nobles
held by a strained analogy that their own assent was
needful to the marriage of Maud. Henry found a
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 151
more pressing danger in the greed of her husband CHAP. II.
Geoffry, whose habit . of wearing the common broom of ^
Anjou, the planta genista, in his helmet gave him the ^[ng a s n
title of Plantagenet. His claims ended at last in intrigues ioas-
with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border 1154 "
to meet an Angevin invasion ; but the plot broke down
at his presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of
1135 the old King withdrew to the Forest of Lyons to die.
" God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Eouen from Stephen.
Henry's death-bed, " the peace he loved." With him
indeed closed the long peace of the Norman rule. An
outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his departure,
and in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew,
appeared at the gates of London. Stephen was a son of
the Conqueror's daughter, Adela, who had married a Count
of Blois ; he had been brought up at the English court, had
been made Count of Mortain by Henry, had become Count
of Boulogne by his marriage, and as head of the Norman
baronage had been the first to pledge himself to support
Matilda's succession. But his own claim as nearest male
heir of the Conqueror's blood (for his cousin, the son of
Robert, had fallen some years before in Flanders) was sup-
ported by his personal popularity ; mere swordgman as he
was, his good-humour, his generosity, his very prodigality
made Stephen a favourite with all. No noble however
had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town opened
its gates when London poured out to meet him with up-
roarious welcome. Neither baron nor prelate was present
to constitute a National Council, but the great city did
not hesitate to take their place. The voice of her citizens
had long been accepted as representative of the popular
assent in the election of a king ; but it marks the progress
of English independence under Henry that London now
claimed of itself the right of election. Undismayed by
the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the crown
its " Aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk-
moot, and these providing at their own will for the good
152
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. of the realm unanimously resolved to choose a king."
^ The solemn deliberation ended in the choice of Stephen,
^Kings? t ne citizens .swore to defend the King with money and
loss- blood, Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the
1154 - pacification and good government of the realm. It was in
fact the new union of conquered and conquerors into a
single England that did Stephen's work. The succession
of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of Anjou, and to
Norman as to Englishman the rule of the Angevin was a
foreign rule. The welcome Stephen won at London and
. Winchester, his seizure of the royal treasure, the adhesion
of the Justiciar Bishop Eoger to his cause, the reluctant
consent of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from
Anjou where Geoffry was at this moment pressed by
revolt, the need above all of some king to meet the out-
break of anarchy which followed Henry's death, secured
Stephen the voice of the baronage. He was crowned at
Christmas-tide; and soon joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester,
a bastard son of Henry and the chief of his nobles ; while
the issue of a charter from Oxford in 1136, a charter which
renewed the dead King's pledge of good government, pro-
mised another Henry to the realm. The charter surrendered
all forests made in the last reign as a sop to the nobles, it
conciliated the Church by granting freedom of election and
renouncing all right to the profits of vacant churches, it
won the people by a pledge to abolish the tax of Danegeld.
The king's first two years were years of success
arid prosperity. Two risings of barons in the east and
west were easily put down, and in 1137 Stephen passed
into Normandy and secured the Duchy against an attack
from Anjou. But. already the elements of trouble were
gathering round him. Stephen was a mere soldier, with
few kingly qualities save that of a soldier's bravery;
and the realm soon began to slip from his grasp. He
turned against himself the jealous dread of foreigners to
which he owed his accession by surrounding himself with
hired knights from Flanders ; he drained the treasury by
Battle
of the
Standard.
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
153
creating new earls endowed with pensions from it, and
recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness
of the gathering storm only drove Stephen to bind his
friends to him by suffering them 'to fortify castles and to
renew the feudal tyranny which Henry had struck down.
But the long reign of the dead king had left the Crown
so strong that even yet Stephen could hold his own. A
plot which Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from
the outset of his reign came indeed to a head in 1138, and
the Earl's revolt stripped Stephen of Caen and half Nor-
mandy. But when his partizans in England rose in the
south and the west and the King of Scots, whose friend-
ship Stephen had bought in the opening of his reign by the
cession of Carlisle, poured over the northern border, the
nation stood firmly by the King. Stephen himself marched
on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds
save Bristol. His people fought for him in the north.
The pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and
the Highlands roused the spirit of the Yorkshiremen.
Baron and freeman gathered at York round Archbishop
Thurstan and marched to the field of Northallerton to
await the foe. The sacred banners of St. Cu.th.bert of
Durham, St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St.
Wilfred of Papon hung from a pole fixed in a four-wheeled
car which stood in the centre of the . host. The first
onset of David's host was a terrible one. " I who wear
no armour." shouted the chief of the Galwegians, " will go
as far this day as any one with breastplate of mail ; " his
men charged with wilds shout of " Albin, Albin," and were
followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands.
But their repulse was complete ; the fierce hordes dashed
in vain against the close English ranks around the Standard,
and the whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle.
Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative organi-
zation of Henry still did its work. Eoger remained justiciar,
his son was chancellor, his nephew Nigel, the Bishop of Ely,
was treasurer. Finance and justice were thus concentrated
CHAP. II.
The
Norman
Kings.
1085-
1154.
Seizure
of the
Bishops.
154
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. in the hands of a single family which preserved amidst
^ the deepening misrule something of the old order and rule,
Nop^n an( j wn i c h stood at the head of the '' new men," whom Henry
loss- had ra i se( l i nto importance and made the instruments of
1154. hjg w j]j These new men were still weak by the side of
the older nobles ; and conscious of the jealousy and ill-
will with which they were regarded they followed in self-
defence the example which the barons were setting in
building and fortiiying castles on their domains. Roger
and his house, the objects from their official position of a
deeper grudge than any, were carried away by the panic.
The justiciar and his son fortified their castles, and it was
only with a strong force at their back that the prelates
appeared at court. Their attitude was one to rouse
Stephen's jealousy, and the news of Matilda's purpose of
invasion lent strength to the doubts which the nobles cast
on their fidelity. All the weak violence of the King's
temper suddenly broke out. He seized Roger the Chan-
cellor and the Bishop of Lincoln when they appeared at
Oxford in June, 1139, and forced them to surrender their
strongholds. Shame broke the justiciar's heart ; he died
at the close of the year, and his nephew Nigel of Ely was
driven from the realm. But the fall of this house shat-
tered the whole system of government. The King's court
and the Exchequer ceased to work at a moment when the
landing of Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda set
Stephen face to face with a danger greater than he had
yet encountered, while the clergy alienated by the arrest
of the Bishops and the disregard of their protests, stood
angrily aloof.
Civil War. The three bases of Henry's system of government, the
subjection of the baronage to the law, the good-will of
the Church, and the organization of justice and finance,
were now utterly ruined ; and for the seventeen years
which passed from this hour to the Treaty of Walling-
ford England was given up to the miseries of civil
war. The country was divided between the adherents
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 155
of the two rivals, the "West supporting Matilda, London CHAP. II:
and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in 1141 ^
left the latter a captive in the hands of his enemies, ^ng^ 1
while Matilda was received throughout the land as its icss-
" Lady." But the disdain with which she repulsed the 1 } 54 '
claim of London to the enjoyment of its older privileges
called its burghers to arms ; her resolve to hold Stephen
a prisoner roused his party again to life, and she was driven
to Oxford to be besieged there in 1142 by Stephen himself,
who had obtained his release in exchange for Earl Robert
after the capture of the Earl in a battle at Devizes. She
escaped from the castle, but with the death of Robert her
struggle became a hopeless one, and in 1146 she withdrew
to Normandy. The war was now a mere chaos of pillage and
bloodshed. The royal power came to an end. The royal
courts were suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come
at the King's call. The bishops met in council to protest,
but their protests and excommunications fell on deafened
ears. For the first and last time in her history England was
in the hands of the baronage, and their outrages showed
from what horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had
saved her. Castles sprang up everywhere. " They filled
the land with castles," says the terrible annalist of the
time. " They greatly oppressed the wretched people by
making them work at these castles, and when they were
finished they filled them with devils and armed men." In
each of these robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a
king. The strife for the Crown had broken into a medley
of feuds between baron and baron, for none could brook an
equal or a superior in his fellow. " They fought among
themselves with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest
lands with fire and rapine; in what had been the mostfertik
of counties they destroyed almost all the provision of bread."
For fight as they might with one another, all were at one
in the plunder of the land. Towns were put to ransom.
Villages were sacked and burned. All who were deemed
to have goods, whether men or women, were carried off and
156
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1085-
1154.
CHAP. II. flung into dungeons and tortured till they yielded up their
^ wealth. No ghastlier picture of a nation's misery has ever
N Kings n been P amte d than that which closes the English Chronicle
whose last accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.
" They hanged up men by their feet and smoked them with
foul smoke. Some were hanged up by their thumbs, others
by the head, and burning things were hung on to their
feet. They put knotted strings about men's heads, and
writhed them till they went to the brain. They put men
into prisons where adders and snakes and toads were crawl-
ing, and so they tormented them. Some they put into a
chest short and narrow and not deep and that had sharp
stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke
all their limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and
grim things called rachenteges, which two or three men had
enough to do to carry. It was thus made : it was fastened
to a beam and had a sharp iron to go about a man's neck and
throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but he
bore all the iron. Many thousands they starved with hunger."
It was only after years of this feudal anarchy that Eng-
land was rescued from it by the efforts of the Church.
The political influence of the Church had been greatly
lessened by the Conquest : for pious, learned, and energetic
as the bulk of the Conqueror's bishops were, they were not
Englishmen. Till the reign of Henry the First no English-
man occupied an English see. This severance of the higher
clergy from the lower priesthood and from the people went
far to paralyze the constitutional influence of the Church.
Anselm stood alone against Eufus, and when Anselm
was gone no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the
silence of the reign of Henry the First. But at the
close of Henry's reign and throughout the reign of Stephen
England was stirred by the first of those great religious
movements which it' was to experience afterwards in the
preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wyclif, the
Reformation, the Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission
work of the Wesleys. Everywhere in town and country
Religious
Revival.
li.l ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
157
men banded themselves together for prayer : hermits
flocked to the woods : noble and churl welcomed the
austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the Benedic-
tine order, as they spread over the moors and forests of
the North. A new spirit of devotion woke the slumbers
of the religious houses, and penetrated alike to the home
'of the noble and the trader. London took its full share
in the revival. The city was proud of its religion, its
thirteen conventual and more than a hundred parochial
churches. The new impulse changed its very aspect. In
the midst of the city Bishop Kichard busied himself with
the vast cathedral church of St. Paul which Bishop
Maurice had begun ; barges came up the river with stone
from Caen for the great arches that moved the popular
wonder, while street and lane were being levelled to make
room for its famous churchyard. Ealiere, a minstrel at
Henry's court, raised the Priory of Saint Bartholomew
beside Srnithfield. Alfune built St. Giles's at Cripplegate.
The old English Cnichtenagild surrendered their soke of
Aldgate as a site for the new priory of the Holy Trinity.
The tale of this house paints admirably the temper of the
citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior Norman, built
church and cloister and bought books and vestments in so
liberal a fashion that no money remained to buy bread.
The canons were at their last gasp when the city-folk,
looking into the refectory as they passed round the cloister
in their usual Sunday procession, saw the tables laid but
not a single loaf on them. " Here is a fine set out," said
the citizens ; " but where is the bread to come from ? " The
women who were present vowed each to bring a loaf every
Sunday, and there was soon bread enough and to spare for
the priory and its priests.
We see the strength of the new movement in the new
class of ecclesiastics whom it forced on to the stage. Men
like Archbishop Theobald drew whatever influence they
wielded from a belief in their holiness of life and unselfish-
ness of aim. The paralysis of the Church ceased as the
CHAP. II.
The
Norman
Kings.
1O85-
1154.
Thomas
of
London
158 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. new impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at the
^ moment we have reached its power was found strong
Norman enough to wrest England out of the chaos of feudal mis-
Kings.
loss- ru ^ e - ^ n ^ ie ear ty P ar ^ f Stephen's reign his brother
H54-. Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been appointed
in 1139 Papal Legate for the realm, had striven to supply
the absence of any royal or national authority by convening
. synods of bishops, and by asserting the moral right of the
Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne. The
compact between king and people which became a part of
constitutional law in the Charter of Henry had gathered
new force in the Charter of Stephen, but its legitimate
consequence in the responsibility of the crown for the
execution of the compact was first drawn out by these
ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions of
Stephen and Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward
and Richard, and the solemn act by which the succession
was changed in the case of James. Extravagant and un-
authorized as their expression of it may appear, they
expressed the right of a nation to good government.
Henry of Winchester however, " half monk, half soldier,"
as he was called, possessed too little religious influence to
wield a really spiritual power, and it was only at the close
of Stephen's reign that the nation really found a moral
leader in Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Theo-
bald's ablest agent and adviser was Thomas, the son of
Gilbert Beket, a leading citizen and, it is said, Portreeve of
London, the site of whose house is still marked by the
Mercers' chapel in Cheapside. His mother Eohese was a
type of the devout woman of her day ; she weighed her
boy every year on his birthday against money, clothes, and
provisions which she gave to the poor. Thomas grew up
amidst the Norman barons and clerks who frequented his
father's house with a genial freedom of character tempered
by the Norman refinement ; he passed from the school of
Merton to the University of Paris, and returned to fling
himself into the life of the young nobles of the time. Tall,
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
159
handsome, bright- eyed, ready of wit and speech, his firm-
ness of temper showed itself in his very sports ; to rescue
his hawk which had fallen into the water he once plunged
into a millrace and was all but crushed by the wheel.
The loss of his father's wealth drove him to the court of
Archbishop Theobald, and he soon became the Primate's
confidant in his plans for the rescue of England.
The natural influence which the Primate would have
exerted was long held in suspense by the superior position
of Bishop Henry of Winchester as Papal Legate ; but this
office ceased with the Pope who granted it, and when in
1150 it was transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald
soon made his weight felt. The long disorder of the realm
was producing its natural reaction in exhaustion and disgust,
as well as in a general craving for return to the line of here-
ditary succession whose breaking seemed the cause of the
nation's woes. But the growth of their son Henry to man-
hoodset naturally aside the pretensions both of Count Geoffry
and Matilda. Young as he was Henry already showed the
cool long-sighted temper which was to be his characteristic
on the throne. Foiled in an, early attempt to grasp the
crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder which was doing
his work till the death of his father at the close of 1151
left him master of Normandy and Anjou. In "the spring
of the following year his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor
of Poitou, added Acquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw
the gathering storm, and strove to meet it. He called on the
bishops and baronage to secure the succession of his son
Eustace by consenting to his 'association with him in the
kingdom. But the moment was now come for Theobald to
play his part. He was already negotiating through Thomas
of London with Henry and the Pope ; he met Stephen's
plans by a refusal to swear fealty to his son, and the
bishops, in spite of Stephen's threats, went with their head.
The blow was soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as
Theobald's agent, invited Henry to appear in England, and
though the Duke disappointed his supporters' hopes by the
CHAP. II.
The
Norrnar-
Kings.
1085-
1154.
Treaty of
Walling-
ford.
160
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK n.
The
Norman
Kings.
1O85-
1154.
CHAP. II. scanty number of men he brought with him in 1153, his
weakness proved in the end a source of strength. It was
not to foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success
but to the arms of Englishmen. An English army gathered
round him, and as the hosts of Stephen and the Duke drew
together a battle seemed near which would decide the fate
of the realm. But Theobald who was now firmly sup-
ported, by the greater barons again interfered and forced
the rivals to an agreement. To the excited partizans of
the house of Anjou it seemed as if the nobles were simply
playing their own game in the proposed settlement and
striving to preserve their power by a balance of masters.
The suspicion was probably groundless, but all fear
vanished with the death of Eustace, who rode off from
his father's camp, maddened with the ruin of his hopes,
to die in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand
of God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground was
now clear, and in November the Treaty of Wullingford
abolished the evils of the long anarchy. The castles were
to be razed, the crown lands resumed, the foreign mer-
cenaries banished from the country, and sheriffs appointed
to restore order. Stephen was recognized as King, and in
turn recognized Henry as his heir. The Duke received at
Oxford the fealty of the barons, and passed into Normandy
in the spring of 1154. The work of reformation had
already begun. Stephen resented indeed the pressure which
Henry put on him to enforce the destruction of the castles
built during the anarchy ; but Stephen's resistance was but
the pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He was in fact fast
drawing to the grave ; and on his death in October 1154
Henry returned to take the crown without a blow.
CHAPTER III.
HENRY THE SECOND.
11541189.
YOUNG as he was, and he had reached but his twenty- Henry
first year when he returned to England as its King, Henry
mounted the throne with a purpose of government which
his reign carried steadily out. His practical, serviceable
frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
something in his build and look, in the square stout form,
the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the
bull neck, the coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that
marked out the keen, stirring, coarse-fibred man of business.
" He never sits down," said one who observed him closely;
" he is always on his legs from morning till night." Orderly
in business, careless of appearance, sparing in -diet, never
resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive,
endowed with a singular charm of address and strength
of memory, obstinate in love or hatred, a fair scholar, a
great hunter, his general air that of a rough, passionate,
busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the
character of his reign. His accession marks the period of
amalgamation when neighbourhood and traffic and inter-
marriage drew Englishmen and Normans into a single
people. A national feeling was thus springing up before
which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept
away. Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past
than the men of .his day : he was indeed utterly without
the imagination and reverence which enable men to
162 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's
Henry" the impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his
second. re f orms by the older constitution of the realm, nor could
he. understand other men's reluctance to purchase un-
doubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and
traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hos-
tility to the co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to
him a perfectly reasonable and natural course to trample
either baronage or Church under foot to gain his end of
good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for
such anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay
in the establishment of a kingly rule unembarrassed by
any privileges of order or class, administered by royal
servants, and in whose public administration the nobles
acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was
to lie in the organization of judicial and administrative
reforms which realized this idea. But of the currents oi
thought and feeling which were tending in the same
direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral
and social impulses which were telling on men about him
was simply to let them alone. Religion grew more and
more identified with patriotism under the eyes of a King
who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books
during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild
frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves
on both sides of the sea round a sovereign who bent the
whole force of his mind to hold together an Empire which
the growth of nationality must inevitably destroy. - There
is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's
position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the
midst of the twelfth, building up by patience and policy
and craft a dominion alien to the deepest sympathies of
his age and fated to be swept away in the end by popular
forces to whose existence his very cleverness and activity
blinded him. But whether by the anti-national temper of
his general system or by the administrative reforms of
his English rule his policy did more than that of all
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
163
CHAP. III.
Henry^the
Second -
his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and
freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.
He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by
the Church. His first work was to repair the evils which lies'.
England had endured till his accession by the restoration ^ e ~gy ea
of the system of Henry the First ; and it was with the aid Scutage.
and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders were
driven from the realm, the new castles demolished in spite
of the opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and
Exchequer restored. Age and infirmity however warned
the Primate to retire from the post of minister, and his
power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands of
Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential
adviser and was now made Chancellor. Thomas won the
personal favour of the King. The two young men had, in
Theobald's words, '' but one heart and mind ; " Henry
jested in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his
shoulders in rough horse-play as they rode through the
streets. He loaded his favourite with riches and honours,
but there is no ground for thinking that Thomas in any
degree influenced his system of rule. Henry's policy
seems for good or evil to have been throughout his own.
His work of reorganization went steadily on amidst troubles
at home and abroad. Welsh outbreaks forced him in 1157
to lead an army over the border ; and a crushing repulse
showed that he was less skilful as a general than as a
statesman. The next year saw him drawn across the
Channel, where he was already master of a third of the
present France. Anjou and Touraine he had inherited
from his father, Maine and Normandy from his mother, he
governed Britanny through his brother, while the seven
provinces of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, Auvergne,
Perigord, the Limousin, the Angoumois, and Guienne,
belonged to his wife. As Duchess of Aquitaine Eleanor
had claims on Toulouse, and these Henry prepared in
1159 to enforce by arms. But the campaign was turned
to the profit of his reforms. He had already begun the
!64 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAI>. ill. work of bringing the baronage within the grasp of the
Henry" tlje ^ aw ^y sending judges from the Exchequer year after
Second. y ear to exact the royal dues and administer the King's
lisa justice even in castle and manor. He now attacked its
military influence. Each man who held lands of a certain
. value was hound to furnish a knight for his lord's service ;
and the barons thus held a body of trained soldiers at
their disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to
serve in the war of Toulouse, he allowed the lower tenants
to commute their service for sums payable to the royal
treasury under the name of "scutage," or shield-money.
The " Great Scutage " did much to disarm the baronage,
while it enabled the King to hire foreign mercenaries for
his service abroad. Again however he was luckless in
war. Kino 1 Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse.
O
Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide dominion,
Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain ; he
withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by a
formal alliance and the betrothal of his eldest son to the
daughter of Lewis.
Archbishop Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the
Thomas. re i a tions O f the state with the Church. These rested in
the main on the system established by the Conqueror, and
with that system Henry had no wish to meddle. But he
was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal
before the law ; and he had no more rnercy for clerical
than for feudal immunities. The immunities of the clergy
indeed were becoming a hindrance to public justice. The
clerical order in the middle ages extended far beyond the
priesthood ; it included in Henry's day the whole of the
professional and educated classes. It was subject to
the jurisdiction of the Church courts alone; but bodily
punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the lay
courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and
laity become that the bishops no longer sought civil aid
but restricted themselves to the purely spiritual punish-
ments of penance and deprivation of orders. Such
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 165
penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while CHAP. III.
preserving the Church courts the King aimed at the delivery HenrjT the
of convicted offenders to secular punishment. For the Sec f nd -
carrying out of these designs he sought an agent in liaj^
Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his
minister for eight years, and had fought bravely in the
war against Toulouse at the head of the seven hundred
knights who formed his household. But the King hatf
other work for him than war. On Theobald's death in
1162 he forced on the monks of Canterbury his election
as Archbishop. But from the moment of his appointment
the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its whole
energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first
intimation of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to
his gay court attire : " You are choosing a fine dress " he
said " to figure at the head of your Canterbury monks ; "
once monk and Archbishop he passed with a fevered
earnestness from luxury to asceticism ; and a visit to the
Council of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of
ecclesiastical authority were sanctioned by Pope Alexander
the Third, strengthened his purpose of struggling for the
privileges of the Church. His change of attitude encouraged
his old rivals at court to vex him with petty law-suits,
but no breach had come with the King till Henry proposed
that clerical convicts should be punished by the civil
power. Thomas refused ; he would only consent that a
clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer like
a layman. Both parties appealed to the " customs " of the
realm ; and it was to state these " customs " that a court
was held in 1164 at Clarendon near Marlborough.
The report presented by bishops and barons formed the Legal
Constitutions of Clarendon, a code which in the bulk Re f orms -
of its provisions simply re-enacted the system of the
Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to take
place before royal officers, in the King's chapel, and with
the King's assent. The prelate elect was bound to do
homage to the King for his lands before consecration,
YOL. I. 12
166 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. and to hold his lands as a barony from the King, subject
Henr7the to a11 feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in
second. ^he King's court. No bishop might leave the realm
use without the royal permission. No tenant in chief or
royal servant might be excommunicated, or their land
placed under interdict, but by the King's assent. What
was new was the legislation respecting ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. The King's court was to decide whether a
suit between clerk and layman, whose nature was disputed,
belonged to the Church courts or the King's. A royal
officer was to be present at all ecclesiastical proceedings
in order to confine the Bishop's court within its own
due limits, and a clerk convicted there passed at once
under the civil jurisdiction. An appeal was left from the
Archbishop's court to the King's court for defect of justice,
but none might appeal to the Papal court save with the
King's leave. The privilege of sanctuary in churches and
churchyards was repealed, so far as property and not
persons was concerned. After a passionate refusal tho
Primate was at last brought to set his seal to these Consti-
tutions, but his assent was soon retracted, and Henry's
savage resentment threw the moral advantage of the
position into his opponent's hands. Vexatious charges were
brought against Thomas, and he was summoned to answer
at a Council held in the autumn at Northampton. All urged
him to submit ; his very life was said to be in peril from
the King's wrath. But in the presence of danger the
courage of the man rose to its full height. Grasping his
archiepiscopal cross he entered the royal court, forbade the
nobles to condemn him, and appealed in the teeth of the
Constitutions to the Papal See. Shouts of "Traitor!"
followed him as he withdrew. The Primate turned fiercely
at the word : " Were I a knight," he shouted back, " my
sword should answer that foul taunt !" Once alone ^how-
ever, dread pressed more heavily; he fled in disguise at
nightfall and reached France through Flanders.
Great as were the dangers it was to bring with it, the
ii. J ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 167
flight of Thomas left Henry free to cany on the reforms CHAP. III.
he had planned. In spite of denunciations from Primate Henry" the
and Pope, the Constitutions regulated from this time Second -
the relations of the Church with the state. Henry now \\B9,
turned to the actual organization of the realm. His reign,
it has been truly said, " initiated the rule of law " as
distinct from the despotism, whether personal or tempered
by routine, of the Norman sovereigns. It was by suc-
cessive " assizes " or codes issued with the sanction of the
great councils of barons and prelates which he summoned
year by year, that he perfected in a system of gradual
reforms the administrative measures which Henry the
First had begun. The fabric of our judicial legislation
commences in 1166 with the Assize of Clarendon, the
first object of which was to provide for the order of the
realm by reviving the old English system of mutual
security or frankpledge. No stranger might abide in any
place save a borough and only there for a single night
unless sureties were given for his good behaviour; and
the list of such strangers was to be submitted to the
itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize for the
repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so
often attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of
each hundred, with four from each township, were sworn
to present those who were known or reputed as criminals
within their district for trial by ordeal. The jurors were
thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also
in determining the value of the charge, and it is this
double character of Henry's jurors that has descended to
our "grand jury," who still remain charged with the duty
of presenting criminals for trial after examination of the
witnesses against them. Two later steps brought the jury
to its modern condition. Under Edward the First wit-
nesses acquainted with the particular fact in question
were added in each case to the general jury, and by the
separation of these two classes of jurors at a later time
the last became simply " witnesses " without any judicial
168
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOR
CHAP. III. power, while the first ceased to be witnesses at all and
Hen^the became our modem jurors, who are only judges of the
second, testimony given. With this assize too a practice whicli
iitsT had prevailed from the earliest English times, the practice
of " computation," passed away. Under this system the
accused could be acquitted of the charge by the voluntary
oath of his neighbours and kinsmen ; but this was abolished
by the Assize of Clarendon, and for the fifty years which
followed it his trial, after the investigation of the grand
jury, was found solely in the ordeal 'or " judgement of
God," where innocence was proved by the power of
holding hot iron in the hand or by sinking when flung
into the water, for swimming was a proof of guilt.
It was the abolition of the whole system of ordeal by
the Council of Lateran in 1216 which led the way to
the establishment of what is called a "petty jury" for
the final trial of prisoners.
Murder But Henry's work of reorganization had hardly begun
f when it was broken by the pressure of the strife with the
Primate. For six years the contest raged bitterly; at
Borne, at Paris, the agents of the two powers intrigued
against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest
persecution in driving the Primate's kinsmen from Eng-
land, and in confiscating the lands of their order till the
monks of Pontigny should refuse Thomas a home ; while
Beket himself exhausted the patience of his friends by
his violence and excommunications, as well as by the
stubbornness with which he clung to the offensive
clause " Saving the honour of my order," the addition
of which to his consent would have practically neutra-
lized the King's reforms. The Pope counselled mild-
ness, the French king for a time withdrew his support,
his own clerks gave way at last. " Come up," said
one of them bitterly when his horse stumbled on the
road, " saving the honour of the Church and my order."
But neither warning nor desertion moved the resolution of
the Primate. Henry, in dread of Papal excommunication,
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 169
'.
resolved in 1170 on the coronation of his son: and this CHAP. III.
office, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, he trans- Henry" the
f erred to the Archbishop of York. But the Pope's hands Se ^ d -
were now freed by his successes in Italy, and the threat of ills.
an interdict forced the King to a show of submission.
The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconcilia-
tion with the King at Freteval, and the Kentishmen flocked
around him with uproarious welcome as he entered Can-
terbury. " This is England," said his clerks, as they saw
the white headlands of the coast. " You will wish your-
self elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said Thomas
sadly, and his foreboding showed his appreciation of
Henry's character. He was now in the royal power, and
orders had already been issued in the younger Henry's
name for his arrest when four knights from the King's
court, spurred to outrage by a passionate outburst of their
master's wrath, crossed the sea, and on the 29th of Decem-
ber forced their way into the Archbishop's palace. After
a stormy parley with him in his chamber they withdrew to
arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into the cathedral,
but as he reached the steps leading from the transept
to the choir his pursuers burst in from the cloisters.
" Where," cried Eeginald Fitzurse in the dusk of the dimly
lighted minster, "where is the traitor, Thomas Beket?"
The Primate turned resolutely back : " Here am I, no
traitor, but a priest of God," he replied, and again descend-
ing the steps he placed himself with his back against a
pillar and fronted his foes. All the bravery and violence
of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas as he
tossed back the threats and demands of his assailants.
" You are our prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four
knights seized him to drag him from the church. " Do not
touch me, Pieginald," cried the Primate, " pander that
you are, you owe me fealty ; " and availing himself of his
personal strength he shook him roughly off. "Strike,
strike," retorted Fitzurse, and blow after blow struck
Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Eanulf de Broc
170 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains
Henry" the on ^ e g roun d- " ^ us ^ e ^>" ^ e CT ^ e ^ triumphantly
second. thi s traitor will never rise again."
}}*%~ The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror
1 1 <5=7 .
~ throughout Christendom ; miracles were wrought at the
Church martyr's tomb ; he was canonized, and became the most
and popular of English saints. The stately " martyrdom "
" m which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody
the triumph which his blood had won. But the contest
had in fact revealed a new current of educated opinion
which was to be more fatal to the Church than the reforms
of the King. Throughout it Henry had been aided by a
silent revolution which now began to part the purely
literary class from the purely clerical. During the earlier
ages of our history we have seen literature springing up
in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself against the
ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical
privileges. Almost all our writers from Baeda to the days
of the Angevins are clergy or monks. The revival of letters
which followed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical
revival ; the intellectual impulse which Bee had given
to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new
Norman abbots who were established in the greater English
monasteries ; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the
chief works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were
copied and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and
entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this
time a part of every religious house of any importance.
But the literature which found this religious shelter was
not so much ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philo-
sophical and devoti onal impulse given by Anselm produced
no English work of theology or metaphysics. The literary
revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old
historical form. At Durham Turgot and Simeon threw
into Latin shape the national annals to the time of Henry
the First with an especial regard to northern affairs, while
the earlier events of Stephen's reign were noted down by
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 171
two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between CHAP. III.
England and the Scots.
These however were the colourless jottings of mere
annalists ; it was in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in
Osbern's lives of the English saints or in Eadmer's
record of the struggle of Anselm against the Eed King
and his successor that we see the first indications of a
distinctively English feeling telling on the new literature.
The national impulse is yet more conspicuous in the two
historians that followed. The war-songs of the English
conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, an Arch-
deacon of Huntingdon, who wove them into annals com-
piled from Baeda and the Chronicle ; while William, the
librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously collected the
lighter ballads which embodied the popular traditions of
the English Kings. It is in William above all others
that we see the new tendency of English literature. In
himself, as in his work, he marks the fusion of the con-
querors and the conquered, for he was of both English
and Norman parentage and his sympathies -were as
divided as his blood. The form and style of his writings
show the influence of those classical studies which were
now reviving throughout Christendom. Monk, as he is,
William discards the older ecclesiastical models and the
annalistic form. Events are grouped together with no
strict reference to time, while the lively narrative flows
rapidly and loosely along with constant breaks of digression
over the general history of Europe and the Church. It is
in this change of historic spirit that William takes his
place as first of the more statesmanlike and philosophic
school of historians who began to arise in direct con-
nexion with the Court, and among whom the author
of the chronicle which commonly bears the name of
" Benedict of Peterborough " with his continuator Eoger of
Howden are the most conspicuous. Both held judicial
. offices under Henry the Second, and it is to their position
at Court that they owe the fulness and accuracy of their
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. information as to affairs at home and abroad, as well as
the their copious supply of official documents. What is note-
Second, worthy in these writers is the purely political temper
ill!" w ^ tn wn i cn they re o ar d the conflict of Church and State
in their time. But the English court had now become
the centre of a distinctly secular literature. The trea-
tise of Eanulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of Henry the
Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of
the royal treasurer, Eichard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer
is the earliest on English government.
Gerald of Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work
Wales. O f a priest who claimed to be a bishop, are the writings
of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is the father of our popular
literature as he is the originator of the political and eccle-
siastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of
Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his
veins, and something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike
through his writings and his life. A busy scholar at Paris,
a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court
chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald became
the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his
time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the
vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse.
Eeared as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry
contemptuously aside. " It is better to be dumb than not
to be understood," is his characteristic apology for the
novelty of his style : " new times require new fashions,
and so I have thrown utterly aside the old and dry
method of some authors and aimed at adopting the
fashion of speech which is actually in vogue to-day."
His tract on the conquest of Ireland and his account of
Wales, which are in fact reports of two journeys under-
taken in those countries with John and Archbishop
Baldwin, illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observa-
tion, his audacity, and his good sense. They are just
the sort of lively, dashing letters that we find in the cor-
respondence of .a modem journal. There is the same
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 173
modern tone in his political pamphlets ; his profusion CHAP. III.
of jests, his fund of anecdote, the aptness of his quota- Henry" the
tions, his natural shrewdness and critical acumen, the Second<
clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a fear- \\S9'
lessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous
assailant even to such a ruler as Henry the Second.
The invectives in which Gerald poured out his resent-
ment against the Angevins are the cause of half the
scandal about Henry and his sons which has found its
way into history. His life was wasted in an ineffectual
attempt to secure the see of St. David's, but his pungent
pen played its part in rousing the* nation to its later
struggle with the Crown.
A tone of distinct hostility to the Church developed Romance,
itself almost from the first among the singers of romance.
Romance had long before taken root in the court of Henry
the First, where under the patronage of Queen Maud the
dreams of Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Brit-
anny, and which had travelled to Wales in the train of the
exile Rhys ap Tewdor, took shape in the History of the
Britons by Geoffry of Monmouth. Myth, legend, tradition,
the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes of future
triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades
and of the world-wide dominion of Charles* the Great,
were mingled together by this daring fabulist in a work
whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred of
Beverly transferred Geoffry's inventions into the region of
sober history, while two Norman trouvcurs, Gaimar and
Wace, translated them into French verse. So complete
was the credence they obtained that Arthur's tomb
at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second while
the child of his son Geoffry and of Constance of
Britanny received the name of the Celtic hero. Out
of Geoffry's creation grew little by little the poem of the
Table Round. Britanny, which had mingled with the story
of Arthur the older and more mysterious legend of the
Enchanter Merlin, lent that of Lancelot to the wandering
174 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. minstrels of the day, who moulded it as they wandered
Henry" the f lom hall to hall into the familiar tale of knighthood
Second. wre sted from its loyalty by the love of woman. The'
ills" stories of Tristram and Gawayne, at first as independent
as that of Lancelot, were drawn with it into the whirlpool
of Arthurian romance ; and when the Church, jealous of
the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a
counteracting influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the
San Graal which held the blood of the Cross invisible to
all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the genius of a
Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends together,
sent Arthur and his knights wandering over sea and land
in quest -of the San Graal, and crowned the work by
the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of ideal knighthood,
without fear and without reproach.
Walter Walter stands before us as the representative of a
de Map. su ^ en outburst of literary, social, and religious criticism
which followed this growth of romance and the appearance
of a freer historical tone in the court of the two Henries.
Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite
with the King, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambas-
sador, his genius was as various as it was prolific. He is
as much at his ease in sweeping together the chit-chat
of the time in his " Courtly Trifles " as in creating the
character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest
strength when he turned from the fields of romance to
that of Church reform and embodied the ecclesiastical
abuses of his day in the figure of his " Bishop Goliath."
The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their struggle
with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse
and confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after
picture strips the veil from the corruption of the medi-
aeval Church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret
immorality. The whole body of the clergy from Pope to
hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain ;
what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon,
what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
175
Henry the
Second.
1154-
1189.
Invasion
of
Ireland.
the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hungrily CHAP. III.
around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd of
figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist
vicars, abbots " purple as their wines," monks feeding and
chattering together like parrots in the refectory, rises the
Philistine Bishop, light of purpose, void of conscience,
lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who
sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead
this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.
It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such
invectives as sober history, or to judge the Church of the
twelfth century by the taunts of Walter de Map. What
writings such as his bring home to us is the upgrowth of
a new literary class, not only standing apart from the
Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will,
and breaking down the unquestioning reverence with
which men had till now regarded it by their sarcasm and
abuse. The tone of intellectual contempt which begins
with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates
in Chaucer and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard.
But even in these early days we can hardly doubt that it
gave Henry strength in his contest with the Church. So
little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop
Thomas that the years which follow it form th& grandest
portion of his reign. While Eome was threatening excom-
munication he added a new realm to his dominions. Ireland
had long since fallen from the civilization arid learning
which its missionaries brought in the seventh century
to the shores of Northumbria. Every element of improve-
ment or progress which had been introduced into the
island disappeared in the long and desperate struggle with
the Danes. The coast-towns which the invaders founded,
such as Dublin or Waterford, remained Danish in blood
and manners and at feud with the Celtic tribes around
them, though sometimes forced by the fortunes of war to
pay tribute and to accept the over-lordship of the Irish
Kings.
It was through these towns however that the
176 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. intercourse with England which had ceased since the
Henry" the eighth century was to some extent renewed in the
Second, eleventh. Cut off' from the Church of the island by
ii897 national antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the
See of Canterbury for the ordination of their bishops, and
acknowledged a right of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc '
and Anselm. The relations thus formed were drawn closer
by a slave-trade between the two countries which the
Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a time in
suppressing at Bristol but which appears to have quickly
revived. At the time of Henry the Second's accession
Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped
and sold into slavery in spite of royal prohibitions and
the spiritual menaces of the English Church. The slave-
trade afforded a legitimate pretext for war, had a pretext
been needed by the ambition of Henry the Second ; and
within a few months of that King's coronation John of
Salisbury was despatched to obtain the Papal sanction for
an invasion of the island. The enterprize, as it was
laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the colour of a
crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the general body
of Christendom, the absence of learning and civilization,
the scandalous vices of its people, were alleged as the
grounds of Henry's action. It was the general belief of
the time that all islands fell under the jurisdiction of the
Papal See, and it was as a possession of the Pioman
Church that Henry sought Hadrian's permission to enter
Ireland. His aim was " to enlarge the bounds of the
Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the
manners of its people and to plant virtue among them,
and to increase the Christian religion." He engaged to
" subject the people to laws, to extirpate vicious customs,
to respect the rights of the native Churches, and to enforce
the payment of Peter's pence " as a recognition of the
overlordship of the Koinan See. Hadrian by his bull
approved the enterprize as one prompted by " the ardour
of faith and love of religion," and declared his will that
55
just before
THE ENGLISH. INVASION
Harper c. Brothers ,.New York.
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 177
'
the people of Ireland should receive Henry with all CHAP. Ill
honour, and revere him as their lord. Henry^tie
The Papal bull was produced in a great council of the Second -
English baronage, but the opposition was strong enough to lias.
force on Henry a temporary abandonment of his designs,
and fourteen years passed before the scheme was brought
to life again by the flight of Dermod, King of Leinster,
to Henry's court. Uermod had been driven from his
dominions in one of the endless civil wars which devastated
the island ; he now did homage for his kingdom to Henry,
and returned to Ireland with promises of aid from the
English knighthood. He was followed in 1169 by Eobert
FitzStephen, a son of the Constable of Cardigan, with a
little band of a hundred and forty knights, sixty men-at-
arms, and three or four hundred Welsh archers. Small as
was the number of the adventurers, their horses and arms
proved irresistible by the Irish kernes ; a sally of the men
of Wexford was avenged by the storm of their town ; the
Ossory clans were defeated with a terrible slaughter, and
Dermod, seizing a head from the heap of trophies which
his men piled at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its
nose and lips with his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces
heralded the coming of Richard of Clare, Earl of Pembroke
and Striguil, a ruined baron who bore the nickname of
Strongbovv, and who in defiance of Henry's prohibition
landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen hundred men
as Dermod's mercenary. The city was at once stormed,
and the united forces of the Earl and King marched to
the siege of Dublin. In spite of a relief attempted by
the King of Connaught, who was recognized as overking
of the island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken
by surprize ; and the marriage of Richard with Eva,
Dermod's daughter, left the Earl on the death of his
father-in-law which followed quickly on these successes
master of his kingdom of Leinster. The new lord had
soon however to hurry back to England and appease the
jealousy of Henry by the surrender of Dublin to the
178
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
Henry the
Second.
1154
1189.
Revolt of
the
younger
Henry.
Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English
lordship, and by accompanying the King in 1171 on a
voyage to the new dominion which the adventurers
had won.
Had fate suffered Henry to carry out his purpose, the
conquest of Ireland would now have been accomplished.
The King of Connaught indeed and the chiefs of Ulster
refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes owneM
his suzerainty ; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized
him as their lord ; and he was preparing to penetrate to
the north and west, and to secure his conquest by a
systematic erection of castles throughout the country,
when the need of making terms with Rome, whose inter-
dict threatened to avenge the murder of Archbishop
Thomas, recalled him in the spring of 1172 to Normandy.
Henry averted the threatened sentence by a show of
submission. The judicial provisions in the Constitu-
tions of Clarendon were in form annulled, and liberty
of election was restored in the case of bishopricks and
abbacies. In reality however the victory rested with the
King. Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments
remained practically in his hands and the King's Court
asserted its power over the spiritual jurisdiction of the
bishops. But the strife with Thomas had roused into active
life every element of danger which surrounded Henry, the
envious dread of his neighbours, the disaffection of his
own house, the disgust of the barons at the repeated blows
which he levelled at their military and judicial power.
The King's withdrawal of' the office of sheriff from the
great nobles of the shire to entrust it to the lawyers and
courtiers who already furnished the staff of the royal
judges quickened the resentment of the baronage into
revolt. His wife Eleanor, now parted from Henry by
a bitter hate, spurred her eldest son, whose coronation had
given him the title of king, to demand possession of the
English realm. On his father's refusal the boy sought
refuge with Lewis of France, and his flight was the signal
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 179
for a vast rising. France, Flanders, and Scotland joined CHAP. III.
in league against Henry; his younger sons, Eichard and Henry" the
Geoff'ry, took up arms in Aquitaine, while the Earl of Second.
Leicester sailed from Flanders with an army of mercenaries iiisT
to stir up England to revolt. The Earl's descent ended in
a crushing defeat near St. Edmundsbury at the hands of the
King's justiciars; but no sooner had the French king
entered Xormandy and invested Eouen than the revolt of
the baronage burst into flame. The Scots crossed the border,
Eoger Mowbray rcse in Yorkshire, Ferrars, Earl of Derby, in
the midland shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern counties,
while a Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection
by a descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop
Thomas still hung round Henry's neck, and his first act
in hurrying to England to meet these perils in 1174 was
to prostrate himself before the shrine of the new martyr
and to submit to a public scourging in expiation of his
sin. But the penance was hardly wrought when all danger
was dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of
Scotland, William the Lion, surprized by the English
under cover of a mist, fell into the hands of the justiciary,
Eanulf de Glanvill, and at the retreat of the Scots the
English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With
the army of mercenaries which he had brought over sea
Henry was able to return to Normandy, to raise the siege
of Eouen, and to reduce his sons to submission.
Through the next ten years Henry's power was at its a fer
height. The French King was cowed. The Scotch King reforms.
bought his release in 1175 by owning Henry's suzerainty.
The Scotch barons did homage, and English garrisons
manned the strongest of the Scotch castles. In England
itself church and baronage were alike at the King's mercy.
Eleanor was imprisoned : and the younger Henry, though
always troublesome, remained powerless to do harm. The
King availed himself of this rest from outer foes to push
forward his judicial and administrative organization. At
the outset of his reign he had restored the Kind's court and
180 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. the occasional circuits of its justices; but the revolt was
Henry" the hardly over when in 1176 the Assize of Northampton ren-
Second. d ere d this institution permanent and regular by dividing the
11897 kingdom into six districts, to each of which three itinerant
judges were assigned. The circuits" thus marked out
correspond roughly with those that still exist. The primary
object of these circuits was financial ; but the rendering of
the King's justice went on side by side with the exaction
of the King's dues, and this carrying of justice to every
corner of the realm was made still more effective by the
abolition of all feudal exemptions from the royal juris-
diction. The chief danger of the new system lay in
the opportunities it afforded to judicial corruption ; and
so great were its abuses, that in 1178 Henry was forced
to restrict for a while the number of justices to five, and
to reserve appeals from their court to himself in council.
The Court of Appeal which was thus created, that of the
King in Council, gave birth as time went on to tribunal
after tribunal. It is from it that the judicial powers now
exercized by the Privy Council are derived, as well as the
equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor. In the next cen-
tury it became the Great Council of the realm, and it is
from this Great Council, in its two distinct capacities,
that the Privy Council drew its legislative, and the House
of Lords its judicial character. The Court of Star
Chamber and the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council are later offshoots of Henry's Court of Appeal.
From the judicial organization of the realm, he turned
to its military organization, and in 1181 an Assize of
Arms restored the national fyrd or militia to the place
which it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution of
scutage for military service had freed the crown from
its dependence on the baronage and its feudal retainers ;
the Assize of Arms replaced this feudal organization by
the older obligation of every freeman to serve in defence
of the realm. Every knight was now bound to appear in
coat of mail and with shield and lance, every freeholder
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
181
Second.
1154-
1189.
Henry's
Death, i
with lance and hauberk, every burgess and poorer freeman CHAP. III.
with lance and helmet, at the King's call. The levy of Henry* the
an armed nation was thus placed wholly at the disposal
of the Crown for purposes of defence.
A fresh revolt of the younger Henry with his brother
Geoffry in 1183 hardly broke the current of Henry's
success. The revolt ended with the young King's death,
and in 1186 this was followed by the death of Geoffry.
Kichard, now his father's heir, remained busy in Aqui-
taine ; and Henry was himself occupied with plans for the
recovery of Jerusalem, which had been taken by Saladin
in 1187. The " Saladin tithe," a tax levied on all goods
and chattels, and memorable as the first English instance
of taxation on personal property, was granted to the King
at the opening of 1188 to support his intended Crusade.
But the Crusade was hindered by strife which broke out
between Richard and the new French King, Philip ; and
while Henry strove in vain to bring about peace, a sus-
picion that he purposed to make his youngest son, John,
his heir drove Eichard to Philip's side. His father,
broken in health and spirits, negotiated fruitlessly through
the winter, but with the spring of 1189 Eichard and the
French King suddenly appeared before Le Mans. Henry
was driven in headlong flight from the town. Tradition
tells how from a height where he halted to look back on
the burning city, so dear to him as his birthplace, the
King hurled his curse against God : " Since Thou hast
taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born
and bred, and where my father lies buried, I will have my
revenge on Thee too I will rob Thee of that thing Thou
lovest most in me." If the words were uttered, they were
the frenzied words of a dying man. Death drew Henry to
the home of his race, but Tours fell as he lay at Saumur,
and the hunted King was driven to beg mercy from his
foes. They gave him the list of the conspirators against
him : at its head was the name of one, his love for whom
had brought with it the ruin that was crushing him, his
YOL. I. 13
182 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK H.
CHAP. III. youngest son, John. " Now," he said, as he turned his
Henry" the ^ ace ^ ^' ne wa ^> " ^ things go as they will I care no
second, more for myself or for the world." The end was come at
lisa' l ast - Henry was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters
of Vienne, and muttering, " Shame, shame on a conquered
King," passed sullenly away.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ANGEVIN KINGS.
11891204.
THE fall of Henry the Second only showed the strength of John and
the system he had built up on this side the sea. In the Long-
hands of the Justiciar, Eanulf de Glanvill, England remained cham P-
peaceful through the last stormy months of his reign,
and his successor Richard found it undisturbed when he
came for his crowning in the autumn of 1189. Though born
at Oxford, Richard had been bred in Aquitaine ; he was an
utter stranger to his realm, and his visit was simply for the
purpose of gathering money for a Crusade. Sheriffdoms,
bishopricks, were sold ; even the supremacy over Scotland
was bought back again by William the Lion ; and it was with
the wealth which these measures won that Ricnard made
his way in 1190 to Marseilles and sailed thence to Messina.
Here he found his army and a host under King Philip of
France ; and the winter was spent in quarrels between the
two Kings and a strife between Richard and Tancred of
Sicily. In the spring of 1191 his mother Eleanor arrived
with ill news from England. Richard had left the realm
under the regency of two bishops, Hugh Puiset of Durham
and William Longchamp of Ely ; but before quitting France
he had entrusted it wholly to the latter, who stood at the
head of Church and State as at once Justiciar and Papal
Legate. Longchamp was loyal to the King, but his exac-
tions and scorn of Englishmen roused a fierce hatred among
the baronage, and this hatred found a head in John. While
184 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
THAP. IV. richly gifting his brother with earldoms and lands, Richard
^ had taken oath from him that he would quit England for
^5ies in three years. But tidings that the Justiciar was striving to
1189- secure the succession of Arthur, the child of his elder
1204. b ro ther Geoffry and of Constance of Britanny, to the
English crown at once recalled John to the realm, and
peace between him and Longchamp was only preserved by
the influence of the queen-mother Eleanor. Richard met
these news by sending William of Coutances, the Arch-
bishop of Rouen, with full but secret powers to England.
On his landing in the summer of 1191 William found the
country already in arms. No battle had been fought, but
John had seized many of the royal castles, and the indig-
nation stirred by Longchamp's arrest of Archbishop
Geoffry of York, a bastard son of Henry the Second,
called the whole baronage to the field. % The nobles swore
fealty to John as Richard's successor, and William of
Coutances saw himself forced to show his commission as
Justiciar, and to assent to Longchamp's exile from the
realm.
Richard. The tidings of this revolution reached Richard in the
Holy Land. He had landed at Acre in the summer and
joined with the French King in its siege. But on the sur-
render of the town Philip at once sailed home, while Richard,
marching from Acre to Joppa, pushed inland to Jerusalem.
The city however was saved by false news of its strength,
and through the following winter and the spring of 1192
the King limited his activity to securing the fortresses of
southern Palestine. In June he again advanced on Jeru-
salem, but the revolt of his army forced him a second
time to fall back, and news of Philip's intrigues with
John drove him to abandon further efforts. There was
need to hasten home. Sailing for speed's sake in a mer-
chant vessel, he was driven by a storm on the Adriatic
coast, and while journeying in disguise overland arrested in
December at Vienna by his personal enemy, Duke Leopold of
Austria. Through the whole year John, in disgust at his
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
185
displacement by William of Coutances, had been plotting
fruitlessly with Philip. But the news of this capture at
once roused both to activity. John secured his castles and
seized Windsor, giving out that the King would never
return ; while Philip strove to induce the Emperor, Henry
the Sixth, to whom the Duke of Austria had given Pdchard
up, to retain his captive. But a new influence now ap-
peared on the scene. The see of Canterbury was vacant, and
Richard from his prison bestowed it on Hubert Walter,
the Bishop of Salisbury, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanvill
and who had acted as secretary to Bishop Longchamp.
Hubert's ability was seen in the skill with which he
held John at bay and raised the enormous ransom
which Henry demanded, the whole people, clergy as well
as lay, paying a fourth of their moveable goods. To
gain his release however Richard was forced besides
this payment of ransom to do homage to the Emperor,
not only for the kingdom of Aries with which Henry
invested him but for England itself, whose crown he
resigned into the Emperor's hands and received back as a
fief. But John's open revolt made even these terms
welcome, and Richard huiried to England in the spring of
1194. He found the rising already quelled by the decision
with which the Primate led an army against Joh'n's castles,
and his landing was followed by his brother's complete
submission.
The firmness of Hubert Walter had secured order in Eng-
land, but oversea Richard found himself face to face with
dangers which he was too clear-sighted to undervalue. Des-
titute of his father's administrative genius, less ingenious
in his political conceptions than John, Richard was far
from being a mere soldier. A love of adventure, a pride in
sheer physical strength, here and there a romantic gene-
rosity, jostled roughly with the craft, the unscrapulousness,
the violence of his race ; but he was at heart a statesman,
cool and patient in the execution of his plans as he was
bold in their conception. " The devil is loose ; take care
CHAP. IV.
The
Angevin
Kings.
1189-
1204.
Richard
and
Philip.
186
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1189-
1204-.
CHAP. IV. of yourself," Philip had written to John at the news of
^ Richard's release. In the Trench King's case a restless
"Kings" 1 ambition was spurred to action by insults which he had
borne during the Crusade. He had availed himself of
Richard's imprisonment to invade ISTormandy, while the
lords of Aquitaine rose in open revolt under the trouba-
dour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of the rule of strangers,
weariness of the turbulence of the mercenary soldiers of
the Angevins or of the greed and oppression of their
financial administration, combined with an impatience of
their firm government and vigorous justice to alienate
the nobles of their provinces on the Continent. Loyalty
among the people there was none ; even Anjou, the home
of their race, drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou.
But in warlike ability Richard was more than Philip's
peer. He held him in check on the Norman frontier and
surprized his treasure at Freteval while he reduced to sub-
mission the rebels of Aquitaine. Hubert Walter gathered
vast sums to support the army of mercenaries which Richard
led against his foes. The country groaned under its
burdens, but it owned the justice and firmness of the
Primate's rule, and the measures which he took to procure
money with as little oppression as might be proved steps
in the education of the nation in its own self-government.
The taxes were assessed by a jury of sworn knights at each
circuit of the justices ; the grand jury of the county was
based on the election of knights in the hundred courts ;
and the keeping of pleas of the crown was taken from
the sheriff and given to a newly elected officer, the coroner.
In these elections were found at a later time precedents for
parliamentary representation ; in Hubert's mind they were
doubtless intended to do little more than reconcile the
people to the crushing taxation. His work poured a million
into the treasury, and enabled Richard during a short truce
to detach Flanders by his bribes from the French alliance,
and to unite the Counts of Qhartres, Champagne, and
Boulogne with the Bretons in a revolt against Philip.
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214.
187
1189-
1204,
Chateau
Gaillan 1 .
He won a yet more valuable aid in the election of his CHAP. IV.
nephew Otto of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, to the xiie
German throne, and his envoy William. Longchamp knitted "Kings! 11
an alliance which would bring the German lances to bear
on the King of Paris.
But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success
of these wider plans, and Eichard saw that its defence could
no longer rest on the loyalty of the Norman people. His
father might trace his descent through Matilda from the line
of Eolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a stranger to the
Norman. It was impossible for a Norman to recognize
his Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince
whom he saw moving along the border at the head of
Brabanc.on mercenaries, in whose camp the old names of
the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Gascon
ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site
that Eichard selected for a new fortress with which he
guarded the border showed his realization of the fact that
Normandy could now only be held by force of arms. As
a monument of warlike skill his "Saucy Castle," Chateau
Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the middle ages.
Eichard fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at
Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and .where the
valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs
along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the
distant hills ; within the river curve lies a dull reach
of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with
green islets and dappled with the grey and blue of the
sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Eouen. The
castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Eichard
designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the
river was blocked by a stockade and a bridge of boats,
by a fort on the islet in mid stream, and by a tower
which the King built in the valley of the Gambon,
then an impassable marsh. In the angle between this
valley and the Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which
only a narrow neck of land connects with the general
18 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP IV. plateau, rose at the height of three hundred feet above the
^T" river the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and
Angevin j ie wa ll s which connected it with the town and stockade
ii89- nave f r ^ e mos ^ P ar ^ o one > Du t time and the hand of man
1204. have done little to destroy the fortifications themselves
the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, with casemates
hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel,
the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and
huddled gables of Les Andelys. Even now in its ruin
we can understand the triumphant outburst of its royal
builder as he saw it rising against the sky : " How pretty
a child is mine, this child of but one year old ! "
Richard's The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau
death. Qaillard at a later time proved Eichard's foresight ; but
foresight and sagacity were mingled in him with a brutal
violence and a callous indifference to honour. "I would take
it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he
saw the fortress rise. " I would hold it, were its walls of
butter," was the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church
land and the Archbishop of Rouen laid Normandy under
interdict at its seizure, but the King met the interdict with
mockery, and intrigued with Rome till the censure was
withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a " rain of blood,"
whose fall scared his courtiers. " Had an angel from
heaven bid him abandon his work," says a cool observer,
"he would have answered with a curse." The twelve-
month's hard work, in fact, by securing the Norman
frontier set Richard free to deal his long-planned blow at
Philip. Money only was wanting; for England had at
last struck against the continued exactions. In 1198
Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, brought nobles and bishops to
refuse a new demand for the maintenance of foreign
soldiers, and Hubert Walter resigned in despair. A new
justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter, Earl of Essex, extorted some
money by a harsh assize of the forests ; but the exchequer
was soon drained, and Richard listened with more than
the greed of his race to rumours that a treasure had been
II.] ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 10711214. 189
found in the fields of the Limousin. Twelve knights of CHAP. IV
gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was said,
o ADC
of the Lord of Chaluz. Treasure-trove at anv rate there 4s gevin
Jungs.
was, and in the spring of 1199 Eichard prowled around 1 ^ 9 _
the walls. But the castle held stubbornly out till the King's iao4 -
greed passed into savage menace. He would hang all, he
swore man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the
midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck him
down. He died as he had lived, owning the wild passion
which for seven years past had kept him from confession
lest he should be forced to pardon Philip, forgiving with
kingly generosity the archer who had shot him.
The Angevin dominion broke to pieces at his death. Loss of
John was acknowledged as King in England and Normandy, ^ or ~
Aquitaine was secured for him by its Duchess, his mother
Eleanor ; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to
Arthur, the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late
Duke of Britanny. The ambition of Philip, who protected
his cause, turned the day against Arthur; the Angevins
rose against the French garrisons with which the French
King practically annexed the country, and in May 1200
a treaty between the two kings left John master of the
whole dominion of his house. But fresh troubles broke
out in Poitou ; Philip, on John's refusal to answer the
charges of the Poitevin barons at his Court, declared in
1202 his fiefs forfeited; and Arthur, now a boy of fifteen,
strove to seize Eleanor in the castle of Mirabeau.
Surprized at its siege by a rapid inarch of the King, the
boy was taken prisoner to Eouen, and murdered there in
the spring of 1203, as men believed, by his uncle's hand.
This brutal outrage at once roused the French provinces
in revolt, while Philip sentenced John to forfeiture as a
murderer and marched straight on Normandy. The ease
with which the conquest of the Duchy was effected can
only be explained by the utter absence of any popular
resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half
a century before the sight of a Frenchman in the land
190 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK n.
CHAP. IV. would have roused every peasant to arms from Avranches
^ to Dieppe. But town after town surrendered at the
^ngs! n mere summons of Philip, and the conquest was hardly
lisa- over before Normandy settled down into the most loyal
1204 ' of the provinces of France. Much of this was due to
the wise liberality with which Philip met the claims of
the towns to independence and self-government, as well
as to the overpowering force and military ability with
which the conquest was effected. But the utter absence
of opposition sprang from a deeper cause. To the Norman
his transfer from John to Philip was a mere passing
from one foreign master to another, and foreigner for
foreigner Philip was the less alien of the two. Between
France and Normandy there had been as many years of
friendship as of strife ; between Norman and Angevin
lay a century of bitterest hate. Moreover, the subjection
to France was the realization in fact of a dependence
which had always existed in theory ; Philip entered Rouen
as the over-lord of its Dukes; while the submission to
the house of Anjou had been the most humiliating of all
submissions, the submission to an equal. In 1204 Philip
turned on the south with as startling a success. Maine,
Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into
his hands, and the death of Eleanor was followed by the
submission of the bulk of Aquitaine. Little was left
save the country south of the Garonne ; and from the
lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne
to the Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to
the realm of England.
BOOK III.
THE CHARTER.
12041291.
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK III.
12041291.
A chronicle drawn up at the monastery of Barnwell near Cain-
bridge, and which has been embodied in the " Memoriale " of Walter
of Coventry, gives us a contemporary account of the period from 1201
to 1225. We possess another contemporary annalist for the same
period in Roger of Wendover, the first of the published chroniclers
of St. Albans, whose work extends to 1235. Though full of detail
Roger is inaccurate, and he has strong royal and ecclesiastical sym-
pathies ; but his chronicle was subsequently revised in a more patriotic
sense by another monk of the same abbey, Matthew Paris, and continued
in the " Greater Chronicle " of the latter.
Matthew has left a parallel but shorter account of the time in his
"Historia Anglorum " (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of
the great chroniclers of his house ; for the chronicles of Rishanger,
his successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked
on at that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and
lifeless jottings of events which become more and more local as time
goes on. The annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton,
which have been published in the " Annales Monastici " of the Rolls
series, add important details for the reigns of John and Henry III.
Those of Melrose, Osney, and Lanercost help us in the close of the
latter reign, where help is especially welcome. For the Barons' war we
have besides these the royalist chronicle of Wykes, Rishanger's fragment
published by the Camden Society, and a chronicle of Bartholomew de
Cotton, which is contemporary from 1264 to 1298. Where the chronicles
fail however the public documents of the realm become of high im-
portance. The " Royal Letters" (12161272) which have been printed
from the Patent Rolls by Professor Shirley (Rolls Series) throw great
light on Henry's politics.
Our municipal history during this period is fully represented by that
of London. For the general history of the capital the Rolls series has
given us its " Liber Albus " and " Liber Custumarum," while a vivid
account of its communal revolution is to be found in the " Liber de
Antiquis Legibus" published by the Camden Society. A store of
documents will be found in the Charter Rolls published by the Record
Commission, in Brady's work on " English Boroughs," and ip the
194 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
" Ordinances of English Gilds," published with a remarkable preface
from the pen of Dr. Brentano by the Early English Text Society.
For our religious and intellectual history materials now become
abundant. Grosseteste's Letters throw light on the state of the
Church and its relations with Rome ; those of Adam Marsh give us
interesting details of Earl Simon's relation to the religious move-
ment of his day ; and Eccleston's tract on the arrival of the Friars
is embodied in the " Monumenta Franciscana." For the Univer-
sities we have the collection of materials edited by Mr . Anstey under
the name of " Munimenta Academica."
With the close of Henry's reign our directly historic materials
become scantier and scantier. The monastic annals we have before
mentioned are supplemented by the jejune entries of Trivet and
Murimuth, by the " Annales AngliaB et Scotia3," by Rishanger's
Chronicle, his " Gesta Edwardi Primi," and three fragments of his
annals (all published in the Rolls Series). The portion of the so-called
" Walsingham's History " which relates to this period is now attributed
by Mr. Riley to Rishanger's hand. For the wars in the north and in
the west we have no records from the side of the conquered. The
social and physical state of Wales indeed is illustrated by the " Itin-
erarium " which Gerald du Barri drew up in the twelfth century, but
Scotland has no contemporary chronicles for this period ; the jingling
rimes of Blind Harry are two hundred years later than his hero,
Wallace. We possess however a copious collection of State papers in
the " Rotuli Scotia?," the " Documents and Records illustrative of the
History of Scotland " which were edited by Sir F. Palgrave, as well
as in Rymer's Foedera. For the history of our Parliament the most
noteworthy materials have been collected by Professor Stubbs in
his Select Charters, and he has added to them a short treatise
called " Modus Tenendi Parliamenta," which may be taken as a fair
account of its actual state and powers in the fourteenth century.
CHAPTER I.
JOHN.
121-11216.
THE loss of Normandy did more than drive John from the
foreign dominions of his race ; it set him face to face with
England itself. England was no longer a distant treasure-
house from which gold could be drawn for wars along the
Epte or the Loire, no longer a possession to be kept in
order by wise ministers and by flying visits from its foreign
King. Henceforth it was his home. It was to be ruled by
his personal and continuous rule. People and sovereign
were to know each other, to be brought into contact with
each other as they had never been brought since the con-
quest of the Norman. The change in the attitude of the
king was the more momentous that it took place at a
time when the attitude of the country itself was rapidly
changing. The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect
to the land. A foreign king ruled it through foreign
ministers. Foreign nobles were quartered in every manor.
A military organization of the country changed while it
simplified the holding of every estate. Huge castles of
white stone bridled town and country ; huge stone minsters
told how the Norman had bridled even the Church. But
the change was in great measure an external one. The
real life of the nation was little affected by the shock of
the Conquest. English institutions, the local, judicial,
and administrative forms of the country were the same as
of old. Like the English tongue they remained practically
England
and the
Conquest.
196 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. unaltered. For a century after the Conquest only a
j^hn f ew new words crept in from the language of the con-
1214- querors, and so entirely did the spoken tongue of the
1 ^i 6 ' nation at large remain unchanged that William himself
tried to learn it that he might administer justice to his
subjects. Even English literature, banished as it was from
the court of the stranger and exposed to the fashionable
rivalry of Latin scholars, survived not only in religious
works, in poetic paraphrases of gospels and psalms, but in
the great monument of our prose, the English Chronicle.
It was not till the miserable reign of Stephen that the
Chronicle died out in the Abbey of Peterborough. But
the " Sayings of Alfred " show a native literature going
on through the reign of Henry the Second, and the ap-
pearance of a great work of English verse coincides in
point of time with the return of John to his island realm.
"There was a priest in the land whose name was Laya-
mon; he was the son of Leovenath; may the Lord be
gracious to him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on
the bank of Severn (good it seemed to him !) near Rad-
stone, where he read books. It came to mind to him and
in his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble deeds
of England, what the men were named and whence they
came who first had English land." Journeying far and
wide over the country, the priest of Earnley found Ba?da
and Wace, the books too of St. Albin and St. Austin,
" Layamon laid down these books and turned the leaves ;
he beheld them lovingly ; may the Lord be gracious to him !
Pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin, and the
true words set together, and compressed the three books
into one." Layamon's church is now that of Areley, near
Bewdley in Worcestershire ; his poem was in fact an
expansion of Wace's " Brut " with insertions from Bseda.
Historically it is worthless ; but as a monument of
our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty
thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to
be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 197
same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still CHAP. I.
only slightly affected by riming terminations ; the similes j^
are the few natural similes of Coedmon ; the battle-scenes IZIA-
are painted with the same rough, simple joy. 1216.
Instead of crushing England indeed the Conquest did English
more than any event that had gone before to build up an a ^ oi
English people. All local distinctions, the distinction of
Saxon from Mercian, of both from Northumbrian, died
away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The
Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new
national feeling, of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell
at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by
excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats
of Englishmen by the Danes. Alfred, the great name of
the English past, gathers round him a legendary worship,
and the " Sayings of ^Elfred " embody the ideal of an
English king. We see the new vigour drawn from this
deeper consciousness of national unity in a national action
which began as soon as the Conquest had given place to
strife among the conquerors. A common hostility to the
conquering baronage gave the nation leaders in its foreign
sovereigns, and the sword which had been sheathed at
Senlac was drawn for triumphs which avenged it. It was
under William the Red that English soldiers shouted scorn
at the Norman barons who surrendered at Eochester. It
was under Henry the First that an English army faced
Duke Robert and his foreign knighthood when they landed
for a fresh invasion, " not fearing the Normans." It was
under the same great King that Englishmen conquered
Normandy in turn on the field of Tenchebray. This over-
throw of the conquering baronage, this union of the con-
quered with the King, brought about the fusion of the
conquerors in the general body of the English people. As
early as the days of Henry the Second the descendants
of Norman and Englishman had become indistinguishable.
Both found a bond in a common English feeling and English
patriotism, in a common hatred of the Angevin and Poitevin
VOL. I. 14
198
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
John.
1214-
1216.
The Uni-
versities.
" foreigners " who streamed into England in the wake of
Henry and his sons. Both had profited by the stern
discipline of the Norman rule. The wretched reign of
Stephen alone broke the long peace, a peace without
parallel elsewhere, which in England stretched from the
settlement of the Conquest to the return of John. Of her
kings' forays along Norman or Aquitanian borders England
heard little ; she cared less. Even Kichard's crusade woke
little interest in his island realm. What England saw in
her Kings was " the good peace they made in the land."
And with peace came a stern but equitable rule, judicial
and administrative reforms that carried order and justice
to every corner of the land, a wealth that grew steadily
in spite of heavy taxation, an immense outburst of material
and intellectual activity.
It was with a new English peop]e therefore that John
found himself face to face. The nation which he fronted
was a nation quickened with a new life and throbbing with
a new energy. Not least among the signs of this energy
was the upgrowth of our Universities. The establishment
of the great schools which bore this name was everywhere
throughout Europe a special mark of the impulse which
Christendom gained from the crusades. A new fervour
of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the
more cultured East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath
brought back the first rudiments of physical and mathe-
matical science from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad.
In the twelfth century a classical revival restored Caesar
and Vergil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp
on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of
writers like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.
The scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools of Paris.
The Roman law was revived by the imperialist doctors of
Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe
broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering
teachers such as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land
to spread the new power of knowledge. The same spirit
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
of restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience with the older
traditions of mankind either local or intellectual that
drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord crowded
the roads with thousands of young scholars hurrying to
the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together.
A new power sprang up in the midst of a world which had
till now recognized no power but that of sheer brute
force. Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race,
the wandering scholars who lectured in every cloister
were hailed as "masters" by the crowds at their feet.
Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats of councils,
of the thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single
Lombard was of note enough in England to draw down
the prohibition of a King.
Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Archbishop
Theobald where Thomas of London and John of Salisbury
were already busy with the study of the Civil Law. But
when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was at once
silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at war with
the Church and jealous of the power which the wreck of
the royal authority was throwing into Theobald's hands.
At this time Oxford stood in the first rank among
English towns. Its town church of St. Martin rose from
the midst of a huddled group of houses, girded in with
massive walls, that lay along the dry upper ground of a
low peninsula between the streams of Cherwell and the
Thames. The ground fell gently 011 either side, east-
ward and westward, to these rivers ; while on the south a
sharper descent led down across swampy meadows to the
ford from which the town drew its name and to the
bridge that succeeded it. Around lay a wild forest country,
moors such as Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course
of Thames, great woods of which Shotover and Bagley are
the relics closing the horizon to the south and east. Though
the two huge towers of its Norman castle marked the
strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river
valley along which the commerce of Southern England
CHAP. 1.
John.
1214-
Oxford.
200 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. mainly flowed, its walls formed the least element in the
Joim town's military strength, for on every side but the north it
iai4- was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell of by
1216. an intricate network of streams into which the Thames
breaks among the meadows of Osney. From the midst of
these meadows rose a mitred abbey of Austin Canons which
with the older priory of St. Frideswide gave Oxford some
ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of
the D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English
kings to a palace without its walls, the presence again and
again of important Parliaments, marked its political weight
within the realm. The settlement of one of the wealthiest
among the English Jewries in the very heart of the town
indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No
place better illustrates the transformation of the land in
the hands of its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of
industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and
accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. To
the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English
castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately
abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of
the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. In the
southern quarter of the city the canons of St. Frideswide
reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathe-
dral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt
almost all its parish churches and founded within their
new castle walls the church of the Canons of St. George.
Oxford We know nothing of the causes which drew students
Scholars. an( j teachers within the walls of Oxford. It is possible
that here as elsewhere a new teacher quickened older
educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney
and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst
into a larger life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet
however the fortunes of the University were obscured by
the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in thousands
round the chairs of William of Champeaux or Abelard.
The English took their place as one of the " nations " of
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
201
the French University. John of Salisbury became famous
as one of the Parisian teachers. Thomas of London wan-
dered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through
the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford quietly
grew in numbers and repute, and forty years after the visit
of Vacarius its educational position was fully established.
When Gerald of Wales read his amusing Topography of
Ireland to its students the most learned and famous of
the English clergy were to be found within its walls.
At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford stood
without a rival in its own country while in European
celebrity it took rank with the greatest schools of the
Western world. But to realize this Oxford of the past we
must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford
of the present. In the outer look of the new Universit^y
there was nothing of the pomp that overawes the freshman
as he first paces the " High " or looks down from the
gallery of St. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of
venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial
elms, history plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of
a mediaeval town. Thousands of boys, huddled in bare
lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as poor as them-
selves in church porch and house porch, drinking, quarrel-
ling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the
place of the brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads.
Mayor and Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order
or peace on this seething mass of turbulent life. The
retainers who followed their young lords to the University
fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets. Scholars
from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter
struggle of North and South. At nightfall roysterer and
reveller roamed with torches through the narrow lanes,
defying bailiffs, and cutting down burghers at their doors.
Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry and wiped
off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew
house or two. Now a tavern squabble between scholar and
townsman widened into a general broil, and the academical
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
202
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
John.
Edmund
Rich.
bell of St. Mary's vied with the town bell of St. Martin's
in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical con-
troversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce
outbreak in this turbulent, surging mob. When England
growled at the exactions of the Papacy in the years that
were to follow the students besieged a legate in the abbot's
house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row pre-
ceded the opening of the Barons' War. " When Oxford
draws knife," ran an old rime, " England's soon at strife."
But the turbulence and stir was a stir and turbulence of
life. A keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of
devotion, gathered thousands round the poorest scholar
and welcomed the barefoot friar. Edmund Rich Arch-
bishop of Canterbury and saint in later days came about
the time we have reached to Oxfprd, a boy of twelve years
old, from a little lane at Abingdon that still bears his
name. He found his scbool in an inn that belonged to
the abbey of Eynsham where his father had taken refuge
jrom the world. His mother was a pious woman of the
day, too poor to give her boy much outfit besides the hair
shirt that he promised to wear every Wednesday ; but
Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He plunged
at once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for
knowledge, its mystical piety. " Secretly," perhaps at
eventide when the shadows were gathering in the church
of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and students had
left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the Virgin,
and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary lor
his bride. Years of study, broken by a fever that raged
among the crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for
completing his education at Paris ; and Edmund, hand in
hand with a brother Eobert of his, begged his way as poor
scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christen-
dom. He.re a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him
so pertinaciously that Edmund consented at last to an
assignation ; but when he appeared it was in company of
grave academical officials who, as the maiden declared in
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
203
the hour of penitence which followed, "straightway whipped
the offending Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin
bridal, Edmund on his return from Paris became the most
popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that Oxford owes
her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see
him in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin's
chapel hard by, his grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic
in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture time after a sleep-
less night of prayer, but gifted with a grace and cheerful-
ness of manner which told of his French training and a
chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what
they would. " Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;' the young
tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride perhaps min-
gling with his contempt of worldly things, as he threw
down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish
student would sometimes run off with it. But even know-
ledge brought its troubles ; the Old Testament, which with
u copy of the Decretals long formed his sole library, frowned
down upon a love of secular learning from which Edmund
found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of
dream, the form of his dead mother floated into the room
where the teacher stood among his mathematical diagrams.
" What are these ? " she seemed to say ; and seizing Ed-
mund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles
interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of
the Christian Trinity. " Be these," she cried, as the figure
faded away, " thy diagrams henceforth, my son."
The story admirably illustrates the real character of the
new training, and the latent opposition between the spirit
of the Universities and the spirit of the Church. The
feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world
were both alike threatened by this power that had so
strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism
rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from
kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of
blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute
force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place
CHAP. I.
John.
1214-
1216.
The
Univer-
sity and
Feudal-
ism.
204 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. and social position. The University on the other hand
John was a protest against this isolation of man from man. The
1214- smallest school was European and not local. Not merely
iai6 - every province of France, but every people of Christendom
had its place among the " nations " of Paris or Padua. A
common language, the Latin tongue, superseded within
academical bounds the warring tongues of Europe. A
common intellectual kinship and rivalry took the place of
the petty strifes which parted province from province or
realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both
aimed at and both failed in, the knitting of Christian
nations together into a vast commonwealth, the Universi-
ties for a time actually did. Dante felt himself as little a
stranger in the " Latin" quarter round Mont St. Genevieve
as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford
scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of
Prague. In England the work of provincial fusion was
less difficult or important than elsewhere, but even in
England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner
and Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of
Oxford witnessed at any rate to the fact that Northerner
and Southerner had at last been brought face to face in its
streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of national isola-
tion was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of
the -University. After the dissensions that threatened the
prosperity of Paris in the thirteenth .century Norman and
Gascon mingled with Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls.
Irish scholars were foremost in the fray with the legate.
At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found
hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And
within this strangely mingled mass society and govern-
ment rested on a purely democratic basis. Among Oxford
scholars the son of the noble stood on precisely the
same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, phy-
sical strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood,
the very grounds on which feudal society rested, went for
nothing in the lecture-room. The University was a state
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
205
absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were admitted
by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the
" master." To know more than one's fellows was a man's
sole claim to be a regent or " ruler " in the schools. And
within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal. When
the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles
of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an
equal vote in the final decision. Treasury and library were
at their complete disposal. It was their voice that named
every officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute.
Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an
officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.
If the democratic spirit of the Universities threatened
feudalism, their spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened
the Church. To all outer seeming they were purely eccle-
siastical bodies. The wide extension which mediaeval
usage gave to the word "orders" gathered the whole
educated world within the pale of the clergy. What-
ever might be their age or proficiency, scholar and
teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay respon-
sibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and ame-
nable only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of
his spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical character of the
University appeared in that of its head. The Chancellor, as
we have seen, was at first no officer of the University itself,
but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it had
sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer
of the Bishop of Lincoln within whose immense diocese
the University was then situated. But this identification
in outer form with the Church only rendered more con-
spicuous the difference of spirit between them. The
sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the
importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological
studies which had hitherto absorbed the whole intellectual
energies of mankind. The revival of classical literature,
the rediscovery as it were of an older and a greater world,
the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
CHAP. l.
John.
1214
1216.
The Urn
versifies
and the
Church.
206 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
(.'HAP. I. society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of
John doubt, of denial into the realms of unquestioning belief.
iai4- Abelard claimed for reason a supremacy over faith.
iai6. Florentine poets discussed with a smile the immortality of
the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these, Vergil
is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the
new culture took its most notable form, Frederick the
Second, the " World's Wonder " of his time, was regarded
by half Europe as no better than an infidel. A faint
revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by
the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into
perilous contact with the Moslem and the Jew. The
books of the Eabbis were no longer an accursed thing to
Eoger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere
Paynirn swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and
against what obstacles science won its way we know from
the witness of Eoger Bacon. " Slowly," he tells us, " has
any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use
among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his
Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and
others, were translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris
up to the year of grace 1237 because of their assertion
of the eternity of the world and of time and because of
the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third
book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many pas-
sages erroneously translated. Even his logic was slowly
received and lectured on. For St. Edmund, the Archbishop
of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read the Ele-
ments at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who
first read the book of Posterior Analytics and I have seen
his writing. So there were but few, considering the mul-
titude of the Latins, who were of any account in the philo-
sophy of Aristotle ; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any
up to this year of grace 1292."
Me If we pass from the English University to the English
wn ' Town we see a progress as important and hardly less inter-
esting. In their origin our boroughs were utterly unlike
HI.]
THE CHAETER. 12041291.
207
those of the rest of the western world. The cities of Italy
and Provence had preserved the municipal institutions of
their Boman past ; the German towns had been founded by
Henry the Fowler with the purpose of sheltering industry
from the feudal oppression around them ; the communes
of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt against
feudal outrage within their Avails. But in England the
tradition of Home passed utterly away, while feudal
oppression was held fairly in check by the Crown. The
English town therefore was in its beginning simply a
piece of the general country, organized and governed
precisely in the same manner as the townships around it.
Its existence witnessed indeed to the need which men felt
in those earlier times of mutual help and protection. The
burh or borough was probably a more defensible place than
the common village ; it may have had a ditch or mound
about it instead of the quickset-hedge or " tun " from which
the township took its name. But in itself it was simply a
township or group of townships where men clustered
whether for trade or defence move thickly than elsewhere.
The towns were different in the circumstances and date of
their rise. Some grew up in the fortified camps of the
English invaders. Some dated from a later occupation of
the sacked and desolate Boman towns. Some clustered
round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the
walls of church and monastery. Towns like Bristol were
the direct result of trade. There was the same variety in the
mode in which the various town communities were formed.
While the bulk of them grew by simple increase of popula-
tion from township to town, larger boroughs such as York
with its " six shires " or London with its wards and sokes
and franchises show how families and groups of settlers
settled down side by side, and claimed as they coalesced,
each for itself, its shire or share of the town-ground while
jealously preserving its individual life within the town-
community. But strange as these aggregations might be,
the constitution of the boroush which resulted from them
CIIAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
208
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP, I. was simply that of the people at large. Whether we regard
John it as a township, or rather from its size as a hundred or
laii- collection of townships, the obligations of the dwellers
Igl6> within its bounds were those of the townships round,
to keep fence and trench in good repair, to send a con-
tingent to the fyrd, and a reeve and four men to the hundred
court and shire court. As in other townships land was a
necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless man
who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate
life ; for purposes of government or property the town con-
sisted simply of the landed proprietors within its bounds.
The common lands which are still attached to many of our
boroughs take us back to a time when each township lay
within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once
as boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of
York had its common pasture; Oxford has still its own
" Portmeadow."
The inner rulo of the borough lay as in the townships
about it in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in
"borough-moot" or " portmannimote." But the social
change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal re-
quirement that each man should have a lord, affected the
towns as it affected the rest of the country. Some passed
into the hands of great thegns near to them ; the bulk became
known as in the demesne of the king. A new officer, the
lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution. It was
the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and
administered justice in it; it was he who collected the
lord's dues or annual rent of the town, and who exacted the
services it owed to its lord. To modern eyes these services
would imply almost complete subjection. When Leicester,
for instance, passed from the hands of the Conqueror into
those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their
lord's corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their
strayed cattle from his pound. The great forest around
was the Earl's, and it was only out of his grace that the little
borough could drive its swine into the woods or pasture
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
209
CHAP. I.
John.
1214-
1216,
its cattle in the glades. The justice and government of
a town lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed
its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants,
and the fees and tolls of their markets and fairs. But in
fact when once these dues were paid and these services
rendered the English townsman was practically free. His
rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his
lord. Property and person alike were secured against
arbitrary seizure. He could demand a fair trial on any
charge, and even if justice was administered by his
master's reeve it was administered in the presence and
with the assent of his fellow-townsmen. The bell which
swung out from the town tower gathered the burgesses to
a common meeting, where they could exercize lights of
free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs.
Their merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, dis-
tributed the sums due from the town among the different
burgesses, looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and
acted in fact pretty much the same part as a town-council
of to-day.
The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to
closer association which found support in those principles Merchant
of mutual aid and mutual restraint that lay at the base of
our old institutions. Gilds or clubs for religious, charit-
able, or social purposes were common throughout the
country, and especially common in boroughs, where men
clustered more thickly together. Each formed a sort of
artificial family. An oath of mutual fidelity among its
members was substituted for the tie of blood, while the
gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced
the gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth.
But within this new family the aim of the gild was to
establish a mutual responsibility as close as that of the
old. " Let all share the same lot," ran its law ; " if any
misdo, let all bear it." A member could look for aid from
his gild-brothers in atoning for guilt incurred by mis-
hap. He could call on- them for assistance in case of
The
210 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. violence or wrong. If falsely accused they appeared in
John court as his compurgators, if poor they supported, and
1214- when dead they buried him. On the other hand he was
iai6. responsible to them, as they were to the State, for order
and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against
brother was also a wrong against the general body of the
gild and was punished by fine or in the last resort by an
expulsion which left the offender a " lawless " man and an
outcast. The one difference between these gilds in country
and town was this, that in the latter case from their close
local neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.
Under ^Ethelstan the London gilds united into one for the
purpose of carrying out more effectually their common aims,
and at a later time we find the gilds of Berwick enacting
" that where many bodies are found side by side in one place
they may become one, and have one will, and in the dealings
of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The
process was probably a long and difficult one, for the
brotherhoods naturally differed much in social rank, and
even after the union was effected we see traces of the
separate existence to a certain extent of some one or more
of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In London for
instance the Knighten-gild which seems to have stood at
the head of its fellows retained for a long time its separate
property, while its Alderman as 'the chief officer of each
gild was called became the Alderman of the united gild of
the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar gild of
Thanes from which the chief officers of the town seem com-
monly to have been selected. Imperfect however as the
union might be, when once it was effected the town passed
from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a powerful
community, far more effectually organized than in the
loose organization of the township, arid whose character was
inevitably determined by the circumstances of its origin.
In their beginnings our boroughs seem to have been mainly
gatherings of persons engaged in agricultural pursuits ; the
first Dooms of London provide especially for the recovery
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
211
of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing
security of the country invited the farmer or the landowner
to settle apart in his own fields, and the growth of estate
and trade told on the towns themselves, the difference
between town and country became more sharply defined.
London of course took the lead in this new developement
of civic life. Even in ^thelstan's day every London
merchant who had made three long voyages on his own
account ranked as a Thegn. Its " lithsmen," or shipmanjs-
gild, were of sufficient importance under Harthacnut to
figure in the election of a king, and its principal street
still tells of the rapid growth of trade in its name of
' Cheap- side ' or the bargaining place. But at the Norman
Conquest the commercial tendency had become universal.
The name given to the united brotherhood in a borough
is in almost every case no longer that of the ' town-gild,'
but of the ' merchant-gild.'
This social change in the character of the townsmen
produced important results in the character of their
municipal institutions. In becoming a merchant-gild the
body of citizens who formed the " town " enlarged their
powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control
of theij internal trade. It became their special business
to obtain from the crown or from their lords wider com-
mercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and
exemption from tolls, while within the town itself they
framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the
control of markets, and the recovery of debts. It was only
by slow and difficult advances that each step in this
securing of privilege was won. Still it went steadily on.
"Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an
English town we find the same peaceful revolution in
progress, services disappearing through disuse or omission,
while privileges and immunities are being purchased in
hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were king,
baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the
capture of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
212 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. building of some new minster by a prior, brought about an
John appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again
1214- their master's treasury at the price of the strip of parch-
* a16 - ment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of
fjovernment. In the silent growth and elevation of the
o .
English people the boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed
and despised by prelate and noble they preserved or won
back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The
right of self-government, the right of free speech in free
meeting, the right to equal justice at the hands of one's
equals, were brought safely across ages of tyranny by the
burghers and shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet
quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place,
in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that
swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in
merchant -gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life
of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron
to make England what she is, the life of their home and
their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their
steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.
London. London stood first among English towns, and the privi-
leges which its citizens won became precedents for the
burghers of meaner boroughs. Even at the Conquest its
power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all its
ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way
indeed it profited by the revolution which laid England at
the feet of the stranger. One immediate result of William's
success was an immigration into England from the Con-
tinent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders fol-
lowed quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery.
Every Norman noble as he quartered himself upon English
lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister,
gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French
domestics about him. Bound the Abbey of Battle which
William founded on the site of his great victory " Gilbert
the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet the Steward, Hugh
the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," dwelt mixed with the
fil.]
THE CHARTER. 12041-291.
213
English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play
so notable a part as in London. The Normans had had
mercantile establishments in London as early as the reign
of ^Ethelred, if not of Eadgar. Such settlements how-
ever naturally formed nothing more than a trading colony
like the colony of the " Emperor's Men/' or Easterlings.
But with the Conquest their number greatly increased.
" Many of the citizens of Eouen and Caen passed over
thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch
as it was fitter for their trading and better stored with the
merchandize in which they were wont to traffic." The
status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They
could no longer be looked upon as strangers in cities which
had passed under the Norman rule. In some cases, as at
Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in a separate
French town, side by side with the English borough. But
in London it seems to have taken at once the position of
a governing class. Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous
Archbishop, was believed in later days to.have been one of
the portreeves of London, the predecessors of its mayors ;
he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within
the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was pre-
served in the annual visit of each newly-elected chief
magistrate to his tomb in a little chapel which he had
founded in, the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet Gilbert was
one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of
the Conqueror ; he was by birth a burgher of Eouen, as his
wife was of a burgher family from Caen.
It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no
doubt to the long internal peace and order secured by the
Norman rule, that London owed the wealth and import-
ance to which it attained during the reign of Henry the
First. The charter which Henry granted it became a
model for lesser boroughs. The King yielded its citizens
the right of justice ; each townsman could claim to be
tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court or
hustings whose sessions took place every week. They
YOL. I. 15
CHAP. I.
John
1214
1216.
Freedom
of
London.
214
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
John.
1214-
1216.
CHAP. I. were subject only to the old English trial by oath, and
exempt from the trial by battle which the Normans in-
troduced. Their trade was protected from toll or exaction
over the length and breadth of the land. The King how-
ever still nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve,
or magistrate of the town, nor were the citizens as yet
united together in a commune or corporation. But an
imperfect civic organization existed in the " wards " or
quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman,
and in the " gilds " or voluntary associations of merchants
or traders which ensured order and mutual protection for
their members. Loose too as these bonds may seem, they
were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions
of freedom which the towns preserved. The London bur-
gesses gathered in their town- mote when the bell swung
out from the bell-tower of St. Paul's to deliberate freely
on their own affairs under the presidency of their alderman.
Here too they mustered iu arms if danger threatened the
city, and delivered the town-banner to their captain, the
Norman baron Fitz- Walter, to lead them against the
enemy.
Few boroughs had as yet attained to such power as this,
but the instance of Oxford shows how the freedom of
London told on the general advance of English towns.
In spite of antiquarian fancies it is certain that no town
had arisen on the site of Oxford for centuries after the
withdrawal of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain.
Though the monastery of St. Frideswide rose in the turmoil
of the eighth century on the slope which led down to a
ford across the Thames, it is long before we get a glimpse
of the borough that must have grown up under its walls.
The first definite evidence for its existence lies in a brief
entry of the English Chronicle which recalls its seizure
by Eadward the Elder, but the form of this entry shows
that the town was already a considerable one, and in the
last wrestle of England with the Dane its position on the
borders of Mercia and Wessex combined with its com-
Early
O.rford.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
215
mand of the upper valley of the Thames to give it military
and political importance. Of the life of its burgesses
however we still know little or nothing. The names of its
parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, St. Edmund,
show how early church aftej- church gathered round the
earlier town-church of St. Martin. But the men of the
little town remain dim to us. Their town-mote, or the
* Portmaunimote " as it was called, which was held in the
churchyard of St. Martin, still lives in a shadow of its older
self as the Freeman's Common Hall their town-mead is
still the Port-meadow. But it is only by later charters
or the record of Doomsday that we see them going on
pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering
in their market-place, or judging and law-making in their
hustings, their merchant-gild regulating trade, their reeve
gathering his king's dues of tax or money or marshalling
his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
paying toll of a hundred herrings in Lent-tide to the
Abbot of Abingdon, as they floated down the Thames
towards London.
The number of houses marked waste in the survey
marks the terrible suffering of Oxford in the Norman
Conquest : but the ruin was soon repaired, and the erec-
tion of its castle, the rebuilding of its churches, the plant-
ing of a Jewry in the heart of the town, showed in what
various ways the energy of its new masters was giving an
impulse to its life. It is a proof of the superiority of the
Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses about them that
each of the later town-halls of the borough had, before
their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Nearly all the
larger dwelling houses in fact which were subsequently
converted into academic halis bore traces of the same
origin in names such as Moysey's Hall, Lombard's Hall,
or Jacob's Hall. The Jewish houses were abundant, for
besides the greater Jewry in the heart of it, there was a
lesser Jewry scattered over its southern quarter, and we
can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
216 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which
John drew teac h ers an d scholars within its walls. The Jewry,
1214- a town within a town, lay here as elsewhere isolated and
1 ^ 1 5' exempt from the common justice, the common life and
self-government of the borough. On all but its eastern
side too the town was hemmed in by jurisdictions in-
dependent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of
Osney, the wide " bailey " of the Castle, bounded it
narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away
beyond the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the
royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon,
whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
horizon, held his leet-court in the hamlet of Grampound
beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within the
walls subject to the self-government of the citizens. The
Jewry had a rule and law of its own. Scores of house-
holders, dotted over street and lane, were tenants of castle
or abbey and paid no suit or service at the borough court.
Oxford But within these narrow bounds and amidst these
and various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a
London. . r \
life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and
confined. Nowhere indeed was the impulse which London
was giving likely to tell with greater force. The " barge-
men " of Oxford were connected even before the Conquest
with the " boatmen," or shippers, of the capital. In both
cases it is probable that the bodies bearing these names
represented what is known as the merchant-gild of the town.
Eoyal recognition enables us to trace the merchant-gild of
Oxford from the time of Henry the First. Even then
lands, Islands, pastures belonged to it,' and amongst them
the same Port-meadow which is familiar to Oxford men
pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow. The con-
nexion between the two gilds was primarily one of trade.
" In the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric " the
channel of the Thames beneath the walls of the Abbey of
Abingdon became so blocked up that boats could scarce
pass as far as Oxford, and it was at the joint prayer of the
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 21?
burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new CHAP. !.
channel through the meadow to the south of his church.
But by the time of Henry the Second closer bonds than
this linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt 12Ig -
or contest about judgements in their own court the
burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter
to the decision of London, " and whatsoever the citizens
of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed
right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each
city were assimilated by Henry's charter. " Of whatsoever
matter the men of Oxford be put in plea, they shall
deraign themselves according to the law and custom of
the city of London and not otherwise, because they and
the citizens of London ars of one and the same custom,
law, and liberty."
A legal connexion such as this could hardly fail to bring Life of the
with it an identity of municipal rights. Oxford had Town -
already passed through the earlier steps of her advance
towards municipal freedom before the conquest of the
Norman. Her burghers assembled in their own Portman-
nimote, and their dues to the crown were assessed at a
fixed sum of honey or coin. But the formal definition of
their rights dates, as in the case of London, from the time
of Henry the First. The customs and exemptions of its
townsmen were confirmed by Henry the Second " as ever
.they enjoyed them in the time of Henry my grandfather,
and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them."
By this date the town had attained entire judicial and com-
mercial freedom, and liberty of external commerce was
secured by the exemption of its citizens from toll on the
king's lands. Complete independence was reached when
a charter of John substituted a mayor of the town's own
choosing for the reeve or bailiff of the crown. But dry
details such as these tell little of the quick pulse of popular
life that beat in the thirteenth century through such a
community as that of Oxford. The church of St. Martin
in the very heart of it, at the " Quatrevoix " or Carfax
218 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. where its four streets met, was the centre of the city life.
John T ne town-mote was held in its churchyard. Justice was
1214 administered ere yet a towiihall housed the infant magis-
1216. tracy by mayor or bailiff sitting beneath a low pent-house,
the " penniless bench " of later days, outside its eastern
wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to council or arms.
Around the church the trade-gilds were ranged as in some
vast encampment. To the south of it lay Spicery and
Vintnery, the quarter of the richer burgesses. Fish-street
fell noisily down to the bridge and the ford. The Corn-
market occupied then as now the street which led to
Northgate. The stalls of the butchers stretched along the
" Butcher-row," which formed the road to the bailey and the
castle. Close beneath the church lay a nest of huddled
lanes, broken by a stately synagogue, and traversed from
time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. Soldiers
from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets ;
the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows ;
processions of pilgrims wound through gates and lane to
the shrine of St. Frideswide. Frays were common enough;
now the sack of a Jew's house ; now burgher drawing
knife on burghei? ; now an outbreak of the young student
lads who were growing every day in numbers and audacity.
But as yet the town was well in hand. The clang of the
city bell called every citizen to his door ; the call of the
mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and
banners flying to enforce the king's peace.
St. The advance of towns Avhich had grown up not on the
"1^" r y al domain but around abbey or castle was slower and
more difficult. The story of St. Edmundsbury shows how
gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an im-
perfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land here in
the Confessor's time was covered with houses by the time
of Henry the Second. The building of the great abbey-
church drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot's domain.
The troubles of the time helped here as elsewhere the
Ill]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
219
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
progress of the town ; serfs, fugitives from justice or their
lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally sought shelter under
the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were
wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not a settler but was bound
to pay his pence to the Abbot's treasury, to plough a
rood of his land, to reap in his harvest-field, to fold
his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the annual
catch of eels from the Abbey waters. Within the
four crosses that bounded the Abbot's domain land and
water were his ; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their
pasture on the common ; if the fullers refused the loan of
their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream
and seize their looms wherever he found them. No toll
might be levied from tenants of the Abbey farms, and cus-
tomers had to "wait before shop and stall till the buyers of
the Abbot had had the pick of the market. There was
little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk-
mote it was before the Abbot's officers that its meeting was
held; if they appealed to the alderman he was the Abbot's
nominee and received the horn, the symbol of his office, at
the Abbot's hands. Like all the greater revolutions of
society, the advance from this mere serfage was a silent
one ; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem
to have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-
fishing, were commuted for an easy rent; others, like the
slavery of the fullers and the toll of flax, simply dis-
appeared. By usage, by omission, by downright forgetful-
ness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to a needy
abbot, the town won freedom.
But progress was not always unconscious, and one inci- The Toumai
dent in the history of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not j a
nierely as indicating the advance of law, but yet more as
marking the part which a new moral sense of man's right
to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the
realm. Rude as the borough was, it possessed the right
of meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for govern-
ment and law. Justice was administered in presence of the
220
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
John,
1214
1216.
CHAP. I. burgesses, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the
oath of his neighbours. Without the borough bounds
however the system of Norman judicature prevailed ; and
the rural tenants who did suit and service at the Cellerar's
court were subjected to the trial by battle. The execution
of a farmer named Kebel who came under this feudal
jurisdiction brought the two systems into vivid contrast.
Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the crime laid to his
charge ; but the duel went against him and he was hung
just without the gates. The taunts of the townsmen woke
his fellow farmers to a sense of wrong. " Had Kebel
been a dweller within the borough," said the burgesses,
"he would have got his acquittal from the oaths of his
neighbours, as our liberty is ; " and even the monks were
moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal
freedom and justice with the townsmen. The franchise of
of the town was extended to the rural possessions of the
Abbey without it ; the farmers " came to the toll-house,
were written in the alderman's toll, and paid the town-
penny." A chance story preserved in a charter of later
date shows the same struggle for justice going on
in a greater town. At Leicester the trial by corn-
purgation, the rough predecessor of trial by jury, had
been abolished by the Earls in favour of trial by battle.
The aim of the burgesses was to regain their old
justice, and in this a touching incident at last made
them successful. " It chanced that two kinsmen,
Nicholas the son of Aeon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas,
waged a duel about a certain piece of land concerning
which a dispute had arisen between them ; and they fought
from the first to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns.
Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came to a
certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and
was about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him ' Take
care of the pit, turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.'
Thereat so much clamour and noise was made by the
bystanders and those who were sitting around that the
Hi.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 221
Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he CHAP. I.
enquired of some how it was there was such a clamour, and j^
answer was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting 1214-
about a certain piece of ground, and that one had fled till 1216 -
he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood over
the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him.
Then the townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant
with the Earl that they should give him threepence yearly
for each house in the High Street that had a gable, on
condition that he should grant to them that the twenty-four
jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should
from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they
might have among themselves."
At the time we have reached this struggle for emanci- Divisor.
patiou was nearly over. The larger towns had secured f * a ^"' '
the privilege of self-government, the administration of
justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns of
Richard and John mark the date in our municipal his-
tory at which towns began to acquire the right of electing
their own chief magistrate, the Portreeve or Mayor, who
had till then been a nominee of the crown. But with
the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle be-
tween the various classes of the townsmen themselves. The
growth of wealth and industry was bringing with it a vast
increase of population. The mass of the new settlers, com-
posed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders without
landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot
in the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor,
had no part in the actual life of the town. The right of
trade and of the regulation of trade in common with all
other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the hands of the
landed burghers whom we have described. By a natural
process too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh
division between the " burghers " of the merchant-gild and
the unenfranchised mass around them. The same change
which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or trades
from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three
222 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. occupations of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of
John cloth, to a position of superiority even within the privileged
lali- circle of tne seven > told though with less force on the Eng-
1216. i^gh Boroughs. The burghers of the merchant-gild gradually
concentrated themselves on the greater operations of com-
merce, on trades which required a larger capital, while, the
meaner employments of general traffic were abandoned to
their poorer neighbours. This advance in the division of
labour is marked by such severances as we note in the
thirteenth century of the cloth merchant from the tailor or
the leather merchant from the butcher.
Trade But the result of this severance was all-important in its
Gilds, influence on the constitution of our towns. The members
of the trades thus abandoned by the wealthier burghers
formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon rose into
dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant-gild of the
town. A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary
prelude to full membership of these trade-gilds. Their regu-
lations were of the minutest character ; the quality and
value of work were rigidly prescribed, the hours of toil fixed
"from day-break to curfew," and strict provision made
against competition in labour. At each meeting of these
gilds their members gathered round the Craft-box which
contained the rules of their Society, and stood with bared
heads as it was opened. The warden and a quorum of gild-
brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of
the gild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated
unlawful tools or unworthy goods ; and disobedience to
their orders was punished by fines or in the last resort by
expulsion, which involved the loss of a right to trade. A
common fund was raised by contributions among the
members, which not only provided for the trade objects of
the gild but sufficed to found chantries and masses and
set up painted windows in the church of their patron saint.
Even at the present day the arms of a craft-gild may often
be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with those of
prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow degrees that
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
223
they rose to such a height as this. The first steps in their
existence were the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild
to carry out its objects with any success it was first neces-
sary that the whole body of craftsmen belonging to the
trade should be compelled to join the gild, and secondly
that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured
to it. A royal charter was indispensable for these purposes,
and over the grant of these charters took place the first
struggle with the merchant-gilds which had till then solely
exercized jurisdiction over trade within the boroughs. The
weavers, who were the first trade-gild to secure royal
sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged
in a contest for existence as late as the reign of John when
the citizens of London bought for a time the suppression of
their gild. Even under the House of Lancaster Exeter was
engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailor's gild.
From the eleventh century however the spread of these
societies went steadily on, and the control of trade passed
more and more from the merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.
It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time,
of the " greater folk " against the " lesser folk," or of the
" commune," the general mass of the inhabitants, against
the " prudhommes," or " wiser " few, which brought about,
as it passed from the regulation of trade to the general
government of the town, the great civic revolution of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Continent,
and especially along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce
as the supremacy of the older burghers had been complete.
In Koln the craftsmen had been reduced to all but serfage,
and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the
ears of " the man without heart or honour who lives by his
toil." Such social tyranny of class over class brought a
century of bloodshed to the cities of Germany; but in
England the tyranny of class over class was restrained by
the general tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the
most part a milder form. The longest and bitterest strife of
all was naturally at London. , Nowhere had the territorial
CHAP. 1.
John.
1214-
1216.
Greater
and Lesser
Folk.
224 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. constitution struck root so deeply, and nowhere had the
John landed oligarchy risen to such a height of wealth and in-
1214- fluence. The city was divided into wards, each of which
Iai6> was governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class.
In some indeed the office seems to have become hereditary.
The " magnates," or " barons," of the merchant-gild advised
alone on all matters of civic government or trade regulation,
and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues or
burthens of the town. Such a position afforded an opening
for corruption and oppression of the most galling kind ; and
it seems to have been a general impression of the unfair
assessment of the dues levied on the poor and the undue
burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised classes
which provoked the first serious discontent. In the reign
of Richard the First William of the Long Beard, though
one of the governing body, placed himself at the head of a
conspiracy which in the panic-stricken fancy of the burghers
numbered fifty thousand of the craftsmen. His eloquence,
his bold defiance of the aldermen in the town- mote, gained
him at any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who
surrounded him hailed him as " the saviour of the poor."
One of his addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer of
the time. In mediaeval fashion he began with a text from
the Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with joy from the foun-
tain of the Saviour." " I," he began, " am the saviour of
the poor. Ye poor men who have felt the weight of rich
men's hands, draw from my fountain waters of wholesome
instruction and that with joy, for the time of your visitation
is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters.
It is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the
lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faithless folk ;
I will part the chosen from the reprobate as light from dark-
ness." But it was in vain that he strove to win royal
favour for the popular cause. The support of the moneyed
classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars with
Philip of France ; and the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert,
after a moment of hesitation issued orders for William
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
225
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
Longbeard's arrest. William felled with an axe the first
soldier who advanced to seize him, and taking refuge
with a few adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow
summoned his adherents to rise. Hubert however, who
had already flooded the city with troops, with bold con-
tempt of the right of sanctuary set fire to the tower.
William was forced to surrender, and a burgher's son,
whose father he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth.
With his death the quarrel slumbered for more than fifty
years. But the movement towards equality went steadily
on. Under pretext of preserving the peace the unen-
franchised townsmen united in secret frith-gilds of their
own, and mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses
of foreigners and the wealthier burgesses. Nor did London
stand alone in this movement. In all the larger towns the
same discontent prevailed, the same social growth called
for new institutions, and in their silent revolt against the
oppression of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were train-
ing themselves to stand forward as champions of a wider
liberty in the Barons' War.
Without the towns progress was far slower and more
fitful. It would seem indeed that the conquest of the Villein,
Norman bore harder on the rural population than on any
other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings of the
house of JElfred the number .of absolute slaves and the
number of freemen had alike diminished. The pure slave
class had never been numerous, and it had been reduced by
the efforts of the Church, perhaps by the general convulsion
of the Danish wars. But these wars had often driven the
ceorl or freeman of the township to " commend " himself
to a thegn who pledged him his protection in consideration
of payment in a rendering of labour. It is probable that
these dependent ceorls are the ' villeins ' of the Norman
epoch, the most numerous class of the Domesday Survey,
men sunk indeed from pure freedom and bound both to
soil and lord, but as yet preserving much of their older
rights, retaining their land, free as against all men but
The
226 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. their lord, and still sending representatives to huiidred-
Joim moot and shire-moot. They stood therefore far above the
iai4- " landless man," the man who had never possessed even
laie. unc i er the old constitution political rights, whom the legis-
lation of the English Kings had forced to attach himself
to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who served as household
servant or as hired labourer or at the best as rent-paying
tenant of land which was not his own. The Norman
knight or lawyer however saw little distinction between
these classes ; and the tendency of legislation under the
Angevins was to blend all in a single class of serfs. While
the pure ' theow ' or absolute slave disappeared therefore
the ceorl or villein sank lower in the social scale. But
though the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more
together and fused into a more homogeneous class, its actual
position corresponded very imperfectly with the view of
the lawyers. All indeed were dependents on a lord. The
manor-house became the centre of every English village.
The manor-court was held in its hall ; it was here that the
lord or his steward received homage, recovered fines, held
the view of frank-pledge, or enrolled the villagers in their
tithing. Here too, if the lord possessed criminal juris-
diction, was held his justice court, and without its doors
stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord's demesne or
home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with
the " villeins " of the manor. It was by them that the
great barn was filled with sheaves, the sheep shorn, the
grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor- hall fire.
These services were the labour-rent by which they held
their lands, and it was the nature and extent of this
labour-rent which parted one class of the population from
another. The ' villein,' in the strict sense of the word,
was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid
in the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The
cottar, the bordar, and the labourer were bound to help in
the work of the home-farm throughout the year.
But these services and the time of rendering them were
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 227
strictly limited by custom, not only in the case of the CHAP. I.
ceorl or villein but in that of the originally meaner " land- j~^
less man." The possession of his little homestead with the iaii-
ground around it, the privilege of turning out his cattle on iai6 *
the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from
mere indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a
lord's caprice into rights that could be pleaded at law.
The number of teams, the lines, the reliefs, the services
that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of oral tradi-
tion, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a
copy of which became the title-deed of the villein. It
was to this that he owed the name of " copy-holder" which
at a later time superseded his older title. Disputes were
settled by a reference to this roll or on oral evidence of the
custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was emi-
nently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise
generally secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein
and lord. It was the duty of the lord's bailiff to exact
their due services from the villeins, but his coadjutor in
this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was chosen
by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of
their interests and rights. A fresh step towards freedom
was made by the growing tendency to commute labour-
services for money-payments. The population was slowly
increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was ap-
plicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure
divided the inheritance of the tenantry equally among
their sons the holding of each tenant and the services due
from it became divided in a corresponding degree. A
labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the
increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a
new spirit of independence made it more burthensome to
those who rendered it. It was probably from this cause
that the commutation of the arrears of labour for a money
payment, which had long prevailed on every estate,
gradually developed into a general commutation of services.
We have already witnessed the silent progress of this
228
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I
John.
1214-
1216.
remarkable change in the case of St. Edmundsbury, but the
practice soon became universal, and " malt-silver," " wood-
silver," and " larder-silver " gradually took the place of the
older personal services on the court-rolls. The process of
commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords
themselves. The luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour
and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigne drained the
purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a
serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an
easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process
even Kings took part. At a later time, under Edward the
Third, commissioners were sent to royal estates for the
especial purpose of selling manumissions to the King's
serfs ; and we still possess the names of those who were
enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash
in aid of the exhausted exchequer.
England. Such was the people which had been growing into a
national unity and a national vigour while English king
and English baronage battled for rule. But king and
baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl.
The loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of
their Norman lands, was the last of many influences
which had been giving through a century and a half a
national temper to the baronage. Not only the " new
men," the ministers out of whom the two Henrys had
raised a nobility, were bound to the Crown, but the older
feudal houses now owned themselves as Englishmen and
set aside their aims after personal independence for a love
of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as
the natural leaders of a people bound together by the
stern government which had crushed all local division,
which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of a peace and
justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was
almost unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had
trained them to something of their old free government
again by the very machinery of election it used to facili-
tate its heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
229
Normandy brought home the King. The growth which
had been going on had easily escaped the eyes of rulers
who were commonly absent from the realm and busy
with the affairs of countries beyond the sea. Henry the
Second had been absent for years from England : Richard
had only visited it twice for a few months : John had as
yet been almost wholly occupied with his foreign do-
minions. To him as to his brother England had as yet
been nothing but a land whose gold paid the mercenaries
that followed him, and whose people bowed obediently to
his will. It was easy to see that between such a ruler and
such a nation once brought together strife must come :
but that the strife came as it did and ended as it did was
due above all to the character of the King.
"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler
presence of John." The terrible verdict of his contem-
poraries has passed into the sober judgement of history.
Externally John possessed all the quickness, the vivacity,
the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which
distinguished his house. His worst enemies owned that
lie toiled steadily and closely at the work of adminis-
tration. He was fond of learned men like Gerald of
Wales. He had a strange gift of attracting friends
and of winning the love of women. But in his inner
soul John was the worst outcome of the Angevins.
He united into one mass of wickedness their insolence,
their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and
tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their
cynical indifference to honour or truth. In mere boy-
hood he tore with brutal levity the beards of the Irish
chieftains who came to own him as their lord. His
ingratitude and perfidy brought his father with sorrow to
the grave. To his brother he was the worst of traitors.
All Christendom believed him to be the murderer of his
nephew, Arthur of Britanny. He abandoned one wife
and was faithless to another. His punishments were
refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the
VOL. L 16
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
John.
230 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. crushing old men under copes of lead. His court was
.. a brothel where no woman was safe from the royal lust,
i2iV and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his
1216. v i c tims' shame. He was as craven in his superstition
as he was daring in his impiety. Though he scoffed at
priests and turned his back on the mass even amidst
the solemnities of his coronation lie never stirred on a
journey without hanging relics round his neck. But with
the wickedness of his race he inherited its profound
ability. His plan for the relief of Chateau Gaillard,
the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur's hopes at
Mirabel, showed an inborn genius for war. In the
rapidity and breadth of his political combinations he far
surpassed the statesmen of "his time. Throughout his
reign we see him quick to discern the difficulties of his
position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which
he met them. The overthrow of his continental power
only spurred him to the formation of a league which all
but brought Philip to the ground ; and the sudden revolt
of England was parried by a shameless alliance with
the Papacy. The closer study of John's history clears
away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men
tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful
lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost
Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished
in a struggle of despair against English freedom was no
weak and indolent voluptuary but the ablest and most
ruthless of the An^evins.
O
Innocent From the moment of his return to England' in 1204
John's whole energies were bent to the recovery of his
dominions on the Continent. He impatiently collected
money and men for the support of those adherents of the
House of Anjou who were still struggling against the arms
of France in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of
1205 he gathered an army at Portsmouth and prepared to
cross the Channel. But his project was suddenly thwarted
by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert Walter,
Hl.J THE CllAKTEli. KO. I5*yj. 231
and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal. So com- . CHAP. l.
pletely had both the baronage and the Church been j^
humbled by his father that the attitude of their repre- iaii-
sentatives revealed to the King a new spirit of national iaig '
freedom which was rising around him, and John at once
braced himself to a struggle with it. The death of
Hubert Walter in July, only a few days after his pro-
test, removed his most formidable opponent, and the
King resolved to neutralize the opposition of the Church
by placing a creature of his own at its head. John
de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by the monks
of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as Primate.
But in a previous though informal gathering the con-
vent had already chosen its sub-prior, Eeginald, as
Archbishop. The rival claimants hastened to appeal to
Koine, and their appeal reached the Papal Court before
Christmas. The result of the contest was a startling one
both for themselves and for the King. After a year's
careful examination Innocent the Third, w r ho now occupied
the Papal throne, quashed at the close of 1206 both the
contested elections. The decision was probably a just one,
but Innocent was far from stopping there. The monks
who appeared before him brought powers from the
convent to choose a new Primate should their earlier
nomination be set aside ; and John, secretly assured of
their choice of Grey, had promised to confirm their
election. But the bribes which the King lavished at Kome
failed to win the Pope over to this plan ; and whether from
mere love of power, for he was pushing the Papal claims
}f supremacy over Christendom further than any of his
predecessors, or as may fairly be supposed in despair of a
Free election within English bounds, Innocent commanded
the monks to elect in his presence Stephen Langton to the
archiepiscopal see.
Personally a better choice could not have been made, The
for Stephen was a man who by sheer weight of learn- In(erdt( ' t -
ing and holiness of life had risen to the dignity of
232 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP: I. jCardinal and whose after career placed him in the front
jrtoL rank of English patriots. But in itself the step was an
1214.- usurpation of the rights both of the Church and of
laie. t | ie Q rown xhe King at once met it with resistance.
When Innocent consecrated the new Primate in June,
1207, and threatened the realm with interdict if Langton
were any longer excluded from his see, John replied by a
counter threat that the interdict should be followed by the
banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every
Italian he could seize in the realm. How little he feared
the priesthood he showed when the clergy refused his
demand of a thirteenth of movables for the whole country
and Archbishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax before the
Council. John banished the Archbishop and extorted the
money. Innocent however was not a man to draw back
from his purpose, and in March 1208 the interdict he had
threatened fell upon the land. All worship save that of
a few privileged orders, all administration of Sacraments
save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and
breadth of the country : the church-bells were silent, the
dead lay unburied on the ground. Many of the bishops
fled from the country. The Church in fact, so long the main
support of the royal power against the baronage, was now
driven into opposition. Its change of attitude was to be
of vast moment in the struggle which was impending;
but John recked little of the future ; he replied to the
interdict by confiscating the lands of the clergy who
observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their privileges
to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them un-
punished. " Let him go," said John, when a Welshman
was brought before him for the murder of a priest, "he has
killed my enemy." In 1209 the Pope proceeded to the
further sentence of excommunication, and the King was
formally cut off from the pale of the Church. But the new
sentence was met with the same defiance as the old. Five
of the bishops fled over sea, and secret disaffection was
spreading widely, but there was no public avoidance of
in.] THE CHARTER 12041291. 233
the excommunicated King. An Archdeacon of Norwich CHAP. I.
who withdrew from his service was crushed to death under j^n
a cope of lead, and the hint was sufficient to prevent either 1214-
prelate or noble from following his example. iai.
The attitude of John showed the power which the Th*
administrative reforms of his father had given to the Deposition
Crown. He stood alone, with nobles estranged from him
and the Church against him, but his strength seemed utter-
ly unbroken. From the first moment of his rule John
had defied the baronage. The promise to satisfy their
demand for redress of wrongs in the past reign, a promise
made at his election, remained unfulfilled ; when the
demand was repeated he answered it by seizing their
castles and taking their children as hostages for their
loyalty. The cost of his fruitless threats of war had been
met by heavy and repeated taxation, by increased land
tax and increased scut age. The quarrel with the Church
and fear of their revolt only deepened his oppression
of the nobles. He drove De Braose, one of the most
powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile, while his
wife and grandchildren were believed to have been starved
to death in the royal prisons. On the nobles who still
clung panic-stricken to the court of the excommunicate
king John heaped outrages worse than death. Illegal ex-
actions, the seizure of their castles, the preference shown
to foreigners, were small provocations compared with his
attacks on the honour of their wives and daughters. But
the baronage still submitted. The financial exactions
indeed became light as John filled his treasury with the
goods of the Church ; the King's vigour was seen in the
rapidity with which he crushed a rising of the nobles in
Ireland and foiled an outbreak of the Welsh; while the
triumphs of his father had taught the baronage its weakness
in any single-handed struggle against the Crown. Hated
therefore as he was the land remained still. Only one
weapon was now left in Innocent's hands. Men held then
that a King, once excommunicate, ceased to be a Christian
234
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
John.
1214-
11216.
John's
Submis-
sion.
or to have claims on the obedience of Christian subjects.
As spiritual heads of Christendom, the Popes had ere now
asserted their right to remove such a ruler from his throne
and to give it to a worthier than he ; and it was this right
which Innocent at last felt himself driven to exercize.
After useless threats he issued in 1212 a bull of deposition
against John, absolved his subjects from their allegiance,
proclaimed a crusade against him as an enemy to Christi-
anity and the Church, and committed the execution of the
sentence to the King of the French. John met the
announcement of this step with the same scorn as before.
His insolent disdain suffered the Boman legate, Cardinal
Pandulf, to proclaim his deposition to his face at North-
ampton. When Philip collected an army for an attack on
England an enormous host gathered at the King's call on
Barham Down; and the English fleet dispelled all danger
of invasion by crossing the Channel, by capturing a number
of French ships, and by burning Dieppe.
But it was not in England only that the King showed
his strength and activity. Vile as he was, John possessed
in a high degree the political ability of his race, and in
the diplomatic efforts with which he met the danger from
France he showed himself his father's equal. The barons
of Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the south.
John bought the aid of the Count of Flanders on his
northern border. The German King, Otto, pledged him-
self to bring the knighthood of Germany to support an
invasion of France. But at the moment of his success
in diplomacy John suddenly gave way. It was in
fact the revelation of a danger at home which shook
him from his attitude of contemptuous defiance. The
bull of deposition gave fresh energy to every enemy. The
Scotch King was in correspondence with Innocent. The
Welsh princes who had just been forced to submission
broke out again in war. John hanged their hostages, and
called his host to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales,
but the army met only to become a fresh source of danger.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
235
Powerless to oppose the King openly, the baronage had
plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies. The
hostility of Philip had dispelled their dread of isolated
action ; many indeed had even promised aid to the French
King on his landing. John found himself in the midst of
hidden enemies ; and nothing could have saved him but
the haste whether of panic or quick decision with which
he disbanded his army and took refuge in Nottingham
Castle. The arrest of some of the barons showed how
true were his fears, for the heads of the French conspiracy,
Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, at once fled over
sea to Philip. His daring self-confidence, the skill of his
diplomacy, could no longer hide from John the utter lone-
liness of his position. At war with Rome, with France,
with Scotland, Ireland and Wales, at war with the Church,
he saw himself disarmed by this sudden revelation of
treason in the one force left at his disposal. With char-
acteristic suddenness he gave way. He endeavoured by
remission of fines to win back his people. He negotiated
eagerly with the Pope, consented to receive the Archbishop,
and promised to repay the money he had extorted from
the Church.
But the shameless ingenuity of the King's temper was
seen in his resolve to find in his very humiliation a new
source of strength. If he yielded to the Church he had
no mind to yield to the rest of his foes ; it was indeed in
the Pope who had defeated him that he saw the means of
baffling their efforts. It was Rome that formed the link
between the varied elements of hostility which combined
against him. It was Rome that gave its sanction to Philip's
ambition and roused the hopes of Scotch and Welsh, Rome
that called the clergy to independence and nerved the
barons to resistance. To detach Innocent by submission
from the league which hemmed him in on every side
was the least part of John's purpose. He resolved to
make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thunders on
his foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy it
CHAP. I.
John.
1214^
1216.
John
becomes
vassal of
Rome.
236 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. had formed, in crushing the baronage, in oppressing the
John c l er gy> i n paralyzing as Rome only could paralyze the
isii- energy of the Primate. That greater issues even than
1216. t^ese were involved in John's rapid change of policy
time was to show; but there is no need to credit the
King with the foresight that would have discerned them.
His quick versatile temper saw no doubt little save
the momentary gain. But that gain was immense.
Nor was the price as hard to pay as it seems to modern
eyes. The Pope stood too high above earthly monarchs,
his claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed
them, were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate
business and interests of the day, to make the owning
of his suzerainty any very practical burthen. John
could recall a time when his father was willing to own
the same subjection as that which he was about to
take on himself. He could recall the parallel allegiance
which his brother had pledged to the Emperor. Shame
indeed there must be in any loss of independence, but in
this less than any and with Borne the shame of submission
had already been incurred. But whatever were the King's
thoughts his act was decisive. On the 15th of May 1213
he knelt before the legate Pandulf, surrendered his king-
dom to the Roman See, took it back again as a tributary
vassal, swore fealty and did liege homage to the Pope.
Its In after times men believed that England thrilled at
Results. t ne news w jth a sense of national shame such as she
had never felt before. " He has become the Pope's
man" the whole country was said to have murmured;
" he has forfeited the very name of King ; from a free
man ho has degraded himself into a serf." But this was
the belief of a time still to come when the rapid growth
of national feeling w T hich this step and its issues, did
more than anything to foster made men look back on
the scene between John and Pandulf as a national dis-
honour. We see little trace of such a feeling in the con-
O
temporary accounts of the time. All seem rather to have
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
237
1214-
ial6 -
Geoffry
regarded it as a complete settlement of the difficulties in CHAP. 1.
which king and kingdom were involved. As a political
measure its success was immediate and complete. The
French army at once broke up in impotent rage, and when
Philip turned on the enemy John had raised up for him
in Flanders, five hundred English ships under the Earl
of Salisbury fell upon the fleet which accompanied the
French army along the coast and utterly destroyed it. The
league which John had so long matured at once disclosed
itself. Otto, reinforcing his German army by the knight-
hood of Flanders and Boulogne as well as by a body of
mercenaries in the pay of the English King, invaded France
from the north. John called on his baronage to follow
him over sea for an attack on Philip from the South.
Their plea that he remained excommunicate was set
aside by the arrival of Langton and his formal absolution l
of the King on a renewal of his coronation oath and a
pledge to put away all evil customs. But the barons
still stood aloof. They would serve at home, they said,
but they refused to cross the sea. Those of the north
took a more decided attitude of opposition. From this
point indeed the northern barons begin to play their part
in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies, Percies,
Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those of de Ros or
de Vaux, all had sprung to greatness on the ruins of the
Mowbrays and the great houses of the Conquest and had
done service to the Crown in its strife with the older
feudatories. But loyal as was their tradition they were
English to the core ; they had neither lands nor interest
over sea, and they now declared themselves bound by no
tenure to follow the King in foreign wars. Furious at this
check to his plans John marched in arms northwards to
bring these barons to submission. But he had now to
reckon with a new antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry
Fitz-Peter. Geoffry had hitherto bent to the King's will ;
but the political sagacity which he drew from the school of
Henry the Second in which he had been trained showed
238
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
Stephen
Langton.
him the need of concession, and his wealth, his wide kin-
ship, and his experience of affairs gave his interposition a
decisive weight. He seized on the political opportunity
which was offered by the gathering of a Council at St.
Albans at the opening of August with the purpose of
assessing the damages done to the Church. Besides the
bishops and barons, a reeve and his four men were sum-
moned to this Council from each royal demesne, no doubt
simply as witnesses of the sums due to the plundered
clergy. Their presence however was of great import. It is
the first instance which our history presents of the sum-
mons of such representatives to a national Council, and the
instance took fresh weight from the great matters which
came to be discussed. In the King's name the Justiciar
promised good government for the time to come, and for-
bade all royal officers to practise extortion as they prized
life and limb. The King's peace was pledged to those
who had opposed him in the past ; and observance of
the laws of Henry the First was enjoined upon all within
the realm.
But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that English
f ree( j om vvas t fi n( j it s champion and the baronaye their
leader. From the moment of his landing in England
Stephen Langton had taken up the constitutional position
of the Primate in upholding the old customs and rights
of the realm against the personal despotism of the kings.
As Anselm had withstood William the Eed, as Theobald
had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand
and rescue his country from the tyranny of John. He
had already forced him to swear to observe the laws
of Edward the Confessor, in other words the traditional
liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to sail
for Poitou he compelled the King to deal with them not
by* arms but by process of law. But the work which he
now undertook was far greater and weightier than this.
The pledges of Henry the First had long been forgotten
when the Justiciar brought them to light, but Langton saw
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
239
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
the vast importance of such a precedent. At the close of
the month he produced Henry's charter in a fresh gather-
ing of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at once welcomed
as a base for the needed reforms. From London Lang ton
hastened to the King, whom he reached at Northampton
on his way to attack the nobles of the north, and wrested
from him a promise to bring his strife with them to
legal judgement before assailing them in arms. With
his allies gathering abroad John had doubtless no wish
to be entangled in- a long quarrel at home, and the
Archbishop's mediation allowed him to withdraw with
seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at
Durham John marched hastily south again, and reached
London in October. His Justiciar at once laid before him
the claims of the Councils of St. Alban's and St. Paul's ;
but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed him from
the pressure which his minister was putting upon him.
" Now, by God's feet," cried John, " I am for the first
time King and Lord of England," and he entrusted the
vacant justieiarship to a Poitevin, Peter des Bodies, the
Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony
with his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the
Archbishop to the front, and Langton at once demanded
the King's assent to the Charter of Henry the First. In
seizing on this Charter as a basis for national, action
Langton showed a political ability of the highest order.
The enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed
showed the sagacity with which the Archbishop had
chosen his ground. From that moment the baronage
was no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a
sense of common wrong or a vague longing for common
deliverance : they were openly united in a definite claim
of national freedom and national law.
John could as yet only meet the claim by delay. His BOUVIMK
policy had still to wait for its fruits at Borne, his diplomacy
to reap its harvest in Flanders, ere he could deal with
England. From the hour of his submission to the Papacy
240
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
Rising of
the
his one thought had been that of vengeance on the barons
who, as he held, had betrayed him ; but vengeance was
impossible till he should return a conqueror from the fields
of France: It was a sense of this danger which nerved
the baronage to their obstinate refusal to follow him over
sea : but furious as he was at their resistance, the Arch-
bishop's interposition condemned John still to wait for
the hour of his revenge. In the spring of 1214 he crossed
with what forces he could gather to Poitou, rallied its
nobles round him, passed the Loire in triumph, and won
back aciain Anders, the home of his race. At the same
o o *
time Oito and ths Count of Flanders, their German and
Flemish knighthood strengthened by reinforcements from
Boulogne as well as by a body of English troops under the
Earl of Salisbury, threatened France from the north. For
the moment Philip seemed lost : arid yet on the fortunes of
Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in this
crisis of her fate, France was true to herself and her King.
From every borough of Northern France the townsmen
marched to his rescue, and the village priests led their
nocks to battle with the Church-banners Hying at their
head. The two armies met at the close of July near the
bridge of Bouvines, between Lille and Tournay, and from
the first the day went against the allies. The Flemish
knights were the first to fly ; then the Germans in the
centre of the host were crushed by the overwhelming
numbers of the French ; last of all the English on the right
of it were broken by a fierce onset of the Bishop of
Beauvais who charged inace in hand and struck the Earl
of Salisbury to the ground. The news of this complete
overthrow reached John in the midst of his triumphs in
the South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was
at once deserted "by the Poitevin nobles ; and a hasty
retreat alone enabled him to return in October, baffled
and humiliated, to his island kingdom.
His return forced on the crisis to which events had so
Baronage, long been drifting. The victory at Bouvines gave strength
III.]
THE CHAETER. 12041291.
241
to his opponents. The open resistance of the northern
Barons nerved the rest of their order to action. The
great houses who had cast away their older feudal tra-
ditions for a more national policy were drawn by the
crisis into close union with the families which had
sprung from the ministers and councillors of the two
Henries. To the first group belonged such men as Saher
de Quinci, the Earl of Winchester, Geoffrey of Mande-
ville, Earl of Essex, the Earl of Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin,
William Mallet, the houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant. Among
the second group were Henry Bohun and Eoger Bigod, the
Earls of Hereford and Norfolk, the younger William Mar-
shal, and Robert de Vere. Eobert Fitz- Walter, who took
the command of their united force, represented both par-
ties equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house of
Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard
de Lucy, had been his grandfather. Secretly, and on the
pretext of pilgrimage, these nobles met at St. Edmunds-
bury, resolute to bear no longer with John's delays. If
he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make
war on him till he confirmed them by Charter under the
King's seal, and they parted to raise forces with the pur-
pose of presenting their demands at Christmas. John,
knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy
of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of
election, while he embittered still more the strife with his
nobles by demanding scutage from the northern nobles who
had refused to follow him to Poitou. But the barons were
now ready to act, and earl}' in January in the memorable .
year 1215 they appeared in arms to lay, as they had
planned, their demands before the King.
John was taken by surprize. He asked for a truce
till Easter-tide, and spent the interval in fevered efforts
to avoid the blow. Again he ottered freedom to the
Church, and took vows as a Crusader against whom war
was a sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of
allegiance and fealty from the whole body of his subjects.
CHAP. I.
John.
1214-
1216.
John
deserted.
242 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. But month after month only showed the King the
John. uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was
1214- with him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit
iai6 ' jn the way of aid from Eome ; the commissioners whom
he sent to plead his cause at the shire-courts brought
back news that no man would help him against the
charter that the barons claimed : and his efforts to de-
tach the clergy from the league of his opponents utterly
failed. The nation was against the King. He was far
indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers still
clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de
Furnival, Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen
trained in the administrative school of his father and who,
dissent as they might from John's mere oppression, still
looked on the power of the Crown as the one barrier
against feudal anarchy : and beside them stood some of
the great nobles of royal blood, his father's bastard Earl
William of Salisbury, his cousin Earl William of Warenne,
and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a grandson of Henry the First.
With him too remained Kanulf, Earl of Chester, and the
wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the
elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in
the rising of the younger Henry against Henry the Second,
and stood by him as he died ; he had shared in the over-
throw of William Longcharnp and in the outlawry of John.
He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-
course, to recall the government to the path of freedom
and law, but shrinking from, a strife which might bring
back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and looking for reforms
rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to bear upon
the King than in forcing them from him by arms.
John p,ut cling as such men might to John, they clung
yte s ' to him rather as mediators than adherents. Their
sympathies went with the demands of the barons
when the delay which had been granted was over
and the nobles again gathered in arms at Brackley in
Northamptonshire to lay their claims before the King.
Hi.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 243
Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely despotic CHAP. I.
idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the j7ta.
passionate surprize which breaks out in his reply. " Why 1214-
do they not ask for my kingdom ? " he cried. " I will X ?A?"
never grant such liberties as will make me a slave ! "
The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's
court had done their work. Held at bay by the prac-
tical sense of Henry, they had told on the more head-
strong nature of his sons. Eichard and John both
held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the
law of the land ; and to fetter that will by the customs
and franchises which were embodied in the barons'
claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of his
rights. 13 ut no imperialist theories had touched the
minds of his people. The country rose as one man at his
refusal. At the close of May London threw open her
gates to the forces of the barons, now arrayed under Eobert
Fitz- Walter as " Marshal of the Army of God and Holy
Church." Exeter and Lincoln followed the example of
the capital ; promises of aid came from Scotland and
Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under Eustace
de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the (
nobles who had as yet clung to the King, but whose hopes
of conciliation were blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at
last to the summons of the " Army of God." Pandulf
indeed and Archbishop Langton still remained with John,
but they counselled as Earl Eanulf and William Marshal
counselled his acceptance of the Charter. None in
fact counselled its rejection save his new Justiciar, the
Poitevin Peter des Eoches, and other foreigners who knew
the barons purposed driving them from the land. But
even the number of these was 'small ; there was a moment
when John found himself with but seven knights at his
back and before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was,
he had been taken utterly by surprize. It was in vain
that in the short respite he had gained from Christmas to
Easter he had summoned mercenaries to his aid and
244 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. appealed to his new suzerain, the Pope. Summons and
John appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart,
1214- John bowed to necessity and called the barons to a con-
1216. f erence on an island in the Thames, between Windsor and
Staines, near a marshy meadow by the river side, the
meadow of Runnymede. The King encamped on one
bank of the river, the barons covered the flat of Eunny-
mede on the other. Their delegates met on the 15th
of July in the island between them, but the negotia-
ations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of
unconditional submission. The Great Charter was dis-
cussed and agreed to in a single day.
The Great Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the
Charter, cathedrals and churches, and one copy may still be seen
in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with
the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled
parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence
on the earliest monument of English freedom which we
can see with our own eyes and touch with our own
hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men
have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty.
But in itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim
to establish any new constitutional principles. The
Charter of Henry the First formed the basis of the
whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes
introduced by Henry the Second. What was new in it
was its origin. In form, like the Charter on which it
was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In actual fact
it was a treaty between the whole English people and its
king. In it England found itself for the first time since
the Conquest a nation bound together by common national
interests, by a common national sympathy. In words
which almost close the Charter, the "community of the
whole land " is recognized as the great body from which
the restraining power of the baronage takes its validity.
There is no distinction of blood or class, of Norman or not
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
245
Norman, of noble or not noble. All are recognized as
Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.
Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnyniede
the rights not of baron and churchman only but those of
freeholder and merchant, of townsman and villein. The
provisions against wrong and extortion which the barons
drew up as against the King for themselves they drew up
as against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it
professed to be on Henry's Charter it was far from being a
mere copy of what had gone before. The vague expressions
of the old Charter were now exchanged for precise and
elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom
which the older grant did little more than recognize had
proved too weak to hold the An<_;evins ; and the baronage
set them aside for the restraints of written aiid defined
law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the
transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in
the nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate,
to the age of written legislation, of Parliaments and
Statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church
had shown its power of self-defence in the struggle over
the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights
alone retained the older and general form. But all vague-
ness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the
rights of Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to
security of person and property, to good government. "No
freeman," ran a memorable article that lies at the base of
our whole judicial system, "shall be seized or imprisoned,
or 'dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin:
we will not go against any man nor send against him, save
by legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land."
" To no man will we sell," runs another, " or deny, or
delay, right or justice." The great reforms of the past
reigns were now formally recognized; judges of assize
were to hold their circuits four times in the year, and the
Court was no longer to follow the King in his
VOL. I. 17
CHAP. I.
John.
1214
1216.
King's
246 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. wanderings over the realm but to sit in a fixed place
John. But the denial of justice under John was a small danger
1214- compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and
X ?I?' his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of
the scutage which Henry the Second had introduced, and
applied it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored
the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often abolished, under the
new name of " carucage," had seized the wool of the
Cistercians and the plate of the churches, and rated mov-
ables as well as land. John had again raised the rate of
scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his pleasure
without counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met
this abuse by a piovision on which our constitutional
system rests. " No scutage or aid [other than the three
customary feudal aids] shall be imposed in our realm save
by the common council of the realm ; " and to this Great
Council it was provided that prelates and the greater
barons should be summoned by special writ and all
tenants in chief through the sheriffs and bailiffs at least
forty days before. The provision defined what had pro-
bably been the common usage of the realm ; but the defi-
nition turned it into a national right, a right so momen-
tous that on it rests our whole Parliamentary life. Even
the baronage seem to have been startled when they realized
the extent of their claim ; and the provision was dropped
from the later issue of the Charter at the outset of the
next reign. But the clause brought home to the nation
at large their possession of a right which became dearer
as years went by. More and more clearly the nation
discovered that in these simple words lay the secret of
political power. It was the right of self-taxation that
England fought for under Earl Simon as she fought
for it under Hampden. It was the establishment of this
right which established English freedom.
The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they
claimed for the nation at large. The boon of free and
unbought justice was a boon for all, but a special
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
247
provision protected the poor. The forfeiture of the
freeman on conviction of felony was never to include
his tenement, or that of the merchant his wares, or that
of the countryman, as Henry the Second had long since
ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood were to
be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, the
exaction of forced labour, by royal officers was forbidden ;
and the abuses of the forest system were checked by a
clause which disafforested all forests made in John's reign.
The under-tenants were protected against all lawless ex-
actions of their lords in precisely the same terms as these
were protected against the lawless exactions ot the Crown.
The towns were secured in the enjoyment of their muni-
cipal privileges, their freedom from arbitrary taxation, their
rights of justice, of common deliberation, of regulation of
trade. " Let the city of London have all its old liberties
and its free customs, as well by land as by water. Besides
this, we wiJ and grant that all other cities, and boroughs,
and towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free
customs." The influence of the trading class is seen in
two other enactments by which freedom of journeying and
trade was secured to foreign merchants and an unifor-
mity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced
throughout the realm.
There remained only one question, and that the most
difficult of all; the question how to secure this order
which the Charter established in the actual government of
the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate
abuses ; the hostages were restored to their homes, the
foreigners banished by a clause in the Charter from the
country. But it was less easy to provide means for the
control of a King whom no man could trust. By the
treaty as settled at Kunnymede a council of twenty-four
barons were to be chosen from the general body of their
order to enforce on John the observance of the Charter
with the right of declaring war on the King should its
provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the Charter
CHAP;!.
John.
121-4
1216.
248
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. should not only be published throughout the whole country
jdhi but sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by
1214- order from the King. " They have given me four-
iai6> and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a burst of fury,
flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and
straw in his impotent rage. But the rage soon passed
into the subtle policy of which he was a master. After
a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for months
along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid
he had solicited from Eome and from the Continent.
It was not without definite purpose that he had become
the vassal of the Papacy. While Innocent w r as dream-
ing of a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its
head to enforce justice and religion on his under-kings,
John believed that the Papal protection would enable him
to rule as tyrannically as he would. The thunders of the
Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the
armies of England are at hand to protect the vileness and
oppression of a Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad.
His envoys were already at Eome, pleading for a con-
demnation of the Charter. The after action of the Papacy
shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English
freedom. But he was indignant that a matter which
might have been brought before his court of appeal as
overlord should have been dealt with by armed revolt,
and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal
tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the
King who submitted to his justice. He annulled the
Great Charter by a bull in August, and at the close of
the year excommunicated the barons.
His suspension of Stephen Langton from the exercize
of his office as Primate was a more fatal blow. Langton
hurried to Eome, and his absence left the barons with-
out a head at a moment when the very success of their
efforts was dividing them. Their forces were already
disorganized when autumn brought a host of foreign
soldiers from over sea to the King's standard. After
Landing
of Lewis.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 1204-^-1291.
249
starving Rochester into submission John found himself
strong enough to march ravaging through the Midland
and Northern counties, while his mercenaries spread like
locusts over the whole face of the laud. From Berwick
the King turned back triumphant to coop up his enemies
in London while fresh Papal excommunications fell on
the barons and the city. But the burghers set Innocent at
defiance. "The ordering of secular matters appertaineth
not to the Pope," they said, in words that seem like mut-
terings of the coming Lollardism; and at the advice of
Simon Langton, the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out
and mass was celebrated as before. Success however was
impossible for the undisciplined militia of the country and
the towns against the trained forces of the King, and
despair drove the barons to listen to Fitz-W alter and the
French party in their ranks, and to seek aid from over sea.
Philip had long been waiting the opportunity for his re-
venge upon John. In the April of 1216 his son Lewis ac-
cepted the ciown in spite of Innocent's excommunications,
and landed soon after in Kent with a considerable force.
As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries who
constituted John's host refused to fight against the French
sovereign and the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly
reversed. Deserted by the bulk of his troops, the King
was forced to fall rapidly back on the Welsh Marches, while
his rival entered London and received the submission of
the larger part of England. Only Dover held out obstinately
against Lewis, By a series of rapid marches John suc-
ceeded in distracting the plans of the barons and in
relieving Lincoln ; then after a short stay at Lynn he
crossed the Wash in a fresh movement to the north. In
crossing however his army was surprized by the tide, and
his baggage with the royal treasures washed away. Fever
seized the baffled tyrant as he reached the Abbey of
Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed by a gluttonous
debauch, and on the 19th of October John breathed bis
last at Newark.
CHAP. 1.
John.
1214
CHAPTER II.
HENRY THE THIRD.
1216-1232.
William THE death of John changed the whole face of English affairs,
ta ' His son, Henry of Winchester, was but nine years old, and
the pity which was stirred by the child's helplessness was
aided by a sense of injustice in burthening him with the
iniquity of his father. At his death John had driven from
his side even the most loyal of his barons; but William
Marshal had clung to him to the last, and with him was
Gualo, the Legate of Innocent's successor, Honorius the
Third. The position of Gualo as representative of the
Papal over-lord of the realm was of the highest importance,
and his action showed the real attitude of Eome towards
English freedom. The boy- king was hardly crowned at
Gloucester when Legate and Earl issued in his name the
very Charter against which his father had died fighting.
Only the clauses which regulated taxation and the summon-
ing of parliament were as yet declared to be suspended.
The choice of William Marshal as "governor of King
and kingdom" gave weight to this step ; and its effrct was
seen when the contest was renewed in 1217. Lewis was
at first successful in the eastern counties, but the political
reaction waS aided by jealousies which broke out between
'the English and French nobles in his force, and the
first drew gradually away from him. So general was
the -defection that at the opening of summer William
Marshal felt himself strong enough for a blow at his foes
BOOK ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 251
Lewis himself was investing Dover and a joint army of
French and English barons under the Count of Perche
and Eobert Fitz-Walter was besieging Lincoln when
gathering troops rapidly from the royal castles the regent
marched to the relief of the latter town. Cooped up in
its narrow streets and attacked at once by the Earl and
the garrison, the barons fled in utter rout ; the Count of
Perche fell on the field, Eobert Eitz- Walter was taken
prisoner. Lewis at once retreated on London and called
for aid from France. But a more terrible defeat crushed
his remaining hopes. A small English fleet which set sail
from Dover under Hubert de Burgh fell boldly on the re-
inforcements which were crossing under escort of Eustace
the Monk, a well-known freebooter of the Channel. Some
incidents of the fight light up for us the naval warfare of
the time. From the decks of the English vessels bowmen
poured their arrows into the crowded transports, others
hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more
active vessels crashed with their armed grows into the sides
of the French ships. The skill of the mariners of the
Cinque Ports turned the day against the larger force s of their
opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly destroyed.
The royal army at once closed upon London, but resistance
was really at an end. By a treaty concluded at Lambeth
in September Lewis promised to withdraw from England
on payment of a sum which he claimed as debt ; his
adherents were restored to their possessions, the liberties
of London and other towns confirmed, and the prisoners
on either side set at liberty. A fresh issue of the Charter,
though in its modified form, proclaimed yet more clearly
the temper and policy of the Earl Marshal.
His death at the opening of 1219, after a year spent in Hubert dc
giving order to the realm, brought no change in the system
he had adopted. The control of affairs passed into the
hands of a new legate, Pandulf, of Stephen Langton who
had just returned forgiven from Eome, and of the Justiciar,
Hubert de Burgh. It was a time of transition, and the
252
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. temper of the Justiciar was eminently transitional.
Henry" the Bred iii the school of Henry the Second, Hubert had
Third.
1216
1232.
little sympathy with national freedom, and though reso-
lute to maintain the Charter he can have had small love
for it ; his conception of good government, like that of his
master, lay in a wise personal administration, in the pre-
servation of order and law. But he combined with this a
thoroughly English desire for national independence, a hatred
of foreigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and
treasure in Continental struggles. Able as he proved him-
self, his task was one of no common difficulty. He was
hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A Papal
legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share
in the administration of the realm as the representative of
its over-lord and as guardian of the young sovereign.
A foreign party too had still a footing in the kingdom, for
William Marshal had been unable to rid himself of men
like Peter des Roches or Faukes de Breaute, who had fought
on the royal side in the struggle against Lewis. Hubert
had to deal too with the anarchy which that struggle
left behind it. From the time of the Conquest the centre
of England had been covered with the domains of great
houses, whose longings were for feudal independence and
whose spirit of revolt had been held in check partly by
the stern rule of the Kings and partly by the rise of a
baronage sprung from the Court and settled for the most
part in the North. The oppression of John united both
the earlier and these newer houses in the struggle for the
Charter. But the character of each remained unchanged,
and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break
out in their old lawlessness and defiance of the Crown.
For a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed to
revive. But the Justiciar was resolute to crush it, and lie
was backed by the strenuous efforts of Stephen Langton. A
new and solemn coronation of the young King in 1220
was followed by a demand for the restoration of the royal
castles which had been seized by the barons and foreigners.
in.] THE CHARTER. 1204-1291. 253
The Earl of Chester, the head of the feudal baronage, though CHAP. II.
he rose in armed rebellion, quailed before the march of HenrjTthe
Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A Third -
more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de HasT.
Breaute, the sheriff of six counties, with six royal castles
in his hands, and allied both with the rebel barons and
Llewelyn of Wales. But in 1224 his castle of Bedford
was besieged for two months ; and on its surrender the
stern justice of Hubert hung the twenty-four knights and
their retainers who formed the garrison before its walls.
The blow was effectual ; the royal castles were surrendeied
by the barons, and the land was once more at peace. Freed
from foreign soldiery, the country was freed also from the
presence of the foreign legate. Langton wrested a promise
from Koine that so long as he lived no future legate should
be sent to England, and with Pandulf's resignation in 1221
the direct interference of the Papacy in the government of
the realm came to an end. But even these services of the
Primate were small compared with his services to English
freedom. Throughout his life the Charter was the first
object of his care. The omission of the' articles which
restricted the royal power over taxation in the Charter
which was published at Henry's accession in 1216 was
doubtless due to the Archbishop's absence and disgrace
at Home. The suppression of disorder seems to have
revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal
ministers; for when Laugton demanded afresh confirmation
of the Charter in Parliament at London William Brewer,
one of the King's councillors, protested that it had been
extorted by force and was without legal validity. "If
you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in
anger, "you would not throw a stumblingblock in the way
of the peace of the realm." The young King was cowed
by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised observance of
the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of
such a temper among the royal councillors that made
Langton and the baronage demand two years later a fresh
254
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
State of
the
Church.
CHAP. II. promulgation of the Charter as the price of a subsidy,
HenrTthe anc ^ Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
Third. constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a
laaaT grant to the Crown.
These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the govern-
ment of the realm year after year in accordance with its pro-
visions were gradually bringing the new freedom home to
the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty was at
this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement
which stirred English society to its depths. Never had the
priesthood wielded such boundless power over Christ-
endom as in the days of Innocent the Third and his
immediate successors. But its religious hold on the
people was loosening day by day. The old reverence for
the Papacy was fading away before the universal resent-
ment at its political ambition, its lavish use of interdict
and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degrada-
tion of the most sacred sentences into means of financial
extortion. In Italy the struggle that was opening between
Rome and Frederick the Second disclosed a spirit of scepti-
cism which among the Epicurean poets of Florence denied
the immortality of the scul and attacked the very founda-
tions of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and
Provence had embraced the hereby of the Albigenses and
thrown off all allegiance to the Papacy. Even in England,
though there were no signs as yet of religious revolt, and
though the political action of Rome had been in the :
main on the side of freedom, there was a spirit of re-
sistance to its interference with national concerns which
broke out in the struggle against John. " The Pope has
no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London
to the interdict of Honorius. And within the English
Church itself there was much to call for reform. Its
attitude in the strife for the Charter as well as the after
work of the Primate had made it more popular than ever ;
but its spiritual energy was less than its political.
The disuse of preaching, the decline of the monastic
lll.J THE CHARTER. 12041291. 255
orders into rich landowners, the non-residence and ignor- CHAP. II.
ance of the parish-priests, lowered the religious influence Henry" the
of the clergy. The abuses of the time foiled even the
energy of such men as Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, lisa.
His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt taverns,
to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in the riot
and debauchery of the life of the baronage. But such
prohibitions witness to the prevalence of the evils they
denounce. Bishops and deans were still withdrawn from
their ecclesiastical duties to act as ministers, judges, or
ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds at a
time on royal favourites like John Mansel. Abbeys
absorbed the tithes of parishes and then served them by
half-starved vicars, while exemptions purchased fiom
Rome shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks
from all episcopal discipline. And behind all this was
a group of secular statesmen and scholars, the successors of
such critics as Walter Map, waging indeed no open war-
fare with the Church, but noting with bitter sarcasm its
abuses and its faults.
To bring the world back again within the pale of the The
Church was the aim of two religious orders which sprang friars.
suddenly to life at the opening of the thirteenth century.
The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at the sight
of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win
the Albigensian heretics to the faith. "Zeal," he cried,
" must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity
by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth." His
fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the
mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of
Assist The life of Francis falls like a stream of tender
light across the darkness of the time. In the frescoes of
Giotto or the verse of Dante we see him take Poverty for
his bride. He strips himself of all, he flings his very
clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with Nature
and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his
sister and the sun for his brother, he calls on his brother
256
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
Henry the
Third.
1216
1232.
The
Friars
and the
Towns.
the Wind, and his sister the Water. His last faint cry
was a " Welcome, Sister Death ! " Strangely as the two
men differed from each other, their aim was the same to
convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile know-
ledge with orthodoxy, above all to carry the Gospel to the
poor. The work was to be done by an utter reversal of
the older inonasticism, by seeking personal salvation in
effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging
the solitary of tho cloister lor the preacher, the monk for
the "brother" or friar. To force the new "brethren " into
entire dependence on those among whom they laboured
their vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality ; the
" Begging Friars " were to subsist solely on alms, they
might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses
in which they lived were to be held in trust for them by
others. The tide of popular enthusiasm which welcomed
their appearance swept before it the reluctance of Rome,
the jealousy of the older orders, the opposition of the
parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in
a few years round Francis .and Dominic ; and the begging
preachers, clad in coarse frock of serge with a girdle of
rope round their waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries
over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured
in the Universities, and preached and toiled among the
poor.
To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a
religious revolution. They had been left for the most part
to the worst and most ignorant of the clergy, the mass-
priest, whose sole subsistence lay in his fees. Burgher
and artizan were left to spell out what religious instruction
they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the Church's
ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures which were
graven on the walls of its minsters. We can hardly
wonder at the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed the
itinerant preacher whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and
familiar story brought religion into the fair and the mar-
ket place. In England, where the Black Friars of; Dominic
Hi.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
257
Third -
1232!
arrived in 1221, the Grey Friars of Francis in 1224, both CHAP. II.
were received with the same delight. As the older orders
had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They
had hardly landed at Dover before they made straight for
London and Oxford. In their ignorance of the road the
first two Grey Brothers lost their way in the woods between
Oxford and Baldon, and fearful of night and of the floods
turned aside to a grange of the monks of Abingdon. Their
ragged clothes and. foreign gestures, as they prayed for
hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the
jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break
in the monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and
cellarer to the door to welcome them and witness their tricks.
The disappointment was too much for the temper of the
monks, and the brothers were kicked roughly from the gate
to find their night's lodging under a tree. But the welcome
of the townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will and
opposition of both clergy and monks. The work of the
Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid progress
of population within the boroughs had outstripped the
sanitary regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or
plague or the more terrible scourge of leprosy festered in
the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was to haunts
such as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and
the Grey Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest
and poorest quarters of each town. Their first work lay
in the noisome lazar-houses ; it was amongst the lepers
that they commonly chose the site of their homes At
London they settled in the shambles of Newgate ; at Oxford
they made their way to the swampy ground between its
walls and the streams of Thames. Huts of mud and
timber, as mean as the huts around them, rose within the
rough fence and ditch that bounded the Friary. The order
of Francis made a hard fight against the taste for sumptu-
ous buildings and for greater personal comfort which char-
acterized the time. " I did not enter into religion to build
walls," protested an English provincial when the brethren
258 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. pressed for a larger house ; and Albert of Pisa ordered a
u ^Tt>,o stone cloister which the burgesses of Southampton had
.ticnry LUG
Third. ^nilt f or them to be razed to the ground. " You need no
1232' li^ 3 mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his
scornful reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick
went shod. An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one
morning, and wore them at matins. At night he dreamed
that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass between
Gloucester and Oxford with shouts of " Kill, kill ! " "I
am a friar," shrieked the terror-stricken brother. "You
lie," was the instant answer, " for you go shod." The Friar
lifted up his foot in disproof, but the shoe was there. In
an agony of repentance he woke and flung the pair out of
window.
Revival of It wa with less success that the order struggled against
Theology, the passion of the time for knowledge. Their vow of poverty,
rig dly interpreted as it was by their founders, would have
denied them the possession of books or materials for study.
" I arn your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis cried
passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the
news of a great doctor's reception was brought, to him at
Paris, his countenance fell. "I am afraid, my son," he
replied, " that such doctors will be the destruction of my
vineyard. They are the true doctors who with the meek-
ness of wisdom show forth good works for the edification
of their neighbours." One kind of knowledge indeed their
work almost forced on them. The popularity of their
preaching soon led them to the deeper study of theology ;
within a short time after their establishment in England
we find as many as thirty readers or lecturers appointed at
Hereford, Leicester, Bristol, and other places, and a regular
success' on of teachers provided at each University. The
Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of
their new church while philosophy was taught in the
cloister. The first provincial of the Grey Friars built a
school in their Oxford house and persuaded Grosseteste tc
lecture there. His influence after his promotion to the
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
259
see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure theological
study among the Friars, as well as their establishment in
the University ; and in this work he was ably seconded
by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco, under whom
the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation
throughout Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Koln borrowed
from it their professors : it was through its influence
indeed that Oxford rose to a position hardly inferior to
that of Paris itself as a centre of scholasticism. But the
result of this powerful impulse was soon seen to be
fatal to the wider intellectual activity which had till now
characterized the Universities. Theology in its scholastic
form resumed its supremacy in the schools. Its only
efficient rivals were practical studies such as medicine and
law. The last, as he was by far the greatest, instance of
the freer and wider culture which had been the glory of
the last century, was Roger Bacon, and no name better
illustrates the rapidity and completeness with which it
passed away.
Roger Bacon was the child of royalist parents who
were driven into exile and reduced to poverty by the civil
wars. From Oxford, where he studied under Edmund of
Abingdon to whom he owed his introduction to the works
of Aristotle, he passed to the University of Paris, and
spent his whole heritage there in costly studies and experi-
ments. " From my youth up," he writes, " I have laboured
at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the friendship
of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for
knowledge. I have caused youths to be instructed in
languages, geometry, arithmetic, the construction of tables
and instruments, and many needful things besides." The
difficulties in the way of such studies as he had resolved
to pursue were immense. He was without instruments
or means of experiment. " Without mathematical instru-
ments no science can be mastered," he complains after-
wards, " and these instruments are not to be found among
the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred
CHAP. II.
Third.
1216-
1232.
Roger
Bacon.
2(JO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK.
CHAP. II. pounds. Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary,
Henry" the tables on which the motions of the heavens are certified
Third. f rom t j ie beginning to the end of the world without daily
1232 labour, but these tables are \vorth a king's ransom and
could not be made without a vast expense. I have often
attempted the composition of such tables, but could not
finish them through failure of means and the folly of those
whom I had to employ." Books were difficult and some-
times even impossible to procure. " The scientific works
of Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other
ancients cannot be had without great cost ; their principal
works have not been translated into Latin, and copies of
others are not to be found in ordinary libraries or else-
where. The admirable books of Cicero de Republica are
not to be found anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I
have made anxious enquiry for them in different parts of
the world, and by various messengers. I could never find
the works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for
them during twenty years and more. And so it is with
many more most useful books connected with the science
of morals." It is only words like these of his own that
bring home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the
patience, the energy of Eoger Bacon. He returned as a
teacher to Oxford, and a touching record of his devotion
to those whom he taught remains in the story of John of
London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above
the general level of his pupils. " When he came to me
as a poor boy," says Bacon in recommending him to the
Pope, " I caused him to be nurtured and instructed for the
love of God, especially since for aptitude and innocence I
have never found so towardly a youth. Five or six. years
ago I caused him to be taught in languages, mathematics,
and optics, and I have gratuitously instructed him with
my own lips since the time that I received your mandate.
There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root
of philosophy, though he has not produced the branches,
flowers, and fruit because of his youth, and because he has
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 261
had no experience in teaching. But he has the means of CHAP. II.
surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and goes on Henry" the
as he has begun." Third.
The pride with which he refers to his system of instruc- if H"
tion was justified by the wide extension which he gave to
scientific teaching in Oxford. It is probably of himself
that he speaks when he tells us that " the science of optics
has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris or elsewhere
among the Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a science
on which he had laboured for ten years. But his teaching
seems to have fallen on a barren soil. From the moment
when the Friars settled in the Universities scholasticism
absorbed the whole mental energy of the student world.
The temper of the age was against scientific or philo-
sophical studies. The older enthusiasm for knowledge
was dying down; the study of law was the one source
of promotion, whether in Church or state ; philosophy was
discredited, literature in its purer forms became almost
extinct. After forty years of incessant study, Bacon
found himself in his own words " unheard, forgotten,
buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy,
but his wealth was gone. " During the twenty years that
I have specially laboured in the attainment of wisdom,
abandoning the path of common men, I have spent on
these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not to
mention the cost of books, experiments, instruments,
tables, the acquisition of languages, and the like. Add to
all this the sacrifices I have made to procure the friend-
ship of the wise and to obtain well-instructed assistants."
Kuined and baffled in his hopes, Bacon listened to the
counsels of his friend Grosseteste and renounced the
world. He became a friar of the order of St. Francis,
an order where books and study were looked upon as
hindrances to the work which it had specially under-
taken, that of preaching among the masses of tlie poor.
He had written little. So far was he from attempting
to write that his new superiors prohibited him from
VOL. I. 18
262 i HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. publishing anything under pain of forfeiture of the book
_ th and penance of bread and water. But we can see the
Third. craving of his mind, the passionate instinct of creation
iaasL which marks the man of genius, in the joy with which
he seized a strange opportunity that suddenly opened
before him. " Some few chapters on different subjects,
written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got
abroad, and were brought by one of the Pope's chaplains
under the notice of Clement the Fourth. The Pope at once
invited Bacon to write. But difficulties stood in his way.
Materials, transcription, and other expenses for such a work
as he projected would cost at least 60, and the Pope
sent not a penny. Bacon begged help from his family,
but they were ruined like himself. No one would lend
to a mendicant friar, and when his friends raised the
money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the
hope of repayment from Clement. Nor was this all ; the
work itself, abstruse and scientific as was its subject, had
to be treated in a clear and popular form to gain the
Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed
another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost super-
human energy. By the close of 1267 the work was
done. The " greater work," itself in modern form a
closely printed folio, with its successive summaries and
appendices in the " lesser" and the " third " works (which
make a good octavo more) were produced and forwarded to
the Pope within fifteen months.
The No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself.
Opus The "Opus Majus" is alike wonderful in plan and detail.
lius ' Bacon's main purpose, in the words of Dr. Whewell, is " to
urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of philoso-
phizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not
made a greater progress, to draw back attention to sources
of knowledge which had been unwisely neglected, to dis-
cover other sources which were yet wholly unknown, and
to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the
vast advantages which it offered." The developeinent of his
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
263
scheme is on the largest scale ; he gathers together the whole
knowledge of his time on every branch of science which it :
possessed, and as he passes them in review he suggests im-
provements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in
his after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his
perseverance in insisting on the necessity of correct texts,
of an accurate knowledge of languages, of an exact inter-
pretation, are hardly less remarkable than his scientific
investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics,
from mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the
name of mathematics indeed was included all the physical
science of the time. " The neglect of it for nearly thirty
or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, " hath nearly
destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he
who knows not mathematics cannot know any other
sciences ; and what is more, he cannot discover his own
ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,
chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something
of scientific form, and like rapid sketches are given
of the question of climate, hydrography, geography,
and astrology. The subject of optics, his own especial
study, is treated with greater fulness ; he enters into the
question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing
problems which lie more strictly within the province
of optical science. In a word, the " Greater Work," to
borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the En- *
cyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth
century." The whole of the afterworks of Roger Bacon
and treatise after treatise has of late been disentombed
from our libraries are but developements in detail of
the magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such
a work was its own great reward. From the world
around Roger Bacon could look for and found small recog-
nition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have
reached its author from the Pope. If we may credit a
more recent story, his writings only gained him a prison
from his order. " Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old man
CHAP. II.
enrjTtiie
lhirdi
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
CHAP.IH. died as be had lived, and it has been reserved for later
Henry" the ages to roll away the obscurity t,h:it had gathered round
Th ^f his memory, and to place first in the great roll of modern
ifaiT science the name of Koger Bacon.
Schoias- r ^ ne fc"l lire f Bacon. shows the overpowering strength
ticism. of the drift towards the practical studies, and above all
towards theology in its scholastic guise. Aristotle, who had
been so long held at bay as the most dangerous foe of
mediaeval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his
logical method in the discussion and definition of theo-
logical dogma into its unexpected ally. It \va^ this very
method that led to " that unprofitable subtlety and
curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the
scholastic philosophy. But " certain it is " to continue
the same great thinker's comment on the Friars "that if
these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and un-
wearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and
contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to the
great advancement of all learning and knowledge." What,
amidst all their errors, they undoubtedly did was to insist
on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a more exact
use of words, to introduce a clear and methodical treat-
ment of all subjects into discussion, and above all to
substitute an appeal to reason for unquestioning obedience
to authority. It was by this critical tendency, by the
" new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave
to enquiry, that in spite of the trivial questions with
which it often concerned itself it trained the human mind
through the next two centuries to a temper which fitted
it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that
brought about the Renascence. And it is to the
same spirit of fearless enquiry as well as to the strong
popular sympathies which their very constitution neces-
sitated that we must attribute the influence which the
Friars undoubtedly exerted in the coming struggle between
the people and the Crown. Their position is clearly and
strongly marked throughout the whole contest. The
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
265
Third.
1216
1232.
Its
Political
Influence.
University of Oxford, which soon fell under the direction CHAP. 11.
of their teaching, stood first in its resistance to Papal Henry" the
exactions and its claim of English liberty. The classes in
the towns, on whom the influence of the Friars told most
directly, were steady supporters of freedom throughout the
Barons' Wars.
Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was
of immense value, for it set on a religious basis and gave
an intellectual form to the constitutional theory of the
relations between King and people which was slowly
emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assum-
ing the responsibility of a Christian king to God for
the good government of his realm, in surrounding the
pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious sanctions,
the mediaeval Church entered its protest against any
personal despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still
to the doctrine of a contract between king and people ;
and their trenchant logic made short work of the royal
claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience.
" He who would be in truth a king," ran a poem which
embodies their teaching at this time in pungent verse
" he is a ' free king ' indeed if he rightly rule himself and
his realm. All things are lawful to him for the govern-
ment of his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its
destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king's
duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law."
" Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be
known what the generality, to whom their laws are best
known, think on the matter. They w r ho are ruled by the
laws know those laws best ; they who make daily trial of
them are best acquainted with them ; and since it is their
own affairs which are at stake they will take the more
care and will act with an eye to their own peace." " It
concerns the community to see what sort of men ought
justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The consti-
tutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the
whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs
266 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. and to have a voice in the selection of the administrators
Henry" the of government, had never been so clearly stated before.
Th ^l dt But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this, that
ifsi" the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the
popular preacher. The theory of government wrought out
in cell and lecture- room was carried over the length and
breadth of the land by the mendicant brother, begging
his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or house-
wife at the cottage door, and setting up his portable
pulpit in village green or market-place. His open-air
sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to coarse
story and homely mother wit, became the journals
as well as the homilies of the day ; political and social
questions found place in them side by side with spiritual
matters ; and the rudest countryman learned his tale of
a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened
to the rambling passionate, humorous discourse of the
Henry beting friar.
. /T>L * J OO O
Never had there been more need of such a political edu-
cation of the whole people than at the moment we~-have
reached. For the triumph of the Charter, the constitu-
tional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested
mainly on the helplessness of the King. As boy or youth,
Henry the Third had bowed to the control of William
Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was
now grown to manhood, and his character was from this
hour to tell on the events of his reign. From the cruelty,
the lust, the impiety of his father the young King was
absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a re-
finement in his temper which won a personal affection for
him even in his worst days from some who bitterly censured
his rule. The Abbey-church of Westminster, with which
he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor, remains a
monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend
of men of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science"
of the troubadour. But of the political capacity which was
the characteristic of his house he had little or none.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
267
CHAP. II.
Henry the
Third.
1216
1232.
Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,
impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and
tongue, reckless in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in
the display of an empty and prodigal magnificence, his one
notion of government was a dream of arbitrary power.
But frivolous as the King's mood was, he clung with a
weak man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy ; and
this was the policy not of Hubert or Langton but of
John. He cherished the hope of recovering his heritage
across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of
the Crown ; and looked on the pledges of the Great
Charter as promises which force had wrested from the
King and which force could wrest back again. France
was telling more and more on English opinion ; and the
claim which the French kings were advancing to a divine
arid absolute power gave a sanction in Henry's rnind to the
claim of absolute authority which was still maintained
by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all
he clung to the alliance with the Papacy. Henry was
personally devout ; and his devotion only bound him the
more firmly to his father's system of friendship with
Piome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the
Papal See. Ptorne had saved him from ruin as a child ;
its legate had set the crown on his head ; its threats and
excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again,
a royal party. Above all it was Borne which could alone
free him from his oath to the Charter, and which could
alone defend him if like his father he had to front the
baronage in arms.
His temper was now to influence the whole system of England
government. In 1227 Henry declared himself of age ; andRo >
and though Hubert still remained Justiciar every year
saw him more powerless in his struggle with the ten-
dencies of the King. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228
was a yet heavier blow to English freedom. In persuad-
ing Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had averted
a conflict between the national desire for self-government
i>G8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. and the Papal claims of ovcrlordship. But his death gave
Henry" the * ne signal for a more serious struggle, for it was in the
Third. oppression of the Church of England by the Popes through
1232' * ne reign of Henry that the little rift first opened which
was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one
from the other at the Keformation. In the mediaeval theory
of the Papacy, as Innocent and his successors held it,
Christendom, as a spiritual realm of which the Popes were
the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms which
lay within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the
Bishops were his barons, and the clergy were his under
vassals. As the King demanded aids and subsidies in case
of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Kome might
the head of the Church demand aid in need from the
priesthood. And at this moment the need of the Popes
was sore. Eome had plunged into her desperate conflict
with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking
everywhere for the means of recruiting her drained ex-
chequer. On England she believed herself to have more
than a spiritual claim for support. She regarded the
kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its
overlord. It was only by the promise of a heavy subsidy
that Henry in 1229 could buy the Papal confirmation of
Langton's successor. But the baronage was of other mind
than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the
demand of an aid to Piome from the laity was at once
rejected by them. Her spiritual claim over the allegiance
of the clergy however remained to fall back upon, and the
clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had
already claimed for the Papal see a right of nomination
to some prebends in each cathedral church ; he now
demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood,
and a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs.
Exaction followed exaction as the needs of the Papal
treasury grew greater. The very rights of lay patrons
were set aside, and under the name of " reserves " pre-
sentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 269
market, while Italian clergy were quartered on the best CHAP. II.
livings of the Church. HenrjTthe
The general indignation at last found vent in a wide T ^^-
conspiracy. In 1231 letters from " the whole body of \zs%.
those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the p^iiof
Romans " were scattered over the kingdom by armed men ; Hubert dt
tithes gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were ^ ur 9 h -
seized and given to the poor ; the Papal collectors were
beaten and their bulls trodden under foot. The re-
monstrances of Rome only made clearer the national
character of the movement ; but as enquiry went on the
hand of the Justiciar himself was seen to have been at
work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done ;
royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving
their acts; and the Pope openly laid the charge of the
outbreak on the secret connivance of Hubert de Burgh.
No charge could have been mere fatal to Hubert in the
mind of the King. But he was already in full collision with
the Justiciar on other grounds. Henry was eager to vindi-
cate his right to the great heritage his father had lost : the
Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they loved Eng-
land but because they hated France, spurre|ji him to war; and
in 1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons.
But while Hubert held power no serious effort was made
to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman call was rejected
through his influence, and when a great armament gathered
at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for
want of transport and supplies. The young King drew
his sword and rushed madly on the Justiciar, charging
him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.
But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred
for the year. In 1230 Henry actually took the field in
Britanny and Poitou, but the failure of the campaign was
again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was
said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was
at this moment that the Papal accusation filled up the
measure of Henry's wrath against his minister. In the
270 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK in.
CHAP. II. summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,
*i. and dragged from a chapel at Brentvvood where threats of
Henry tne 3
Third. death had driven him to take sanctuary. A smith who
1232' was ordered to shackle him stoutly refused. " I will die
any death " he said " before I put iron on the man who
freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from
France." The remonstrances of the Bishop of London
forced the King to replace Hubert iii sanctuary, but
hunger compelled him to surrender ; he was thrown a
prisoner into the Tower, and though soon released he
remained powerless in the realm. His fall left England
without a check to the rule of Henry himself*
CHAPTEE III.
THE 'BARONS' WAR.
12321272.
ONCE master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to The
A 1 *
declare his plan of government. The two great checks on ALl
a merely personal rule lay as yet in the authority of the
great ministers of State and in the national character of
the administrative body which had been built up by Henry
the Second. Both of these checks Henry at once set
himself to remove. He would be his own minister. The
Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the King
and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts.
The Chancellor had grown into a great officer of State, and
in 1226 this office had been conferred on the Bishop of
Chichester by the advice and consent of the Great Council.
But Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him and
naming to this as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy
was to entrust all high posts of government to mere
clerks of the royal chapel ; trained administrators, but
wholly dependent on the royal will. He found equally
dependent agents of administration by surrounding him-
self with foreigners. The return of Peter des Eoches to
the royal councils was the first sign of the new system ;
and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were sum-
moned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial
and administrative posts about the Court. The King's
marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence was followed by
the arrival in England of the new Queen's uncles. The
272 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP III. " Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls
^T Peter of Savoy who arrived five years later to take for a
Barons' w liile the chief place at Henry's council-board ; another
brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop Ed-
1272. mund's death to the highest post in the realm save the
Crown itself, the Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The
young Primate, like his- brother, brought with him foreign
fashions strange enough to English folk. His armed re-
tainers pillaged the markets. His own arch (episcopal fist
felled to the ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-
Smithfield who opposed his visitation. London was roused
by the outrage ; on the King's refusal to do justice a noisy
crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at
Lambeth with cries of vengeance, and the " handsome
archbishop," as his followers styled him, was glad to
escape over sea. This brood of Provencals was followed
in 1 243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's
queen, Isabella of Angouleme. Aymer was made Bishop
of Winchester ; William of Valence received at a later
time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the King's jester
was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed
these great nobles to find a fortune in the English realm.
The Poitevin lords brought in their train a bevy of ladies
in search of husbands, and three English earls who were
in royal wardship were wedded by the King to foreigners.
The whole machinery of administration passed into the
hands of men who were ignorant and contemptuous of the
principles of English government or English law. Their
rule was a mere anarchy ; the very retainers of the royal
household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants
in the precincts of the Court; corruption invaded the
judicature ; at the close of this period of misrule Henry
de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.
Henrji That rnisgovernment of this kind should have gone on
Baronage, unchecked in defiance of the provisions of the Charter
was owing to the disunion and sluggishness of the English
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
273
1232-
1272.
baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard, CHAP. Ill,
the Earl Mareschal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth The
as their leader to demand the expulsion of the sti angers war. 8
from the royal Council. Though deserted by the bulk of
the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent against him,
and forced the King to treat lor peace. But at this critical
moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des
Roches to Ireland ; he fell in a petty skirmish, and the
barons were left without a head. The interposition of
a new primate, Edmund of Abin^don, forced the King to
dismiss Peter from court ; but there was no real change of
system, and the remonstrances of the Archbishop and
of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, remained
fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial
straits of the King forced him to heap exaction on
exaction. The Forest Laws were used as a means of
extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant, loans w r ere
wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at
free quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind
however \vere utterly insufficient to defray the cost of the
King's prodigality. A sixth of the royal revenue was
wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The deUa of
the Crown amounted to four times its annual income.
Henry was forced to appeal for aid to the great Council
of the realm, and aid was granted in 1237 on promise
of control in its expenditure and on condition that the
King confirmed the Charter. But Charter and promise
were alike disregarded; and in 1242 the resentment of
the barons expressed itself in a determined protest and
a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal
however Henry gathered money enough for a costly rxje-
dition for the recovery of Poitou. The attempt ended in
failure and shame. At Taillebourg the King's force fled
in disgraceful rout before the French as far as Saintes,
and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a
disease which scattered his army saved Bordeaux from
the conquerors. The treasury was utterly drained, and
274 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with
^~ his own mouth to the baronage. But the barons had now
Barons' ra llj e d to a plan of action, and we can hardly fail to
1232 attribute their union to the man who appears at their
1272. ] iea d. This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.
Simon of Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose
Montfort. name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade
against the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul, and
who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his
mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the
house of Beaumont. But as Simon's tendencies were for
the most part French John had kept the revenues of the
earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim
of his elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry
the Third to accept a divided allegiance. The refusal
marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of nationality
which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury
chose to remain French, and by a family arrangement
with the King's sanction the honour of Leicester passed
in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice made
Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved the
jealousy of the barons, and this jealousy was quickened
by a secret match in 1238 with Eleanor, the King's sister
and widow of the second William Marshal. The match
formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued
throughout his reign of bringing the great earldoms
into closer connexion with the Crown. That of Chester
had fallen to the King through the extinction of the
family of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother,
Eichard ; Salisbury by his cousin. Simon's marriage
linked the Earldom of Leicester to the royal house.
But it at once brought Simon into conflict with the
nobles and the Church. The baronage, justly indignant
that such a step should have been takor, without their con-
sent, for the Queen still remained childless and Eleanor's
children by one whom they looked on as a stranger
promised to be heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
275
1232
1272.
failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard CHAP. III
of Cornwall, who was satisfied with Earl Simon's withdrawal xi
from the Royal Council. The censures of the Church on war*
Eleanor's breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which
she had made at her first husband's death were averted
with hardly less difficulty by a journey to Rome. It was
after a year of trouble that Simon returned to England
to reap as it seemed the fruits of his high alliance. He
was now formally made Earl of Leicester and re-entered
the Royal Council. But it is probable that he still found
there the old jealousy which had forced from him a pledge
of retirement after his marriage ; and that his enemies now
succeeded in winning over the King. In a few months, at
any rate, he found the changeable. King alienated from him,
he was driven by a burst of royal passion from the realm,
and was forced to spend seven months in France.
Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in the
spring of 1240 the Earl was again received with honour at
court. It was from this moment however that his posi-
tion changed. As yet it had been that of a foreigner,
confounded ill the eyes of the nation at large with the
Poitevins and Prove^als who swarmed about the court.
But in the years of retirement which followed Simon's
return to England his whole attitude was reversed. There
was as yet no quarrel with the King: he followed him in
a campaign across the Channel, and shared in his defeat at
Saintes. But he was a friend of Grosseteste and a patron
of the Friars, and became at last known as a steady
opponent of the misrule about him. When prelates and
barons chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry
in 1244 Simon stood with Earl Richard of Cornwall at the
head of them. A definite plan of reform disclosed his
hand. The confirmation of the Charter was to be followed
by the election of Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer in the
Great Council. Nor was this restoration of a responsible
ministry enough ; a perpetual Council was to attend the
King and devise further reforms. The plan broke against
Simoii's
early
action.
576
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
Simon in
(toscony.
CHAP. ill. Henry's resistance and a Papal prohibition ; but from this
time the Earl took his stand in the front rank of the patriot
leaders. The struggle of the following years was chiefly
with the exactions of the Papacy, and Simon was one of
the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246
addressed to the court of Eome. He was present at the
Lent Parliament of 1248, and we can hardly doubt that
he shared in its bold rebuke of the King's misrule and its
renewed demand for the appointment of the higher officers
of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the
danger of leaving at home such a centre of all efforts
after reform that brought Henry to send .him in the
autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for the
Crown the last of its provinces over sea.
Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well as
by revolt within, the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand;
but in a few months the stern rule of the new Seneschal
had quelled every open foe within or without its bounds.
To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder
task. Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the JRhine :
" they rode the country by night," wrote the Earl, " like
thieves, in parties of twenty or thirty or forty," and gathered
in leagues against the Seneschal, who set himself to exact
their dues to the Crown and to shield merchant and hus-
bandman from their violence. For four years Earl Simon
steadily warred down these robber bands, storming castles
where there was need, and bridling the wilder country with
a chain of forts. Hard as the task was, his real difficulty
lay at home. Henry sent neither money nor men and the
E;irl had to raise both from his own resources, while the
men whom he was fighting found friends in Henry's council-
chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled to answer
charges of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles
and pressed by his enemies at home on the King. Henry's
feeble and impulsive temper left him open to pressure like
this ; and though each absence of the Earl from the pro-
vince was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder which
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
277
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
only his presence repressed, the deputies of its nobles were CHAP. III.
still admitted to the council-table and commissions sent over
to report on the Seneschal's administration. The strife came
to a head in 1252, when the commissioners reported that
stern as Simon's rule had been the case was one in which
sternness was needful. The English barons supported
Simon, and in the face of their verdict Henry was powerless.
But the King was now wholly with his enemies ; and his
anger broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered
to resign his post if the money he had spent was repaid
him, and appealed to Henry's word. Ilenry hotly retorted
that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor.
Simon at once gave Henry the lie ; " and but that thou
bearest the name of King it had been a bad hour for thee
when thou utteredst such a word ! " A formal recon-
ciliation was brought about, and the Earl once more re-
turned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was
forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his
reputation was shown in an offer which its nobles made
him of the regency of their realm during the absence of
Kinff Lewis from the land. But the offer was refused ; and
o *
Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of
Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its
old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.
The Earl's character had now thoroughly developed. He
inherited the strict and severe piety of his father ; he was
assiduous in his attendance on religious services whether
by night or day. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh
we see him iinding patience under his Gascon troubles in
a perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and
singularly temperate ; he was noted for his scant in-
dulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheer-
ful and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was
quick and ardent, his sense of honour keen, his speech
rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction,
his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks
in his after career. His best friends marked honestlv
VOL. I. 19
tfimon's
temper.
278
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Barons'
War.
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1272.
CHAP. III. this fault, and it shows the greatness of the man that he
listened to their remonstrances. "Better is a patient
man," writes honest Friar Adam, " than a strong man, and
he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a
city." But the one characteristic which overmastered all
was what men at that time called his " constancy," the
firm irnmoveable resolve which trampled even death under
foot. in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward
the First chose as his device, " Keep troth," was far truer
as the device of Earl Simon. We see in his correspondence
with what a clear discernment of its difficulties both at
home and abroad he " thought it unbecoming to decline
the danger of so great an exploit" as the reduction of
Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he
persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the
failure of all support or funds from England, and the King's
desertion of his cause, till the work was done. There was
the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism.
The letters of Eobert Grosseteste show how early Simon had
learned to sympathize with the Bishop in his resistance to
Eome, arid at the crisis of the contest he offered him
his own support and that of his associates. But Eobert
passed away, and as the tide of misgovernment mounted
higher and higher the Earl silently trained himself for the
day of trial. The fruit of his self-discipline was seen
when the crisis came. While other men wavered and
faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people
clung to the grave, stern soldier who " stood like a pillar,"
unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the
oath he had sworn.
While Simon had been warring with Gascon rebels
affairs in England had been going from bad to worse. The
scourge of Papal taxation fell heavier on the clergy. After
vain appeals to Eome and to the King, Archbishop Edmund
retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-
gatherer after tax-gatherer with powers of excommunica-
tion, suspension from orders, and presentation to benefices,
Matthew
Paris.
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
279
1232
1273.
desi.vuded on the unhappy priesthood. The wholesale CHAP. III.
piliiige kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the xhe
signal Ity hunting a papal legate out of the city amid cries B war. 8
of "usurer" and "siinoniac" from the mob of students.
Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the barons bade a Papal
collector begone out of England. " If you tarry here three
days longer," he added, "you and your company shall
be cut to pieces." For a time Henry himself was swept
away by the tide of national indignation. Letters from
the King, the nobles, and the prelates, protested against
the P;ipal exactions, and orders were given that no money
should be exported from the realm. But the threat of
interdict soon drove Henry back on a policy of spolia-
tion in which he went hand in hand with Koine. The
temper which this oppression begot among even the most
sober churchmen has been preserved for us by an annalist
whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic feel-
ing. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he in reality is the
last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Alban's
survived indeed till a far later time, but its writers dwindle
into mere annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey
precincts and whose work is as colourless as it is jejune.
In Matthew the breadth and precision of the narrative,
the copiousness of his information on topics whether
national or European, the general fairness and justice of
his comments, are only surpassed by the patriotic fire and
enthusiasm of the whole. He had succeeded lloger of
Wendover as chronicler at St. Alban's ; and the Greater
Chronicle with an abridgement of it which long passed
under the name of Matthew of Westminster, a " History
of the English," and the " Lives of the Earlier Abbots,"
are only a few among the voluminous works which
attest his prodigious industry. He was an artist as
well as an historian, and many of the manuscripts
which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand. A
large circle of correspondents bishops like Grosseteste,
ministers like Hubert de* Burgh, officials like Alexander
280
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Barons'
War.
1232
.1272.
Wales.
de Swereford furnished him with minute accounts of
political and ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from
the East and Papal agents brought news of foreign events
to his scriptorium at St. Alban's. He had access to and
quotes largely from state documents, charters, and ex-
chequer rolls. The frequency of royal visits to the abbey
brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry
himself contributed to the great chronicle which has pre-
served with so terrible a faithfulness the memory of his
weakness and misgovernment. On one solemn feast-day
the King recognized Matthew, and bidding him sit on the
middle step between the floor and the throne begged him
to write the story of the day's proceedings. While on a
visit to St. Alban's he invited him to his table and chamber,
and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of the
English baronies for his information. But all this royal
patronage has left little mark on his work. " The case,"
as Matthew says, " of historical writers is hard, for if they
tell the truth they provoke men, and if they write what is
false they offend God." With all the fullness of the
school of court historians, such as Benedict and Hoveden,
to which in form he belonged Matthew Paris combines an
independence and patriotism which is strange to their
pages. He denounces with the same unsparing energy the
oppression of the Pnpacy and of the King. His point of
aim is neither that of a courtier nor of a churchman but
of an Englishman, and the new national tone of his
chronicle is but the echo of a national sentiment which at
last bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together
into a people resolute to wrest freedom from the Crown.
The nation was outraged like the Church. Two solemn
confirmations of the Charter failed to bring about any
compliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and
again in 1255 the great Council fruitlessly renewed its
demand for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of
the nobles to enforce good government was seen in their
offer of a grant on condition that the great officers of the
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 281
Crown were appointed in the Council of the Baronage. CHAP. III.
But Henry refused their otter with scorn and sold his plate The
to the citizens of London to find payment for his house- war*
hold. A spirit of mutinous defiance broke out on the 1232-
failure of all legal remedy. When the Earl of Norfolk 1 ^?"
refused him aid Henry answered with a threat. " I will
send reapers and reap your fields for you," he said. " And
I will send you back the heads of your reapers," replied the
Earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and the re-
fusal of supplies, the Crown was in fact penniless ; and yet
never was money more wanted, for a trouble which had
long pressed upon the English kings had now grown to a
height that called for decisive action. Even his troubles
at home could not blind Henry to the need of dealing
with the difficulty of Wales. Of the three Welsh states
into which all that remained unconquered of Britain had
been broken by the victories of Deorham and Chester, two
had long ceased to exist. The country between the
Clyde and the Dee had been gradually absorbed by the
conquests of Northumbria and the growth of the Scot
monarchy. West Wales, between the British Channel
and the estuary of the Severn, had yielded to the sword
of Ecgberht. But a fiercer resistance prolonged the inde-
pendence of the great central portion which alone in
modern language preserves -the name of Wales. Comprizing
in itself the largest and most powerful of the British
kingdoms, it was aided in its struggle against Mercm by
the weakness of its assailant, the youngest and feeblest
of the English states, as well as by an internal warfare
which distracted the energies of the invaders. But Mercia
had no suoner risen to supremacy among the English
kingdoms than it took the work of conquest vigorously
in hand, Gffa tore from Wales the border land between
the Severn and the Wye ; the raids of his successors
carried fire and sword into the heart of the country ;
and an acknowledgement of the Mercian over-lordship
was wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of
282
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. Ill,
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
Wales
and the
Normans.
Mercia this overlordship passed to the West -Saxon kings,
and the Laws of Howel Dda own the payment of a
yearly tribute by " the prince of Aberffraw " to " the
King of London." The weakness of England during her
long struggle with the Danes revived the hopes of British
independence ; it was the co-operation of the Welsh on
which the Northmen reckoned in their attack on the
house of Ecgberht. But with the fall of the Danelagh
the British princes were again brought to submission, and
when in the midst of the Confessor's reign the Welsh
seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric and
God wine to cross the border and carry their attacks into
England itself, the victories of Harold re-asserted the
English supremacy. Disembarking on the coast his light-
armed troops he penetrated to the heart of the mountains,
and the successors of the Welsh prince Gruffydd, whose hoad
was the trophy of the campaign, swore to observe the old
fealty and render the whole tribute to the English Crown.
A far more desperate struggle began when the wave of
Norman conquest broke on the Welsh frontier. A chain
of great earldoms, settled by William along the border-land,
at once bridled the old maraud ing forays. From his county
palatine of Chester Hugh the Wolf harried Flintshire into
a desert, Kobert of Belesme in his earldom of Shrewsbury
" slew the Welsh," says a chronicler, " like sheep, con-
quered them, enslaved them and flayed them with nails
of iron." The earldom of Gloucester curbed Britain along
the lower Severn. Backed by these greater baronies a
horde of lesser adventurers obtained the royal "licence to
make conquest on the Welsh." Moumouth and Aber-
gavenny were seized and guaided by Norman castellans;
Bernard of Neufmarche" won the lordship of Brecknock ;
Roger of Montgomery raised the town .and fortress in
Powysland which still preserves his name. A great rising
of the whole people in the days of the second William
won back some of this Norman spoil. The new castle
of Montgomery was burned, Brecknock and Cardigan
HI.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 283
were cleared of the invaders, and the Welsh poured CHAP. ill.
ravaging over the English border. Twice the lied King ^
carried his arms fruitlessly among the mountains against B war. 8
enemies who took refuge in their fastnesses till famine 1232
and hardship drove his broken host into retreat. The 127a -
wiser policy of Henry the First fell back on his father's
system of gradual conquest. A new tide of invasion flowed
along the southern coast, where the land was level and open
and accessible from the sea. The attack was aided by strife
in the country itself, Itobert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of
Gloucester, was summoned to his aid b} a Welsh chieftain ;
and his defeat of Ithys ap Tewdor, the last prince under
whom Southern Wales was united, produced an anarchy
which enabled ttobert to land safely on the coast of
Glamorgan, to conquer the country round, and to divide
it among his soldiers. A force of Flemings, and English-
men followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near Milford
Haven and pushing back the British inhabitants settled
a " Little England " in the present Pembrokeshire. A few
daring adventurers accompanied the Norman Lord of
Kemeys into Cardigan, where land might be had for the
winning by any one who would " wage war on the Welsh."
It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of The
the British race seemed at hand, that a new outburst of Welsh
energy rolled back the tide of invasion and changed the
fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces into a
national effort to regain independence. To all outer seem-
ing Wales had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every
vestige of the older Eoman civilization by ages of bitter war-
fare, of civil strife, of estrangement i'rom the general culture
of Christendom, the uriconquered Britons had sunk into a
mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by
the milk of the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and
revengeful, retaining no higher political organization than
that of the clan, their strength was broken by ruthless
feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid
against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild people
284
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOR
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
CHAP. III. there still lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had
nerved it four hundred years before through Aneurin und
Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest Englishmen.
At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales
was suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The song
of the twelfth century burst forth, not from one bard or
another, but from the nation at large. The Welsh temper
indeed was steeped in poetry. " In every house," says the
shrewd Gerald du Barri, " strangers who arrived in the
morning were entertained till eventide with the talk of
maidens and the music of the harp:* A romantic literature,
which was destined to leaven the fancy of western Europe,
had grown up among this wild people and found an
admirable means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh
language was as real a developement of the old Celtic
language heard by Caesar as tho Romance tongues are
developements of Cassar's Latin, but at a far earlier date
than any other language of modern Europe it had attained
to definite structure and to settled literacy form. No
other mediaeval literature shows at its outset the same
elaborate and completed organization as that of the
Welsh. But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy
played with a startling freedom. In one of the later
poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into a hare,
a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the
symbol of the strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy
embodies itself in the romantic tales which reached their
highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.
The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings
defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels
in the impossible and unreal. When Arthur sails into
the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The
" descent into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes
off the mediaeval horror with the mediaeval reverence,
and the knight who achieves the quest spends his
years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy,
and in converse with fair women. The world of the
The
Welsh
Poetry.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
285
1232
1272.
Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new earth of CHAP. III.
marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence xhe
is broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the B war s
light plays on the hero's armour. Each figure as it moves
across the poet's canvas is bright with glancing colour.
" The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk,
and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which
were precious emeralds and rubies. Her head was of
brighter gold than the flower of the broom, her skin was
whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her
hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-
anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye
of the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not brighter
than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of
the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses."
Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous
imagery, but the gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The
sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive
beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its
adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passion-
ate melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impos-
sible, by an instinct of what is noble, by a sentiment that
discovers the weird charm of nature. The wildest
extravagance of the tale-teller is relieved by some
graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of
feeling, some magical touch of beauty. As Kalweh's
greyhounds bound from side to side of their master's
steed, they "sport round him like two sea-swallows."
His spear is " swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from
the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of
June is at the heaviest." A subtle, observant love of
nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour from the
passionate human sentiment with which it is imbued.
"I love the birds" sings Gwalchmai "and their sweet
voices in the lulling songs of the wood;" he watches
at night beside the fords "among the untrodden grass " to
hear the nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew.
286
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
The
Bards.
Even patriotism takes the same picturesque form. The
Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the
Saxon ; as he dwells on his own he tells of " its sea-
coast and its mountains, its towns on the forest border,
its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its valleys,
its white sea-mews, its beauteous women." Here as
everywhere the sentiment of nature passes swiftly and
subtly into the sentiment of a human tenderness : " I
love its fields clothed with tender trefoil " goes on the
song ; " I love the marches of Merioneth where my head
was pillowed on a snow-white arm." In the Celtic love
of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth and
earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate
enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-
light of dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight
in beauty. " White is my love as the apple blossom, as the
ocean's spray ; her face shines like the pearly dew on Eryri ;
the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sunset." The
buoyant and elastic temper of the French trouveur was
spiritualized in the Welsh singers by a more refined poetic
feeling. " Whoso beheld her was filled with her love.
Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod." A
touch of pure fancy such as this removes its object out of
the sphere of passion into one of delight and reverence.
It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh
history into such a world as this. But side by side with
this waysvard, fanciful stream of poesy and romance ran
a torrent of intenser song. The spirit of the earlier bards,
their joy in battle, their love of freedom, -broke out anew
in ode after ode, in songs extravagant, monotonous, often
prosaic, but fused into poetry by the intense tire of
patriotism which glowed within them. Every fight, every
hero had its verse. The names of older singers, of Taliesin,
Aneurin, and Lly warch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries
to animate the national resistance and to prophesy victory.
It was in North Wales that the spirit of patriotism re-
ceived its strongest inspiration from this burst of song.
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 287
Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat CHAP. III.
from the impregnable fastnesses where the " Lords of ^0
Snowdon," the princes of the house of Gruffydd ap Conan, B war. 8
claimed supremacy over the whole of Wales. Once in the jaaa-
pass of Consilt a cry arose that the King was slain, Henry x ^ a -
of Essex flung down the royal standard, and the King's
desperate efforts could hardly save his army from utter
rout. The bitter satire of the Welsh singers bade him
knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him from
capture. In a later campaign the invaders were met by
storms of rain, and forced to abandon their baggage in a
headlong flight to Chester. The greatest of the Welsh
odes, that known to English readers in Gray's translation
as " The Triumph of Owen," is Gwalchmai's song of victory
over the repulse of an English fleet from Abermenai.
The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed Lleicetyn
destined to realize the hopes of his countrymen. The T aj) .,
1-11 i ,.,,! Jorwerth.
homage which he succeeded in extorting irom the whole
of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted
from 1194 to 1240 placed him openly at the head of his
race, and gave a new character to its struggle with
the English King. In consolidating his authority within
his own domains, and in the assertion of his lordship
over the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap Jonveith
aimed steadily at securing the means of striking off the
yoke of the Saxon, It was in vain that John strove
to buy his friendship by the hand of his natural daughter
Johanna. Fresh raids on the Marches forced the King
to enter Wales in 1211 ; but though his army reached
Snowdon it fell back like its predecessors, starved and
broken before an enemy it could never reach. A second
attack in the same year had better success. The chief-
tains of South Wales were drawn from their new allegiance
to join the English forces, and Lle\\ elyn, prisoned in his
fastnesses, was at last driven to submit. But the ink of
the treaty was hardly dry before Wales was again on
fire ; a common fear of the English once more united its
288
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Barons'
War,
1232
1272.
Llewelyn
and the
Bards.
chieftains, and the war between John and his barons soon
removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his
allegiance to an excommunicated King, and allied with the
barons under Fitzwalter too glad to enlist in their cause a
prince who could hold in check the nobles of the border
country where the royalist cause was strongest Llewelyn
seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex
Powys, the central district of Wales where the English in-
fluence had always been powerful, to clear the royal garri-
sons from Caerrnarthen and Cardigan, and to force even
the Fleniings of Pembroke to do him homage.
England watched these efforts of the subject race with
an anger still mingled with contempt. " Who knows not,"
exclaims Matthew Paris as he dwells on the new pretensions
of the Welsh ruler, " who knows not that the Prince of
Wales is a petty vassal of the King of England ? " But
the temper of Llewelyn's own people was far other than
the temper of the English chronicler. The hopes of Wales
rose higher and higher with each triumph of the Lord of
Snowdon. His court was crowded with bardic singers.
" He pours," sings one of them, " his gold into the lap of
the bard as the ripe fruit falls from the trees." Gold
however was hardly needed to wake their enthusiasm.
Poet after poet sang of " the Devastator of England," the
" Eagle of men that loves not to lie nor sleep," " towering
above the rest of men with his long red lance," his " red
helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf." " The sound of
his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes to the
shore, that can neither be stnyed nor hushed." Lesser bards
strung together Llewelyn's victories in rough jingle of rime
and hounded him on to the slaughter. " Be of good courage
in the slaughter," sings Elidir, " cling to thy work, destroy
England, and plunder its multitudes." A fierce thirst for
blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the
court singers. " Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken
in heaps," bursts out a triumphant bard ; " St. Clears, with
its bright white lands, it is not Saxons who hold it now ! "
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
289
" In Swansea, the key of Lloegria, we made widows of all
the wives." " The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in
rows, and to feast with the leader of wolves and with
hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with keen
scent of carcases." " Better," closes the song, " better the
grave than the life of man who sighs when the horns call
him forth to the squares of battle."
But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out
of the mere mob of chieftains who live by rapine, and
boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from hand to hand
through the hall that " they take and give no 'quarter."
" Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was " the
great Caesar " who was to gather beneath his sway the
broken fragments of the Celtic race. Mysterious prophecies,
the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from lip to
lip and were heard even along the Seine and the llhme,
came home again to nerve Wales to its last struggle with
the stranger. Medrawd and Arthur, men whispered, would
appear once more on earth to fight over again the fatal
battle of Camlan in which the hero-king perished.^ The
last conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still lived to
combat for his people. The supposed verses of Taliesin
expressed the undying hope of a restoration of the Cymry.
" In their hands shall be all the land from Brittany to Man :
... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving
out of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gatheied
up in the strange work of Geoffry of Monmouth, these
predictions had long been making a deep impression not
on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet
the dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the
legendary hero-king at Glastonbury was found and visited
by Henry the Second. But neither trick nor conquest
could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate
victory of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh
chieftain who joined his host, " that your people of rebels
can withstand my army ? " " My people," replied the
chieftain, "may be weakened by your might, and even
CHAP. III.
1232-
1272.
The
Welsh
hopes.
290 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. in great part destroyed, but unless the wrath of God be
^ on the side of its foe it will not perish utterly. Nor
B War 8 deem I that other race or other tongue will answer for
1232- tliis corner of the world before the Judge of all at the
ia7a - last day save this people and tongue of Wales." So
ran the popular rime, " Their Lord they will praise, their
speech they shall keep, their land they shall lose except
wild Wales."
The Faith and prophecy seemed justified by the growing
Provisions streng . t j l of t ] ie British people. The weakness and dis-
Oxford. sensinns which characterized the reign of Henry the Third
enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a practical
independence till the close of his life, when a fresh
acknowledgement of the English supremacy was wrested
from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of
his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gryffydd,
who followed him in 1246. The raids of the new chieftain
swept the border to the very gates of Chester, while his
conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the whole people
together in a power strong enough to meet any attack from
the stranger. So pressing was the danger that it called the
King's eldest son, Edward, to the field ; but his first appear-
ance in arms ended in a crushing defeat. The defeat
however remained unavenged. Henry's dreams were of
mightier enterprizes than the reduction of the Welsh. The
Popes were still fighting their weary battle against the
House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its kingdom of
Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy
See, to any power that would aid them in the struggle.
In 1254 it was offered to the King's second son, Edmund.
> With imbecile pride Henry accepted the offer, prepared to
send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to
repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the
purposes of his war. In a Parliament at the opening of
1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the clergy. A
fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of
the realm was at last exhausted. Earl Simon had returned
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 291
in 1253 from his government of Gascony, and the fruit of CHAP. III.
his meditations during the four years of his quiet stay at ^
home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France B ^ar 8
and Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel 1232-
witli Henry, was seen in a league of the baronage and in ia72
their adoption of a new and startling policy. The past
half century had shown both the strength and weakness of
the Charter : its strength as a rally ing-point for the
baronage and a definite assertion of rights which the King
could be made to acknowledge ; its weakness in providing
no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations.
Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter
and his oath was 110 sooner taken than it was unscru-
pulously broken. The barons had secured the freedom of
the realm: the secret of their long patience during the
reign of Henry lay hi the difficulty of securing its right
administration. It was this difficulty winch Earl Simon
wa.s prepared to solve when action was forced on him by
the stir of the realm. A great famine added to the sense
of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the
irritation at the new demands from both Henry and
Borne with which the year 1258 opened. It was to arrange
for a campaign against Wales that Henry called a parlia-
ment in April. But the baronage appeared in arms with
Gloucester and Leicester at their head. The King was
forced to consent to the appointment of a committee of
twenty-four to draw up terms for the reform of the state.
The Twenty-four again met the Parliament at Oxford in
June, and although half the committee consisted of royal
ministers and favourites it was impossible to resist the .
tide of popular feeling. Hugh Bigod, one of the firmest
adherents of the two Earls, was chosen as Justiciar. The
claim to elect this great officer was in fact the leading
point in the baronial policy. But further measures were
needed to hold in check such arbitrary misgovernment as
had prevailed during the past twenty years. By the " Pro-
visions of Oxford " it was agreed that the Great Council
292
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Borons'
War.
1232
1272.
Govern-
ment
of the
Barons.
should assemble thrice in the year, whether summoned
by the King or no ; and on each occasion " the Com-
monalty shall elect twelve honest men who shall come
to the Parliaments, and at other times when occasion shall
be when the King and his Council shall send for them,
to treat of the wants of the King and of his kingdom.
And the Commonalty shall hold as established that
which these Twelve shall do." Three permanent com-
mittees of barons and prelates were named to carry out
the work of reform and administration. The reform of
the Church was left to the original Twenty-Four; a second
Twenty-Four negotiated the financial aids ; a Perma-
nent Council of Fifteen advised the King in the ordinary
work of Government. The complexity of such an arrange-
ment was relieved by the fact that the members of each of
these committees were in great part the same persons.
The Justiciar, Chancellor, and the guardians of the King's
castles swore to act only with the advice and assent of the
Permanent Council, and the first two great officers, with
the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings
to it at the end of the year. Sheriffs were to be appointed
for a single year only, no doubt by the Council, from
among the chief tenants of the county, and no undue
fees were to be exacted for the administration of justice
in their court.
A royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in
that tongue since the Conquest which has reached us, ordered
the observance of these Provisions. The King was in
fact helpless, and resistance came only from the foreign
.favourites, who refused to surrender the castles and
honours which had been granted to them. But the Twenty-
four were resolute in their action : and an armed demon-
stration of the barons drove the foreigners in flight over
sea. The whole royal power was now in fact in the hands
of the committees appointed by the Great Council. But
the measures of the barons showed little of the wisdom
and energy which the country had hoped for. In October
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
293
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
1259 the knighthood complained that the barons had done CHAP. III.
nothing but seek their own advantage in the recent
changes. This protest produced the Provisions of West-
minster, which gave protection to tenants against their
feudal lords, regulated legal procedure in the feudal courts,
appointed four knights in each shire to watch the justice
of the sheriffs, and made other temporary enactments for
the furtherance of justice. But these Provisions brought
little fruit, and a tendency to mere feudal privilege showed
itself in an exemption of all nobles and prelates from
attendance at the Sheriff's courts. Their foreign policy
was more vigorous and successful. All further payment
to Eome, whether secular or ecclesiastical, was prohibited ;
formal notice was given to the Pope of England's with-
drawal from the Sicilian enterprize, peace put an end
to the incursions of the Welsh, and negotiations on the
footing of a formal abandonment of the King's claim to
Xormandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou ended in
October, 1259, in a peace with France.
This peace, the triumph of that English policy which
had been struggling ever since the days of Hubert de
Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry and his foreign
advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester. The revo-
lution had doubtless been mainly Simon's doing. In the
summer of 1258, while the great change was going on, a
thunder storm drove the King as he passed along the
river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the
Earl was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter
with him and have no fear of the storm. The King
refused with petulant wit. " If I fear the thunder, I fear
you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." But
Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system
of government which the Barons devised, and it was with
reluctance that he was brought to swear to the Provisions of
Oxford which embodied it. With their home government
he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that
of 1259 he was chiefly busied in negotiation in France,
i VOL. I.20
Simon
and the
Baronage.
294
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1232-
1272.
CHAP. III. But already his breach with Gloucester and the bulk of
^e his fellow councillors was marked. In the Lent Parlia-
B War 8 raent of 1259 he had reproached them, and Gloucester
above all, with faithlessness to their trust. " The things
we are treating of," he cried, " we have sworn to carry out.
With such feeble and faithless men I care not to have
ought to do ! " The peace with France was hardly signed
when his distrust of his colleagues was verified. Henry's
withdrawal to the French court at the close of the year
for the formal signature of the treaty was the signal for a
reactionary movement. From France the King forbade the
summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced
his resumption of the enterprize against Sicily. Both acts
were distinct breaches of the Provisions of Oxford, but
Henry trusted to the divisions of the Twenty-Four.
Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester ; the Justiciar,
Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring ; and both of
these leaders drew cautiously to the King, Roger Mor-
timer and the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk more openly
espoused the royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry
had gained confidence enough to announce that as the
barons had failed to keep their part of the Provisions he
should not keep his.
Earl Sirnon almost alone remained unshaken. But his
growing influence was seen in the appointment of his
supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in Bigod's place,
while his strength was doubled by the accession of the
King's son Edward to his side. In the moment of the
revolution Edward had vehemently supported the party of
the foreigners. But he had sworn to observe the Provisions,
and the fidelity to his pledge which remained throughout
his life the chief note of his temper at once showed itself.
Like Simon he protested against the faithlessness of the
barons in the carrying out of their reforms, and it was his
strenuous support of the petition of the knighthood that
brought about the additional Provisions of 1259. He had
been brought up with Earl Simon's sons, and with the Earl
The
Counter
Revolu-
tion.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
295
1232
1272.
himself his relations remained friendly even at the later CHAP. Ill
time of their fatal hostilities. But as yet he seems to have ^he
had no distrust of Simon's purposes or policy. His B war. s
adhesion to the Earl recalled Henry from France ; and the
King was at once joined by Gloucester in London while
Edward and Simon remained without the walls. But the
love of father and son proved too strong to bear political
severance, and Edward's reconciliation foiled the Earl's
plans. He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh
troubles were breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal
his final blow at the government which, tottering as it was,
still held him in check. Rome had resented the measures
which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to
Rome that Henry looked for a formal absolution from his
oath to observe the Provisions. In June 1261 he pro-
duced a Bull annulling the Provisions and freeing him
from his oath in a Parliament at "Winchester. The sudden-
ness of the blow forbade open protest and Henry quickly
followed up his victory. Hugh Bigod, who had surrendered
the Tower and Dover in the spring, surrendered the other
castles he held in the autumn. Hugh Despenser was de-
posed from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset,
appointed in his place.
The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a mo-
ment the barons. Gloucester joined Earl Simon in calling
an autumn Parliament at St. Alban's, and in summon-
ing to it three knights from every shire south of Trent.
But the union was a brief one. Gloucester consented to
refer the quarrel with the King to arbitration and the
Earl of Leicester withdrew in August to France. He saw
that for the while there was no means of withstanding
Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provisions. Foreign
soldiers were brought into the land ; the King won back
again the appointment of sheriffs. For eighteen months of
this new rule Simon could do nothing but wait. But his
long absence lulled the old jealousies against him. The
confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak of troubles
Simon's
rising.
296
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP..IH.
The
Bnrons'
War.
1232
1273.
Mise of
Amiens.
in Wales renewed the disgust at Henry's government,
while his unswerving faithfulness to the Provisions fixed
the eyes of all Englishmen upon the Earl as their natural
leader. The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262
removed the one barrier to action ; and in the spring of
1263 Simon landed again in England as the unquestioned
head of the baronial party. What immediately forced him
to action was a march of Edward with a body of foreign
troops against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time
in communication if not in actual alliance with the Earl.
The chief opponents of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords
were ardent supporters of Henry's misgovernment, and
when a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl
together, the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an
English noble gave formal justification for co-operation with
him. At Whitsuntide the barons met Simon at Oxford
and finally summoned Henry to observe the Provisions.
His refusal was met by an appeal to arms. Throughout
the country the younger nobles flocked to Simon's
standard, and the young Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert of
Clare, became his warmest supporter. His rapid move-
ments foiled all opposition. While Henry vainly strove
to raise money and men, Simon swept the Welsh border,
marched through Beading on Dover, and finally appeared
before London.
The Earl's triumph was complete. Edward after a brief
attempt at resistance was forced to surrender Windsor arid
disband his foreign troops. The rising of London in the
cause of the barons left Henry helpless. But at the
moment of triumph the Earl saw himself anew forsaken.
The bulk of the nobles again drew towards the King ; only
six of the twelve barons who had formed the patriot half
of the committee of 1258, only four of the twelve repre-
sentatives of the community at that date, were now with
the Earl. The dread too of civil war gave strength to the
cry for a compromise, and at the end of the year it was
agreed that the strife should be left to the arbitration of
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291.
the French King, Lewis the Ninth. But saint and just CHAP. III.'
ruler as he was, the royal power was in the conception of ^
Lewis a divine thing, which no human power could limit B war s
or fetter, and his decision, which was given in January 1232-
1264, annulled the whole of the Provisions. Only the 1272 '
Charters granted before the Provisions were to be observed.
The appointment and removal of all officers of state
was to be wholly with the King, and he was suffered to
call aliens to his councils if he would. The Mise of
Amiens was at oiice confirmed by the Pope, and crushing
blow as it was, the barons felt themselves bound by the
award. It was only the exclusion of aliens a point which
they had not purposed to submit to arbitration which
they refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible
on this point as on the rest, and the mutual distrust
prevented any real accommodation.
But Henry had to reckon on more than the baronage. Battle of
Deserted as he was by the greater nobles, Simon w r as far Lewes.
from standing alone. Throughout the recent struggle the
new city governments of the craft-gilds, which were known
by the name of " Communes," had shown an enthusiastic
devotion to his cause. The Queen was stopped in her
attempt to escape from the Tower by an angry mob, who
drove her back with stones and foul words. When Henry
attempted to surprize Leicester in his quarters- at South-
wark, the Londoners burst the gates which had been locked
by the richer burghers against him, and rescued him by a
welcome into the city. The clergy and the universities
went in sympathy with the towns, and in spite of the
taunts of the royalists, who accused him of seeking allies
against the nobility in the common people, the popular
enthusiasm gave a strength to the Earl which sustained
him even in this darkest hour of the struggle. He at
once resolved on resistance. The French award had luckily
reserved the rights of Englishmen to the liberties they had
enjoyed before the Provisions of Oxford, and it was easy for
Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave to the
298
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Borons'
War
1232
1272.
CHAP. III. Crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions
themselves. London was the first to reject the decision ;
in March 1264 its citizens mustered at the call of the
town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the royal officials, and
plundered the royal parks. But an army had already
mustered in great force at the King's summons, while
Leicester found himself deserted by the bulk of the
baronage. Every day brought news of ill. A detachment
from Scotland joined Henry's forces. The younger De
Montfort was taken prisoner. Northampton was captured,
the King raised the siege of Eochester, and a rapid march
of Earl Simon's only saved London itself from a surprize
by Edward. But betrayed as he was, the Earl remained
firm to the cause. He would fight to the end, he said, even
were he and his sons left to fight alone. "With an army
reinforced by 15,000 Londoners, he marched in May to
the relief of the Cinque Ports which were now threatened
by the King. Even on the march he was forsaken by
many of the nobles who followed him. Halting at Fletch-
ing in Sussex, a few miles from Lewes, where the royal
army was encamped, Earl Simon with the young Earl of
Gloucester offered the King compensation for all damage
if he would observe the Provisions. Henry's answer was
one of defiance, and though numbers were against him,
the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a soldier reversed
the advantages of the ground ; inarching at dawn on the
14th of May he seized the heights eastward of the town
and moved down these slopes to an attack. His men with
white crosses on back and breast knelt in prayer before the
battle opened, and all but reached the town before their
approach was perceived. Edward however opened the
fight by a furious charge which broke the Londoners on
Leicester's left. In the bitterness of his hatred for the
insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles,
slaughtering three thousand men. But he returned to find
the battle lost. Crowded in the narrow space between the
heights and the river Ouse, a space broken by marshes and
ill.] TEE CHARTER. 12041291. 299
by the long street of the town, the royalist centre and left CHAP. III.
were crushed by Earl Simon. The Earl of Cornwall, now ^
King of the Romans, who, as the mocking song of the B war 8
victors ran, " makede him a castel of a mulne post " (" he 1232-
weened that the mill-sails were mangonels " goes on the 1272 '
sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself
captured. Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join
in his father's surrender.
The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of Simon's
the state. " Xow England breathes in the hope of liberty," ****
sang a poet of the time ; " the English were despised like
dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their
foes are vanquished." But the moderation of the terms
agreed upon in the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the
King and his captors, shows Simon's sense of the difficulties ,
of his position. The question of the Provisions was again
to be submitted to arbitration ; and a parliament in June,
to which four knights were summoned from every county,
placed the administration till chis arbitration was complete
in the hands of a new council of nine to be nominated
by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester and the patriotic
Bishop of Chichester. Responsibility to the community
was provided for by the declaration of a right in the body
of barons and prelates to remove either of the Three
Electors, who in turn could displace or appoint the mem-
bers of the Council. Such a constitution was of a different
order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of
1258. But it had little time to work in. The plans
for a fresh arbitration broke down. Lewis refused to
review his decision, and all schemes for setting fresh judges
between the King and his people were defeated by a
formal condemnation of the barons' cause issued by the
Pope. Triumphant as he was indeed Earl Simon's diffi-
culties thickened every day. The Queen with Archbishop
Boniface gathered an army, in France for an invasion ;
Ro^er Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms
O
and only held in check by Llewelyn. It was impossible
300 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. to make binding terms with an imprisoned King, yet to
^ release Henry without terms was to renew the war. The
B War S imprisonment too gave a shock to public feeling which
1232- thinned the Earl's ranks. In the new Parliament which
1272. k e ca i} ef i a t t^ opening of 1265 the weakness of the
patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact
that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to
sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics.
Summons But it was just this sense of his weakness which prompted
Commons ^ ne ^ ar ^ *' au ac ^ that nas done more than any incident of
this struggle to immortalize his name. Had the strife been
simply a strife for power between the king and the
baronage the victory of either would have been equally
fatal in its results. The success of the one would have
doomed England to a royal despotism, that of the other to
a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our freedom the
English baronage had been brought too low by the policy
of the kings to be able to withstand the crown single-
handed. From the first moment of the contest it had
been forced to make its cause a national one. The sum-
mons of two knights from each county, elecjted in its
county court, to a Parliament in 1254, even before the
opening of the struggle, was a recognition of the political
weight of the country gentry which was confirmed by
the summons of four knights from every county to the
Parliament assembled after the battle of Lewes. The
Provisions of Oxford, in stipulating for attendance and
counsel on the part o/ twelve delegates of the " com-
monalty," gave the first indication of a yet wider appeal
to the people at large. But it was the weakness of his
party among the baronage at this great crisis which drove
Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in
our history. As before, he summoned two knights from
every county. But he created a new force in English
politics when he summoned to sit beside them two
citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates
from the towns had long been .usual in the county courts
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 301
when any matter respecting their interests was in question ; CHAP. III.
but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon that first sum- ^^
moned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the B war 8
knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the 1232-
parliament of the realm. 1272.
It is only this great event however which enables us Simon's
to understand the large and prescient nature of Earl difficultly.
Simon's designs. Hardly a few months had passed away
since the victory of Lewes when the burghers took their
seats at Westminster, yet his government was tottering
to its fall. We know little of the Parliament's acts. It
seems to have chosen Simon as Justiciar and to have
provided for Edward's liberation, though he was still
to live under surveillance at Hereford and to surrender
his earldom of Chester to Simon, who was thus able to
communicate with his Welsh allies. The Earl met the
dangers from without with complete success. In September
1264 a general muster of the national forces on Barham
Down and a contrary wind put an end to the projects of
invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom the Queen
had collected in Flanders ; the threats of France died away
into negotiations ; the Papal Legate was forbidden to cross
the Channel, and his bulls of excommunication were flung
into the sea. But the difficulties at home grew more
formidable every day. The restraint upon Henry and
Edward jarred against the national feeling of loyalty, and
estranged the mass of Englishmen who always side with the
weak. Small as the patriotic party among the barons had
been from the first, it grew smaller as dissensions broke out
over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice and resolve
to secure the public peace told heavily against him. John
Giffard left him because he refused to allow him to exact
ransom from a prisoner, contrary to the agreement made
after Lewes. A greater danger opened ^vvhen the young
Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of
the foreigners, held himself aloof from the Justiciar, and
resented Leicester's prohibition of a tournament, his
302 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
UHAP. III. naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own
^ authority, his holding Edward's fortresses on the Welsh
B War 8 marches by his own garrisons.
1232 Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of
1272. Leicester's precautions. In the spring Parliament of 1265
Edward } ie openly charged the Earl with violating the Mise of
Gloucester Lewes, w ^ n tyranny, and with aiming at the crown.
Before its close he withdrew to his own lands in the west
and secretly allied himself with Eoger Mortimer and the
Marcher barons. Earl Simon soon followed him to the
west, taking with him the King and Edward. He moved
along the Severn, securing its towns, advanced westward
to Hereford, and was marching at the end of June along bad
roads into the heart of South Wales to attack the fortresses
of Earl Gilbert in Glamorgan when Edward suddenly made
his escape from Hereford and joined Gloucester at Ludlow.
The moment had been skilfully chosen, and Edward
showed a rare ability in the movements by which he took
advantage of the Earl's position. Moving rapidly along
the Severn he seized Gloucester and the bridges across
the river, destroyed the ships by which Leicester strove
to escape across the Channel to Bristol, and cut him off
altogether from England. By this movement too he placed
himself between the Earl and his son Simon, who was
advancing from the east to his father's relief. Turning
rapidly on this second force Edward surprized it at Kenil-
worth and drove it with heavy loss within the walls of
the castle. But the success was more than compensated
by the opportunity which his absence gave to the Earl of
breaking the line of the Severn. Taken by surprize and
isolated as he was, Simon had been forced to seek for aid
and troops in an avowed alliance with Llewelyn, and it was
with Welsh reinforcements that he turned to the east.
But the seizure of his ships and of the bridges of the
Severn held him a prisoner in Edward's grasp, and a fierce
attack drove him back, with broken and starving forces,
into the Welsh hills. In utter despair he struck north-
Ill ] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 303
ward to Hereford ; but the absence of Edward now enabled CHAP, ill
him on the 2nd of August to throw his troops iii boats The
across the Severn below Worcester. The news drew B w 8
Edward quickly back in a fruitless counter-march to the 1232-
river, for the Earl had already reached Evesham by a long 1 ? 72
night march on the morning of the 4th, while his son, re-
lieved in turn by Edward's counter-inarch, had pushed in
the same night to the little town of Alcester. The two
armies were now but some ten miles apart, and their
junction seemed secured. But both were spent with long
marching, and while the Earl, listening reluctantly to
the request of the King who accompanied him, halted at
Evesham for mass and dinner, the army of the younger
Simon halted for the same purpose at Alcester.
" Those two dinners doleful were, alas ! " sings Robert of Battle
Gloucester ; for through the same memorable night Edward f
. , , Evesham.
was hurrying back from the Severn by country cross-lanes
to seize the fatal gap that lay between them. As morning
broke his army lay across the road that led northward
from Evesham to Alcester. Evesham lies in a loop of
the river Avon where it bends to the- south; and a
height on which Edward ranged his troops closed the one
outlet from it save across the river. But a force had been
thrown over the river under Mortimer to seize the bridges,
and all retreat was thus finally cut off. The approach
of Edward's army called Simon to the front, and for the
moment he took it for his son's. Though the hope soon
died away a touch of soldierly pride moved him as he re-
cognized in the orderly advance of his enemies a proof of
his own training. " By the arm of St. James," he cried,
" they come on in wise fashion, but it was from me that
they learnt it." A glance however satisfied him of the hope-
lessness of a struggle ; it was impossible for a handful of
horsemen with a mob of half-armed Welshmen to resist
the disciplined knighthood of the royal* army. "Let us
commend our souls to God," Simon said to the little group
around him, "for our bodies are the foe's." He bade
304
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
B Wa? S
1232
1372.
The
Royalist
reaction.
CHAP. III. Hugh Despenser and the rest of his comrades fly from
i^I the field. " If he died," was the noble answer, " they had
no will to live." In three hours the butchery was over.
The Welsh fled at the first onset like sheep, and \vere cut
ruthlessly down in the cornfields and gardens where they
sought refuge. The little group of knights around Simon
fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left
alone. So terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but
gained the hill top when a lance thrust brought his horse to
the ground, but Simon still rejected the summons to yield
till a blow from behind felled him mortally wounded to
the ground. Then with a last cry of " It is God's grace "
the soul of the great patriot passed away.
The triumphant blare of trumpets which welcomed the
rescued King into Evesham, " his men weeping for joy,"
rang out in bitter contrast to the mourning of the realm.
It sounded like the announcement of a reign of terror.
The rights and laws for which men had toiled and fought
so long seemed to have been swept away in an hour.
Every town which had supported Earl Simon was held to
be at the King's mercy, its franchises to be forfeited. The
Charter of Lynn was annulled ; London was marked out
as the special object of Henry's vengeance, and the farms
and merchandize of its citizens were seized as first-fruits
of its plunder. The darkness which on that fatal morning
hid their books from the monks of Evesham as they sang
in choir was but a presage of the gloom which fell on the
religious houses. From Ramsey, from Evesham, from St.
Alban's rose the same cry of havoc and rapine. But the
plunder of monk and burgess was little to the vast sentence
of confiscation which the mere fact of rebellion was held
to have passed on all the adherents of Earl Simon. To
" disinherit '* these of their lands was to confiscate half
the estates of the landed gentry of England ; but the
hotter royalists declared them disinherited, and Henry was
quick to lavish their lands away on favourites ami
The very chroniclers of their party recall the
foreigners.
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 305
pillage with shame. But all thought of resistance lay hushed CHAP. III.
in a general terror. Even the younger Simon " saw no other ^he
.rede " than to release his prisoners. His army, after finish- B war. s
ing its meal, was again on its march to join the Earl when 1232-
the news of his defeat met it, heralded by a strange darkness 12 ^ a<
that, rising suddenly in the north-west and following as it
\vere on Edward's track, served to shroud the mutilations
and horrors of the battle-field. The news was soon fatally
confirmed. Simon himself could see from afar his father's
head borne off on a spear-point to be mocked at Wigmore.
But the pursuit streamed away southward and westward
through the streets of Tewkesbury, heaped with corpses of
the panic-struck Welshmen whom the townsmen slaughtered
without pity ; and there was no attack as the little force
fell back through the darkness and big thunder-drops in
despair upon Kenilworth. " I may hang up my axe," are
the bitter words which a poet attributes to their leader,
" for feebly have I gone ; " and once within the castle he
gave way to a wild sorrow, day after day tasting neither
meat nor drink.
He was roused into action again by news of the Edward.
shameful indignities which the Marcher-lords had offered
to the body of the great Earl before whom they had
trembled so long. The knights around him broke out at
the tidings in a passionate burst of fury, and clamoured
for the blood of Richard of Cornwall and his son, who
were prisoners in the castle. But Simon had enough
nobleness left to interpose. " To God and him alone
was it owing" Richard owned afterwards "that I was
snatched from death." The captives were not only saved,
but set free. A Parliament had been called at Win-
chester at the opening of September, and its mere
assembly promised an end to the reign of utter lawless-
ness. A powerful party, too, was known to exist in the
royal camp which, hostile as it had shown itself to Earl
Simon, shared his love for English liberties, and the
liberation of Richard was sure to aid its efforts. At the
306
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1232-
12/2.
CHAP. III. head of this party stood the young Earl of Gloucester,
^ Gilbert of Clare, to whose action above all the Earl's
Barons' overthrow was due. And with Gilbert stood Edward him-
self. The passion for law, the instinct of good govern-
ment, which were "to make his reign so memorable in our
history, had declared themselves from the first. He had
sided with the barons at the outset of their struggle with
Henry ; he had striven to keep his father true to the
Provisions of Oxford. It was only when the figure of
Earl Simon seemed to tower above that of Henry himself,
when the Crown seemed falling into bondage, that Edward
passed to the royal side ; and now that the danger which
he dreaded was over he returned to his older attitude. In
the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was as
yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his
captivity against the cry of the Marcher-lords for his
blood. When all was done he wept over the corpse of
his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed
the Earl's body to the tomb. But great as was Edward's
position after the victory of Evesham, his moderate counsels
were as yet of little avail. His efforts in fact were met
by those, of Henry's second son, Edmund, who had received
the lands and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread
of any restoration of the house of De Montfort set at the
head of the ultra-royalists. Nor was any hope of modera-
tion to be found in the Parliament which met in September
1265. It met in the usual temper of a restoration-
Parliament to legalize the outrages of the previous month.
The prisoners who had been released from the dungeons
of the barons poured into Winchester to add fresh violence
to the demands of the Marchers. The wives of the captive
loyalists and the widows of the slain were summoned to
give fresh impulse to the reaction. Their place of meeting
added fuel to the fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester
was fresh from its pillage by the younger Simon on his way
to Kenilworth, and its stubborn loyalty must have been
fanned into a flame by the losses it had endured. In such
XIX.]
THE CHARTER. 1204-1291.
307
The
Barons'
War.
1232
1272.
Miracles.
an assembly no voice of moderation could find a hearing. CHAP. III.
The four bishops who favoured the national cause, the
bishops of London and Lincoln, of Worcester and
Chichester, were excluded from it, and the heads of the
religious houses were summoned fpr the mere purpose
of extortion. Its measures were but a confirmation of
the violence which had been wrought. All grants made
during the King's " captivity " were revoked. The house
of De Montfort was banished from the realm. The charter
of London was annulled. The adherents of Earl Simon
were disinherited and seizin of their lands was given to
the King.
Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and
take possession of his spoil while he moved to Windsor to
triumph in the humiliation of London. Its mayor and
forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only to
be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and Henry
entered his capital in triumph as into an enemy's city.
The surrender of Dover came to fill his cup of joy, for
Eicbard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with the
Earl's treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by
this port that tbeir force was destined to land. But a rising
of the prisoners detained there compelled its surrender in
October, and the success of the royalists seemed complete.
In reality their difficulties were but beginning. Their
triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the
religious sentiment of the time, and religion avenged itself
in its own way. Everywhere the Earl's death was looked
upon as a martyrdom ; and monk and friar united in
praying for the souls of the men who fell at Evesham as
for soldiers of Christ. It was soon whispered that Heaven
was attesting the sanctity of De Montfort by miracles at
his tomb. How great was the effect of this belief was
seen in the efforts of King and Pope to suppress the
miracles, and in their continuance not only through the
reign of Edward the First but even in the days of his
successor. But its immediate result was a sudden revival
308
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Barons'
1232
1272.
CHAP. III. of hope. " Sighs are changed into songs of praise," breaks
out a monk of the time, " and the greatness of our former
joy has come to life again ! " Nor was it in miracles alone
that the " faithful," as they proudly styled themselves,
began to look for relief " from the oppression of the
malignants." A monk of St. Alban's who was penning a
eulogy of Earl Simon in the midst of this uproar saw the
rise of a new spirit of resistance in the streets of the
little town. In dread of war it was guarded and strongly
closed with bolts and bars, and refused entrance to all
strangers, and above all to horsemen, who wished to pass
through. The Constable of Hertford, an old foe of the
townsmen, boasted that spite of bolts and bars he would
enter the place and carry off four of the best villeins
captive. He contrived to make his way in; but as he
loitered idly a-bout a butcher who passed by heard him
ask his men how the wind stood. The butcher guessed
his design to burn the town, and felled him to the ground.
The blow roused the townsmen. They secured the Con-
stable and his followers, struck off their heads, and fixed
them at the four corners of the borough.
The popular reaction gave fresh heart to the younger
Simon. Quitting Kenilworth, he joined in November John
D'Ey vill and Baldewin Wake in the Isle of Axholme where
the Disinherited were gathering in arms. So fast did horse
and foot flow in to him that Edward himself hurried into
Lincolnshire to meet this new danger. He saw that the
old strife was just breaking out again. The garrison of
Kenilworth scoured the country ; the men of the Cinque
Ports, putting wives and children on board their barks,
swept the Channel and harried the coasts ; while Llewelyn,
who had brought about the dissolution of Parliament by
a raid upon Chester, butchered the forces sent against
him and was master of the border. The one thing
needed to link the forces of resistance together was a
head, and such a head the appearance of Simon at
Axholme seemed to promise. But Edward was resolute
The
Younger
8imo"i.
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
309
The
Barons'
War.
1232-
1272.
in his plan of conciliation. Arriving before the camp at CHAP. Ill
the close of 1265, he at- once entered into negotiations with
his cousin, and prevailed on him to quit the island and
appear before the King. liichard of Cornwall welcomed
Simon at the court, he presented him to Henry as the
saviour of his life, and on his promise to surrender Kenil-
worth Henry gave him the kiss of peace. In spite of
the opposition of Roger Mortimer and the Marcher-lords
success seemed to be crowning this bold stroke of the
peace party when the Earl of Gloucester interposed.
Desirous as he was of peace, the blood of Be Montfort
lay between him and the Earl's sous, and the safety of
the one lay in the ruin of the other. In the face of this
danger Earl Gilbert threw his weight into the scale of
the ultra-royalists, and peace became impossible. The
question of restitution was shelved by a reference to
arbitrators; and Simon, detained in spite of a safe-
conduct, moved in Henry's train at Christmas to witness
the surrender of Kenilworth which had been stipulated
as the price of his full reconciliation with the King. But
hot blood was now stirred again on both sides. The
garrison replied to the royal summons by a refusal to
surrender. They had received ward of the castle, they
said, not from Simon but from the Countess, and to none
but her would they give it up. The refusal was not likely
to make Simon's position an easier one. On his return to
London the award of the arbitrators bound him to quit
the realm and not to return save with the assent of King
and baronage when all were at peace. He remained for
a while in free custody at London ; but warnings that he
was doomed to life-long imprisonment drove him to flight,
and he finally sought a refuge over sea.
His escape set England again on fire. Llewelyn wasted
the border ; the Cinque Ports held the sea ; the garrison
of Kenilworth pushed their raids as far as Oxford ;
Baldewin Wake with a band of the Disinherited threw
himself into the woods and harried the eastern counties ;
VOL. I. 21
Ban of
Kenil-
worth.
310
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1232
1272.
CHAP. III. Sir Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned
^ prowess, wasted with a smaller party the shires of the
B War 8 ' south. In almost every county bands of outlaws were
seeking a livelihood in rapine and devastation, while the
royal treasury stood empty and the enormous fine imposed
upon London had been swept into the coffers of French
usurers. But a stronger hand than the King's was now
at the head of affairs, and Edward met his assailants with
untiring energy. King Richard's son, Henry of Almaine,
was sent with a large force to the north ; Mortimer hurried
to hold the "Welsh border ; Edmund was despatched to
Warwick to hold Kenilworth in check ; while Edward
himself marched at the opening of March to the south-
The Berkshire woods w r ere soon cleared, and at Whitsun-
tide Edward succeeded in dispersing Adam Gurdon's band
and in capturing its renowned leader in single combat.
The last blow was already given to the rising in the north,
where Henry of Almaine surprized the Disinherited at
Chesterfield and took their leader, the Earl of Derby, in
his bed. Though Edmund had done little but hold the
Kenilworth knights in check, the submission of the rest
of the country now enabled the royal army to besiege it
in force. But the King was penniless, and the Parliament
which lie called to replenish his treasury in August showed
the resolve of the nation that the strife should cease. They
would first establish peace, if peace were possible, they
said, and then answer the King's demand. Twelve com-
missioners, with Earl Gilbert at their head, were appointed
on Henry's assent to arrange terms of reconciliation.
They at once decided that none should be utterly disin-
herited for their part in the troubles, but that liberty of
redemption should be left open to all. Furious at the
prospect of being forced to disgorge their spoil, Mortimer
and the ultra-royalists broke out in mad threats of violence,
even against the life of the Papal legate who had pressed
for the reconciliation. But the power of the ultra-royalists
was over. The general resolve was not to be shaken by
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
The
Barons
War.
1232
1272.
the clamour of a faction, and Mortimer's rout at Brecknock CHAP. ill.
by Llewelyn, the one defeat that chequered the tide of
success, had damaged that leader's influence. Backed by
Edward and Earl Gilbert, the legate met their opposition
with a threat of excommunication, and Mortimer withdrew
sullenly from the camp. Fresh trouble in the country and
the seizure of the Isle of Ely by a band of the Disinherited
quickened the labours of the Twelve. At the close of
September they pronounced their award, restoring their
lands to all who made submission on a graduated scale
of redemption, promising indemnity for all wrongs done
during the troubles, and leaving the restoration of the
house of De Montfort to the royal will. But to these
provisions were added an emphatic demand that " the King
fully keep and observe those liberties of the Church,
charters of liberties, and forest charters, which he is
expressly and by his own mouth bound to preserve and
keep." "Let the King," they add, "establish on a lasting
foundation those concessions which he has hitherto made
of his own will and not on compulsion, and those needful
ordinances which have been devised by his subjects and
by his own good pleasure."
With this Award the struggle came to an end. The
garrison of Kenilworth held out indeed till November, and
the full benefit of the Ban was only secured when Earl
Gilbert in the opening of the following year suddenly
appeared in arms and occupied London. But the Earl
was satisfied, the Disinherited were at last driven from
Ely, and Llewelyn was brought to submission by the
appearance of an army at Shrewsbury. All was over by
the close of 1267. His father's age and weakness, his
own brilliant military successes, left Edward practically
in possession of the royal power ; and his influence at once
made itself felt. There was no attempt to return to the
misrule of Henry's reign, to his projects of continental
aggrandizement or internal despotism. The constitutional
system of government for which the Barons had
Close of
the
Struggle.
fought
312 HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK in.
CHAP. III. was finally adopted by the Crown, and the Parliament of
^ Maryborough which assembled in November 1267 renewed
^a? 8 tne provisions by which the baronage had remedied the chief
1232- abuses of the time in their Provisions of Oxford and West-
1272. m i ns ter. The appointment of all officers of state indeed was
jealously reserved to the crown. But the royal expenditure
was brought within bounds. Taxation was only imposed
with the assent of the Great Council. So utterly
was the land at rest that Edward- felt himself free to
take the cross in 1268 and to join the Crusade which
was being undertaken by St. Lewis of France. He reached
Tunis only to find Lewis dead and his enterprize a failure,
wintered in Sicily, made his way to Acre in the spring
of 1271, and spent more than a year in exploits which
want of force prevented from growing into a serious
campaign. He was already on his way home when the
death of Henry the Third in November 1272 called
him to the throne.
CHAPTER IV.
EDWARD THE FIRST.
12721307.
IN his own day and among his own subjects Edward the Edward's
First was the object of an almost boundless admiration. Tem P er -
He was in the truest sense a national King. At the
moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed
away, when the descendants of those who won and those
who lost at Senlac blended for ever into an English people,
England saw in her ruler no stranger but an Englishman.
The national tradition returned in more than the golden
hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier
Kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core.
In good as in evil he stands out as the typical repre-
sentative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and
imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his
pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in
sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish,
laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and
self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. It is
this oneness with the character of his people which parts
the temper of Edward from what had till now been the
temper of his house. He inherited indeed from the
Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath ; his punish-
ments, when he punished in anger, were without pity ;
and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into
his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer
fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard
314
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-
13O7.
selfishness, the vindictive obstinacy which had so long
characterized the house of Anjou. His wrath passed as
quickly as it gathered ; and for the most part his conduct
was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse
from cruelty, prone to forgive. " No man ever asked mercy
of me," he said in his old age, "and was refused." The
rough soldierly nobleness of his nature broke out in
incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the bare
ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh
campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been
saved from marauders. " It is I who have brought you
into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow- soldiers, " and
I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink."
Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay
in fact a strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection.
Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to
the King who wept bitterly at the news of his father's
death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of
vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother,
whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at
every spot where his wife's bier rested, "I loved her
tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's friend,
the Abbot of Clugny ; " I do not cease to love her now she
is dead." And as it was with mother and wife, so it was
with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation
of the foreign Kings disappeared in Edward. He was the
first English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people
with a personal love and craved for their love back again.
To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for
them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our
laws. Even in his struggles with her England understood
a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels
between King and people during his reign are quarrels
where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted
for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few
scenes in our history are more touching than a scene
during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward
III.]
THE CHAKTER. 12041291.
315
1272-
13O7.
Influence
of
Chivalry,
stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall CHAP. IV.
and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in Edward
the wrong. theFirst.
But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer
impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange
contradictions which meet us in Edward's career. His
reign was a time in which a foreign influence told strongly
on our manners, our literature, our national spirit, for the
sudden rise of France into a compact and organized
monarchy was now making its influence dominant in
Western Europe. The " chivalry " so familiar to us in the
pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high
sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy before which all
depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to make room
for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and
a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially of
French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's
nature from which the baser influences of this chivalry
fell away. His life was pure, his piety, save when it
stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sin-
cere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the
frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But lie was far
from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His
passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable
chivalry of his day. His frame was that of a born soldier
tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance
or action, and he shared to the full his people's love of
venture and hard fighting. When he encountered Adam
Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed to beg
for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life
by sheer fighting in a tournament at Challon. It was this
love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous unreality
of the new chivalry. His fame as a general seemed a small
thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a
knight. At his " Eound Table of Kenilworth " a hundred
lords and ladies, "clad all in silk," renewed the faded
glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of romance which
316
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272
1307-
Influen.ce
of
Legality,
was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into
outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow
of the Swan," when rising at the royal board he swore on
the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder
of Comyn.' Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal
influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble
class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the crafts-
man from all claim to pity. " Knight without reproach "
as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the
burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing
but a common robber.
The French notion of chivalry had hardly more power
over Edward's mind than the French conception of king-
ship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was
everywhere hardening customary into written rights,
allegiance into subjection, loose ties such as commendation
into a definite vassalage. But it was specially through
French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his
successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman Law
were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of the
time. When the " sacred majesty " of the Caesars was
transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal
baronage every constitutional relation was changed. The
" defiance " by which a vassal renounced service to his
lord became treason, his after resistance " sacrilege." That
Edward could appreciate what was sound and noble in the
legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our
judicature and our Parliament ; but there was something
as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its
narrow technicalities. He was never wilfully unjust, but
he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal
chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the
law. The high conception of royalty which he borrowed
from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the
worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered
in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his
own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 317
crown. It was incredible to him that Scotland should CHAP. IV.
revolt against a legal bargain which made her national Edward
independence conditional on the terms extorted from a t 116 ^ 1 '
claimant of her throne ; nor could he view in any other 1307^
light but as treason the resistance of his own baronage to
an arbitrary taxation which their fathers had borne.
It is in the anomalies of such a character as this, in its H
strange mingling of justice and wrong-doing, of grandeur
and littleness, that we must look for any fair explanation
of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward's
conduct and policy. But what none of these anomalies
can hide from us is the height of moral temper which
shows itself in the tenor of his rule. Edward was
every inch a king ; but his notion of kingship was a lofty
and a noble one. He loved power ; he believed in his sove-
reign rights and clung to them with a stubborn tenacity.
But his main end in clinging to them was the welfare of
his people. Nothing better proves the self-command
which he drew from the purpose he set before him than
his freedom from the common sin of great rulers the lust
of military glory. He was the first of 'our kings since
William the Conqueror who combined military genius
with political capacity ; but of the warrior's temper, of the
temper that finds delight in war, he had little or none.
His freedom from it was the more remarkable that Edward
was a great soldier. His strategy in the campaign before
Evesham marked him as a consummate general. Earl
Simon was forced to admire the skill of his advance on the
fatal field, and the operations by which he met the risings
that followed it were a model of rapidity and military
grasp. In his Welsh campaigns he was soon to show a
tenacity and force of will which wrested victoiy out of the
midst of defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse
as at Lewes, or organize a commissariat which enabled him
to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In
his old age he was quick to discover the value of the
English archery and to employ it as a means of victoiy
318
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Edward
the First.
1272-
1307.
His
Political
Genius.
at Falkirk. But master as lie was of the art of war, and
forced from time to time to show his mastery in great
campaigns, in no single instance was he the assailant.
He fought only when he was forced to fight ; and when
fighting was over he turned back quietly to the work
of administration and the making of laws.
War in fact was with Edward simply a means of carrying
out the ends of statesmanship, and it was in the character
of his statesmanship that his real greatness made itself
felt. His policy was an English policy ; he was firm to
retain what was left of the French dominion of his race,
but he abandoned from the first all dreams of recovering
the wider dominions which his grandfather had lost. His
mind was not on that side of the Channel, but on this.
He concentrated his energies on the consolidation and good
government of England itself. We can only fairly judge
the annexation of Wales or his attempt to annex Scotland
if we look on, his efforts in either quarter as parts of the
same scheme of national administration to which we owe
his final establishment of our judicature, our legislation,
our parliament. The character of his action was no doubt
determined in great part by the general mood of his age,
an age whose special task and aim seemed to be that of
'reducing to distinct form the principles which had sprung
into a new and vigorous life during the age which pre-
ceded it. As the opening of the thirteenth century had
been an age of founders, creators, discoverers, so its close
was an age of lawyers, of rulers such as St. Lewis of France
or Alfonzo the Wise of Castille, organizers, administrators,
framers of laws and institutions. It was to this class that
Edward himself belonged. He had little of creative
genius, of political originality, but he possessed in a high
degree the passion for order and good government, the
faculty of organization, and a love of law which broke out
even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped.
In the judicial reforms to which so much of his attention
was directed he showed himself, if not an "English
III.j
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
319
Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted and judicious man
of business, developing, reforming, bringing into a shape
which has borne the test of five centuries' experience the
institutions of his predecessors. If the excellence of a
statesman's work is to be measured by its duration and the
faculty it has shown of adapting itself to the growth and
developement of a nation, then the work of Edward rises
to the highest standard of excellence. Our law courts
preserve to this very day the form which he gave them.
Mighty as has been the growth of our Parliament, it has
grown on the lines which he laid down. The great roll
of English Statutes reaches back in unbroken series to the
Statutes of Edward. The routine of the first Henry, the
administrative changes which had been imposed on the
nation by the clear head and imperious will of the second,
were transformed under Edward into a political organization
with carefully-defined limits, directed not by the King's
will alone but by the political impulse of the people at
large. His social legislation was based in the same fashion
on principles which had already been brought into practical
working by Henry the Second. It was no doubt in great
measure owing to this practical sense of its financial and'
administrative value rather than to any foresight of its
political importance that we owe Edward's organization of
our Parliament. But if the institutions which we com-
monly associate with his name owe their origin to others,
they owe their form and their perpetuity to him.
The King's English policy, like his English name, was
in fact the sign of a new epoch. England was made.
The long period of national formation had come practically,
to an end. With the reign of Edward begins the con-
stitutional England in which we live. It is not that any
chasm separates our history before it from our history after
it as the chasm of the devolution divides the history of
France, for we have traced the rudiments of our constitu-
tion to the first moment of the English settlement in
Britain. But it is with these as with our language. The
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First
1272
13O7.
Constitu-
tional
As2iect <rf
his lieirjn.
320
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. tongue of Alfred is the very tongue we speak, but in spite
Edward f ^ ts identity with modern English it has to be learned
theFim. ijk e the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the
iio7~ English of Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own.
In the first the historian and philologer can study the origin
and developement of our national speech, in the last a school-
boy can enjoy the story of Troilus and Cressidaor listen to
the gay chat of the Canterbury Pilgrims. In precisely the
same way a knowledge of our earliest laws is indis-
pensable for the right understanding of lat^r legislation, its
origin and its developement, while the principles of our
Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in the
Meetings of Wise Men before the Conquest or the Great
Council of barons after it. But the Parliaments which
Edward gathered at the close of his reign are not merely
illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they are
absolutely identical with those which still sit at St.
Stephen's. At the close of his reign King, Lords, Commons,
the Courts of Justice, the forms of public administration,
the relations of Church and State, all local divisions and
provincial jurisdictions, in great measure the framework of
society itself, have taken the shape which they essentially
retain. In a word the long struggle of the constitution for
actual existence has come to an end. The contests which
follow are not contests that tell, like those that preceded
them, on the actual fabric of our institutions; they are
simply stages in the rough discipline by which England
has learned and is still learning how best to use and how
wisely to develope the latent powers of its national life,
how to adjust the balance of its social and political forces,
how to adapt its constitutional forms to the varying
conditions of the time.
The news of his father's death found Edward at Capua
in the opening of 1273 ; but the quiet of his realm under a
regency of which Eoger Mortimer was the practical head
left him free to move slowly homewards. Two of his
acts while thus journeying through Italy show that his
The
Earlier
Finance.
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 321
mind was already dwelling on the state of English finance CHAP. IV.
and of English law. His visit to the Pope at Orvieto was Edward
with a view of gaining permission to levy from the clergy the j^ rst -
a tenth of their income for the three coming years, while iao7~
he drew from Bologna its most eminent jurist, Francesco
Accursi, to aid in the task of legal reform. At Paris he
did homage to Philip the Third for his French possessions,
and then turning southward he devoted a year to the
ordering of Gascony. It was not till the summer of 1274
that the King reached England. But he had already
planned the work he had to do, and the measures which
he laid before the Parliament of 1275 were signs of the
spirit in which he was to set about it. The First Statute
of Westminster was rather a code than a statute. It con-
tained no less than fifty-one clauses, and was an attempt to
summarize a number of previous enactments contained in
the Great Charter, the Provisions of Oxford, and the Statute
of Marlborough, as well as to embody some of the ad-
ministrative measures of Henry the Second and his son.
But a more pressing need than that of a codification of
the law was the need of a reorganization of finance.
While the necessities of the Crown were growing with
the widening of its range of administrative action, the
revenues of the Crown admitted of no corresponding
expansion. In the earliest times of our history the
outgoings of the Crown were as small as its income. All
local expenses, whether for justice or road-making or
fortress-building, were paid by local funds; and the
national " fyrd " served at its own cost in the field. The
produce of a king's private estates with the provisions
due to him from the public lands scattered over each
county, whether gathered by the King himself as he
moved over his realm, or as in later days fixed at a stated
rate and collected by his sheriff, were sufficient to defray
the mere expenses of the Court. The Danish wars gave
the first shock to this simple system. To raise a ransom
which freed the land from the invader, the first land-
322
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
ilo7~
CHAP. IV. tax, under the name of the Danegeld, was laid on every hide
Edward f ground ; and to this national taxation the Norman kings
theFirst. a( j(j e (i the feudal burthens of the new military estates
created by the Conquest, reliefs paid on inheritance, profits
of marriages and wardship, and the three feudal aids. But
foreign warfare soon exhausted these means of revenue ;
the barons and bishops in their Great Council were called
on at each emergency for a grant from their lands, and at
each grant a corresponding demand was made by the King
as a landlord on the towns, as lying for the most part
in the royal demesne. The cessation of Danegeld under
Henry the Second and his levy of scutage made little
change in the general incidence of taxation : it still fell
wholly on the land, for even the townsmen paid as holders
of their tenements. But a new principle of taxation was
disclosed in the tithe levied for a Crusade at the close of
Henry's reign. Land was no longer the only source of
wealth. The growth of national prosperity, of trade and
commerce, was creating a mass of personal property which
offered irresistible temptations to the Angevin financiers. The
old revenue from landed property was restricted and lessened
by usage and compositions. Scutage was only due for foreign
campaigns : the feudal aids only on rare -and stated occa-
sions: and though the fines from the shire-courts grew with
the growth of society the dues from the public lands were
fixed and incapable of developement. But no usage fettered
the Crown in dealing with personal property, and its growth
in value promised a growing revenue. From the close of
Henry the Second's reign therefore this became the most
common form of taxation. Grants of from a seventh to a
thirtieth of moveables, household-property, and stock were
demanded ; and it was the necessity of procuring their
assent to these demands which enabled the baronage
through the reign of Henry the Third to bring a financial
pressure to bear on the Crown.
But in addition to these two forms of direct taxation
Indirect
1 axation. jrj^i rec t taxation also was coming more and more to the
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 323
front. The right of the King to grant licences to bring CHAP. IV,
goods into or to trade within the realm, a right springing Ech^ r a
from the need for his protection felt by the strangers who the First '
came there for purposes of traffic, laid the foundation 1*307.
of our taxes on imports. Those on exports were only a
part of the general system of taxing personal property
which we have already noticed. How tempting this source
of revenue was proving we see from a provision of the
Great Charter which forbids the levy of more than the
ancient customs on merchants entering or leaving the
realm. Commerce was in fact growing with the growing
wealth of the people. The crowd of civil and eccle-
siastical buildings which date from this period shows
the prosperity of the country. Christian architecture
reached its highest beauty in the opening of Edward's
reign ; a reign marked by the completion of the abbey
church of Westminster and of the cathedral church at
Salisbury. An English noble was proud to be styled
"an incomparable builder," while some traces of the art
which was rising into life across the Alps flowed in,
it may be, with the Italian ecclesiastics whom the Papacy
forced on the English Church. The shrine of the
Confessor at Westminster, the mosaic pavement beside
the altar of the abbey, the paintings on the walls of
its chapter-house remind us of the schools which were
springing up under Giotto and the Pisans. But the
wealth which this art progress shows drew trade to
English shores. England was as yet simply an agri-
cultural . country. Gascony sent her wines ; her linens
were furnished by the looms of Ghent and Liege ; Genoese
vessels brought to her fairs the silks, the velvets, the glass
of Italy. In the barks of the Hanse merchants came fur
and amber from the Baltic, herrings, pitch, timber, and
naval stores from the countries of the north. Spain sent
us iron and war-horses. Milan sent armour. The great
Venetian merchant-galleys touched the southern coasts and
left in our ports the dates of Egypt, the figs and currants
324
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. of Greece, the silk of Sicily, the sugar of Cyprus and
Edward Urete, the spices of the Eastern seas. Capital too came
theJFirst. f rom abroad. The bankers of Florence and Lucca were
\307. busy with loans to the court or vast contracts with the
wool-growers. The bankers of Cahors had already dealt
a death-blow to the usury of the Jew. Against all this
England had few exports to set. The lead supplied by the
mines of Derbyshire, the salt of the Worcestershire springs,
the iron of the Weald, were almost wholly consumed
at home, The one metal export of any worth was that of
tin from the tin-mines of Cornwall. But the production
of wool was fast becoming a main element of the nation's
wealth. Flanders, the great manufacturing country of the
time, lay fronting our eastern coast ; and with this market
close at hand the pastures of England found more and
more profit in the supply of wool. The Cistercian order
which possessed vast ranges of moorland in Yorkshire
became famous as wool-growers ; and their wool had been
seized for Richard's ransom. The Florentine merchants
were developing this trade by their immense contracts ; we
find a single company of merchants contracting for the
purchase of the Cistercian wool throughout the year. It
was after counsel with the Italian bankers that Edward
devised his scheme for drawing a permanent revenue from
this source. In the Parliament of 1275 he obtained the
grant of half a mark, or six shillings and eightpence, on
each sack of wool exported ; and this grant, a grant
memorable as forming the first legal foundation of our
customs-revenue, at once relieved the necessities of the
Crown.
Wehh The grant of the wool tax enabled Edward in fact to deal
Campaign. with the great Difficulty of his realm. The troubles of the
Barons' war, the need which Earl Simon felt of Llewelyn's
alliance to hold in check the Marcher-barons, had all but
shaken off from Wales the last traces of dependence.
Even at the close of the war the threat of an attack from
the now united kingdom only forced Llewelyn to submis-
XIX.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
325
1272
1307
sion on a practical acknowledgement of his sovereignty. CHAP. IV
Although the title which Llewelyn ap Jorweith claimed of Edward
Prince of North Wales was recognized by the English the First,
court in the earlier days of Henry the Third, it was Avith-
drawn after 1229 and its claimant known only as Prince
of Aberffraw. But the loftier title of Prince of Wales
which Llewelyn ap Gryffydd assumed in 1256 was formally
conceded to him in 1267, and his right to receive homage
from the other nobles of his principality was formally
sanctioned. Near however as he seemed to the final
realization of his aims, Llewelyn was still a vassal of the
English crown, and the accession of Edward to the throne
was at once followed by the demand of homage. But the
summons was fruitless ; and the next two years were
wasted in as fruitless negotiation. The kingdom however
was now well in hand. The royal treasury was filled again,
and in 1277 Edward marched on North Wales. The fabric
of Welsh greatness fell at a single blow. The chieftains
who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewelyn in the
southern and central parts of the country deserted him
to join his English enemies in their attack ; an English
fleet reduced Anglesea ; and the Prince was cooped up in
his mountain fastnesses and forced to throw himself on
Edward's mercy. With characteristic moderation the
conqueror contented himself with adding to the English
dominions the coast-district as far as Conway and with
providing that the title of Prince of Wales should cease
at Llewelyn's death. A heavy fine which he had incurred
by his refusal to do homage was remitted ; and Eleanor, a
daughter of Earl Simon of Montfort whom he had sought
as his wife but who had been arrested on her way to him,
was wedded to the Prince at Edward's court.
For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches,
and Edward was able again to turn his attention to the
work of internal reconstruction. It is probably to this
time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we
may attribute his modification of our judicial system
VOL. L 22
Judicial
Reforms.
326 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. The King's Court was divided into three distinct tribunals,
Edward the Court of Exchequer which took cognizance of all
theFim. causes j n which the royal revenue was concerned ; the
ilofy Court of Common Pleas for suits between private persons ;
and the King's Bench, which had jurisdiction in all mat-
ters that affected the sovereign as well as in " pleas of the
crown" or criminal causes expressly reserved for his deci-
sion. Each court was now provided with a distinct staff
of judges. Of yet greater importance than this change,
which was in effect but the completion of a process of
severance that had long been going on, was the establish-
ment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side with that of
the common law. In his reform of 1178 Henry the Second
broke up the older King's Court, which had till then served
as the final Court of Appeal, by the severance of the
purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it
from the general body of his councillors. The judges thus
severed from the Council retained the name and the
ordinary jurisdiction of "the King's Court," but the mere
fact of their severance changed in an essential way the
character of the justice they dispensed. The King in
Council wielded a power which was not only judicial but
executive; his decisions though based upon custom were
not fettered by it, they were the expressions of his will,
and it was as his will that they were carried out by officers
of the Crown. But the separate bench of judges had no
longer this unlimited power at their command. They had
not the King's right as representative of the community to
make the law for the redress of a wrong. They professed
simply to declare what the existing law was, even if it was
insufficient for the full purpose of redress. The authority
of their decision rested mainly on their adhesion to ancient
custom or as it was styled the " common law " which had
grown up in the past. They could enforce their decisions
only by directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and
here again their right was soon rigidly bounded by set
form and custom. These bonds in fact became tighter
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 327
every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be CHAP. IV.
reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges Edward
became authorities for their successors. It is plain that the First -
such a state of things has the utmost value in many ways, 1307"
whether in creating in men's minds that impersonal notion
of a sovereign law which exercizes its imaginative force
on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and
sacredness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of
arbitrary power. But it threw a terrible obstacle in the
way of the actual redress of wrong. The increasing
complexity of human action as civilization advanced
outstripped the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient
custom furnished 110 redress for a wrong which sprang
from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry
and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual
cases the highest injustice.
It was the consciousness of this that made men cling Equitable
even from the first moment of the independent existence ^ 1 ?. s ~
. ,. . 1-1-11 -i diction.
of these courts to the judicial power which still remained
inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short in
any matter the duty of the King to do justice to all still
remained, and it was this obligation which was recog-
nized in the provision of Henry the Second by which all
cases in which his judges failed to do justice were reserved
for the special cognizance of the royal Council itself. To
this final jurisdiction of the King in Council Edward gave
a wide developement. His assembly of the ministers, the
higher permanent officials, and the law officers of the
Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its judicial
capacity the correction of all breaches of the law which
the lower courts had failed to repress, whether from weak-
ness, partiality, or corruption, and especially of those
lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage which
defied the common authority of the judges. Such powers
were of course capable of terrible abuse, and it shows what
real need there was felt to be for their exercize that though
regarded with jealousy by Parliament the jurisdiction of
328
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Edw_ard
the First.
1272-
13O7.
CHAP. iv. the royal Council appears to have been steadily put into
force through the two centuries which followed. In the
reign of Henry the Seventh it took legal and statutory
form in the shape of the Court of Star Chamber, and its
powers are still exercized in our own day by the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council. But the same duty of
the Crown to do justice where its courts fell short of jnvin"
v O O
due redress for wrong expressed itself in the jurisdiction
of the Chancellor This great officer of State, who had
perhaps originally acted only as President of the Council
when discharging its v judicial functions, acquired at a very
early date an independent judicial position of the same
nature. It is by remembering this origin of the Court of
Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers it
gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially
those which sprang from the misconduct of government
officials or of powerful oppressors, fell within its cognizance
as they fell within that of the Royal Council, and to
these were added disputes respecting the wardship of
infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable juris-
diction sprang from the defective nature and the technical
and unbending rules of the common law. As the Council
had given redress in cases where law became injustice,
so the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the
rules of procedure adopted by the common law courts on
the petition of a party for whose grievance the common law
provided no adequate remedy. An analogous extension of
his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford relief in cases
of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this 'side of his
jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time by the
results oflegislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical
bodies. The separate powers of the Chancellor, whatever
was the original date at which they were first exercized,
seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward
the First.
What reconciled the nation to the exercize of powers such
as these by the Crown and its council was the need which was
Law and
the
Baronage.
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 329
still to exist for centuries of an effective means of bringing CHAP. IV.
the baronage within the reach of the law. Constitu- Edward
tionally the position of the English nobles had now become
established. A King could no longer make laws or levy
taxes or even make war without their assent. The nation
reposed in them an unwavering trust, for they were no longer
the brutal foreigners from whose violence the strong hand
of a Xorman ruler had been needed to protect his subjects ;
they were as English as the peasant or the trader. They
had won English liberty by their swords, and the tradition
of their order bound them to look on themselves as its
natural guardians. The close of the Barons' War solved
the problem which had GO long troubled the realm, the
problem how to ensure the government of the realm in
accordance with the provisions of the Great Charter, by
the transfer of the business of administration into the
hands of a standing committee of the greater barons and
prelates, acting as chief officers of state in conjunction
with specially appointed ministers of the Crown. The
body thus composed was known as the Continual Council ;
and the quiet government of the kingdom by this body in
the long interval between the death of Henry the Third
and his son's return shows how effective this rule of the
nobles was. It is significant of the new relation which
they were to strive to establish between themselves and the
Crown that in the brief which announced Edward's acces-
sion the Council asserted that the new monarch mounted
his throne " by the will of the peers." But while the
political influence of the baronage as a leading element in
the whole* nation thus steadily mounted, the personal
and purely feudal power of each individual baron on his
own estates as steadily fell. The hold which the Crown
gained on every noble family by its rights of wardship and
marriage, the circuits of the royal judges, the ever narrow-
ing bounds within which baronial justice saw itself circum-
scribed, the blow dealt by scutage at their military power,
the prompt intervention of the Council in their feuds,
330
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-
13O7.
Edward
and the
Baronage.
lowered the nobles more and more to the common level of
their fellow subjects. Much yet remained to be done ; for
within the general body of the baronage there existed side
by side with the nobles whose aims were purely national
nobles who saw in the overthrow of the royal despotism
simply a chance of setting up again their feudal privileges ;
and different as the English baronage, taken as a whole, was
from a feudal noblesse like that of Germany or France there
is in every military class a natural, drift towards violence
and lawlessness. Throughout Edward's reign his strong
hand was needed to enforce order on warring nobles.
Great earls, such as those of Gloucester and Hereford,
carried on private war ; in Shropshire the Earl of Arundel
waged his feud with Fulk Fitz Warine. To the lesser and
poorer nobles the wealth of the trader, the long wain of
goods as it passed along the highway, remained a tempting
prey. Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks
against canons, a band of country gentlemen succeeded in
introducing themselves into the great merchant fair at
Boston ; at nightfall every booth was on fire, the merchants
robbed and slaughtered, and the booty carried off to ships
which lay ready at the quay. Streams of gold and silver,
ran the tale of popular horror, flowed melted down the
gutters "to the sea ; " all the money in England could hardly
make good the loss." Even at the close of Edward's reign
lawless bands of " trail-bastons," or club-meii, maintained
themselves by general outrage, aided the country nobles
in their feuds, and wrested money and goods from the great
tradesmen.
The King was strong enough to face and imprison the
warring earls, to hang the chiefs of the Boston marauders,
and to suppress the outlaws by rigorous commissions.
But the repression of baronial outrage was only a part
of Edward's policy in relation to the Baronage. Here, as
elsewhere he had to carry out the political policy of his
house, a policy defined by the great measures of Henry
the Second, his institution of scutage, his general assize of
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
331
1272-
1307.
arms, his extension of the itinerant judicature of the royal CHAP. IV.
judges. Forced by the first to an exact discharge of their Edward
military duties to the Crown, set by the second in the the _El rst -
midst of a people trained equally with the nobles to arms,
their judicial tyranny curbed and subjected to the King's
justice by the third, the barons had been forced from
their old standpoint of an isolated class to the new and
nobler position of a people's leaders. Edward watched
jealously over the ground which the Crown had gained.
Immediately after his landing he appointed a commission
of enquiry into the judicial franchises then existing, and
on its report (of which the existing " Hundred-Bolls." are
the result) itinerant justices were sent in 1278 to discover
by what right these franchises were held. The writs of
" quo warranto " were roughly met here and there. Earl
\Varenne bared a rusty sword and flung it on the justices'
table. " This, sirs," he said, " is my warrant. By the sword
our fathers won their lands when they came over with the
Conqueror, and by the sword we will keep them." But the
King was far iiom limiting himself to the mere carrying
out of the plans of Henry the Second. Henry had aimed
simply at lowering the power of the great feudatories;
Edward aimed rather at neutralizing their power by rais-
ing the whole body of landowners to the same level. We
shall see - at a later time the measures which were the
issues of this policy, but in the very opening of his reign
a significant step pointed to the King's drift. In the
summer of 1278 a royal writ ordered all freeholders who
held lands to the value of twenty pounds to receive
knighthood at the King's hands.
Acts as significant announced Edward's purpose of
carrying out another side of Henry's policy, that of limiting
in the same way the independent jurisdiction of the Church.
He was resolute to force it to become thoroughly national
by bearing its due part of the common national burthens,
and to break its growing dependence upon Borne. But the
ecclesiastical body was jealous of its position as a power
Edward-
and the
Church.
332
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1272
1307.
CHAP. IV. distinct from the power of the Crown, and Edward's policy
Edward had hardly declared itself when in 1279 Archbishop
at ' Peckham obtained a canon from the clergy by which
copies of the Great Charter, with its provisions in favour
of the liberties of the Church, were to be affixed to the
doors of churches. The step was meant as a defiant pro-
test against all interference, and it was promptly forbidden.
An order issued by the Primate to the clergy to declare to
their flocks the sentences of excommunication directed
against all who obtained royal writs to obstruct suits in church
courts, or who, whether royal officers or no, neglected to en-
force iheir sentences, was answered in a yet more emphatic
way. By falling into the " dead hand " or " mortmain " of
the Church land ceased to render its feudal services ; and
in 1279 the Statute " de Eeligiosis," or as it is commonly
called "of Mortmain," forbade any further alienation of land
to religious bodies in such wise that it should cease to
render its due service to the King. The restriction was
probably no beneficial one to the country at large, for
Churchmen were the best landlords, and it was soon evaded
by the ingenuity of the clerical lawyers; but it marked the
growing jealousy of any attempt to set aside what was
national from serving the general need and profit of the
nation. Its immediate effect was to stir the clergy to a
bitter resentment. But Edward remained firm, and when
the bishops proposed to restrict the royal courts from deal-
ing with cases of patronage or causes which touched the
chattels of Churchmen he met their proposals by an instant
prohibition.
The resentment of the clergy had soon the means of
showing itself during a new struggle with Wales. The
persuasions of his brother David, who had deserted him in
the previous war but who deemed his desertion insufficiently
rewarded by an English lordship, roused Llewelyn to a
fresh revolt. A prophecy of Merlin was said to promise
that when English money became round a Prince of Wales
should be crowned in London ; and at this moment a new
Conquest
of Wales.
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 333
coinage of copper money, coupled with a prohibition to CHAP. IV.
break the silver penny into halves and quarters, as had Edward
been commonly done, was supposed to fulfil the prediction. the j^5 st '
In 1282 Edward marched in overpowering strength into the 1307'
heart of Wales. But Llewelyn held out in Snowdon with
the stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English force
which had crossed into Anglesea prolonged the contest into
the winter. The cost of the war fell on the King's treasury.
Edward had called for but one general grant through the
past eight years of his reign ; but he was now forced to
appeal to his people, and by an expedient hitherto without
precedent two provincial Councils were called for this pur-
pose. That for Southern England met at Northampton, that
for Northern at York ; and clergy and laity were summoned,
though in separate session, to both. Two knights came from
every shire, two burgesses from every borough, while the
bishops brought their archdeacons, abbots, and the proctors
of their cathedral clergy. The grant of the laity was quick
and liberal. But both at York and Northampton the clergy
showed their grudge at Edward's measures by long delays
in supplying his treasury. Pinched however as were his
resources and terrible as were the sufferings of his army
through the winter Edward's firmness remained unbroken ;
and rejecting all suggestions of retreat he issued orders for
the formation of a new army at Caermarthen to complete
the circle of investment round Llewelyn. But the war
came suddenly to an end. The Prince sallied from his
mountain hold for a raid upon Radnorshire and fell
in a petty skirmish on the banks of the Wye. With
him died the independence of his race. After six months
of flight his brother David was made prisoner; and a
Parliament summoned at Shrewsbury in the autumn of
1283, to which each county again sent its two knights and
twenty boroughs their two burgesses, sentenced him to a
traitor's death. The submission of the lesser chieftains
soon followed : and the country was secured by the building
of strong castles at Convay and Caernarvon, and the
334
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-
1307.
Neio
Legisla-
tion.
settlement of English barons on the confiscated soil. The
Statute of Wales which Edward promulgated at Khuddlan
in 1284 proposed to introduce English law and the English
administration of justice and government into Wales.
But little came of the attempt ; and it was not till the
time of Henry the Eighth that the country was actually in-
corporated with England and represented in the English
Parliament. What Edward had really done was to break
the Welsh resistance. The policy with which he followed
up his victory (for the " massacre of the bards " is a mere-
fable) accomplished its end, and though two later rebellions
and a ceaseless strife of the natives with the English towns
in their midst showed that the country was still far from
being reconciled to its conquest, it ceased to be any serious
danger to England for a hundred years.
Erom the work of conquest Edward again turned to the
vork of legislation. In the midst of his struggle with
Wales he had shown his care for the commercial classes
by a Statute of Merchants in 1283, which provided for
the registration of the debts of traders and for their
recovery by distraint of the debtor's goods and the im-
prisonment of his person. The close of the war saw two
measures of even greater importance. The second Statute
of Westminster which appeared in 1285 is a code of the
same sort as the first, amending the Statutes of Mortmain,
of Merton, and of Gloucester as well as the laws of dower
and advowson, remodelling the system of justices of assize,
and curbing the abuses of manorial jurisdiction. In the
same year appeared the greatest of Edward's measures for
the enforcement of public order The Statute of Winchester
revived and reorganized the old institutions of national
police and national defence. It regulated the action of
the hundred, the duty of watch and ward, and the gather-
ing of the fyrd or militia of the realm as Henry the
Second had moulded it into form in his Assize of Arms.
Every man was bound to hold himself in readiness, duly
armed, for the King's service in case of invasion or revolt,
ill.] THE CHARTER 12041291. 335
and to pursue felons when hue and cry were made after CHAP. IV.
them. Every district was held responsible for crimes com- Edward
mitted within its bounds ; the gates of each town were the _^i rst -
to be shut at nightfall ; and all strangers were required 1^07.
to give an account of themselves to the magistrates
of any borough w r hich they entered. By a provision
which illustrates at once the social and physical condition
of the country at the time all brushwood was ordered to
be destroyed within a space of two hundred feet on either
side of the public higlnvay as a security for travellers against
sudden attacks from robbers. To enforce the observance
of this act knights were appointed in every shire under
the name of Conservators of the Peace, a name which
as the benefit of these local magistrates was more
sensibly felt and their powers were more largely extended
was changed into that which they still retain of Justices
of the Peace. So orderly how r ever was the realm that
Edward was able in 1286 to pass over sea to his
foreign dominions, and to spend the next three years in
reforming their government. But the want of his guiding
hand was at last felt ; and the Parliament of 1289 refused
a new tax till the King came home again.
He returned to find the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford '' Quia
at war, and his judges charged with violence and corrup- <m P to
tion. The two Earls were brought to peace, and Earl
Gilbert allied closely to the royal house by a marriage
with the King's daughter Johanna. After a careful
investigation the judicial abuses were recognized and
amended. Two of the chief justices were banished from
the realm and their colleagues imprisoned and fined. But
these administrative measures were only preludes to a
great legislative act which appeared in 1290. The Third
Statute of Westminster, or, to use the name by which it is
more commonly known, the Statute " Quia Emptores," is
one of those legislative efforts which mark the progress of
a wide social revolution in the country at large. The
number of the greater barons was diminishing every day,
336
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272
13O7.
The
Crown
and the
Jews.
while the number of the country gentry and of the more
substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase of
the national wealth. The increase showed itself in a
growing desire to become proprietors pf land. Tenants of
the barons received under-tenants on condition of their ren-
dering them similar services to those which they them-
selves rendered to their lords ; and the baronage, while
duly receiving the services in compensation for which
they had originally granted their lands in fee, saw with
jealousy the feudal profits of these new under-tenants, the
profits of wardships or of reliefs and the like, in a word
the whole increase in the value of the estate consequent
on its subdivision and higher cultivation passing into other
hands than their own. The purpose of the statute " Quia
Emptores " was to check this process by providing that in
any case of alienation the sub-tenant should henceforth
hold, not of the tenant, but directly of the superior lord.
But its result was to promote instead of hindering the
transfer and subdivision of land. The tenant who was
compelled before the passing of the statute to retain in
any case so much of the estate as enabled him to discharge
his feudal services to the over-lord of whom he held it,
was now enabled by a process analogous to the modern
sale of " tenant-right," to transfer both land and services
to new holders. However small the estates thus created
might be, the bulk were held directly of the Crown ; and
this class of lesser gentry and freeholders grew steadily
from this time in numbers and importance.
The year which saw " Quia Emptores" saw a step which
remains the great blot upon Edward's reign. The work
abroad had exhausted the royal treasury, and he bought a
grant from his Parliament by listening to their wishes in
the matter of the Jews. Jewish traders had followed
William the Conqueror from Normandy, and had been
enabled by his protection to establish themselves in
separate quarters or " Jewries" in all larger English towns.
The Jew had no right or citizenship in the land. The
ill.] THE CHAETER. 12041291. 337
Jewry in which he lived was exempt from the common CHAP. IV.
law. He was simply the King's chattel, and his life and Edward
goods were at the King's mercy. But he was too valuable the _
a possession to be lightly thrown away. If the Jewish 1307.
merchant had no standing-ground in the local court
the king enabled him to sue before a special justiciar ; his
bonds were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal
palace at Westminster ; he was protected against the
popular hatred in the free exercize of his religion and
allowed to build synagogues and to manage his own
ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. The royal
protection was dictated by no spirit of tolerance or mercy.
To the kings the Jew was a mere engine of finance. The
wealth which he accumulated was wrung from him when-
ever the crown had need, and torture and imprisonment
were resorted to when milder means failed. It was the
gold of the Jew that filled the royal treasury at the out-
break of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers
that the foreign kings found strength to hold their baronage
at bay.
That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier Pojmlar
years of his settlement, beneficial to the nation at large Hatred of
there can be little doubt. His arrival was the arrival of
a capitalist ; and heavy as was the usury he necessarily
exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans
gave an impulse to industry. The century which followed
the Conquest witnessed an outburst of architectural energy
which covered the land with castles and cathedrals ; but
castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans of
the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic
architecture. The buildings which, as at Lincoln and
Bury St. Edmund's, still retain their name of "Jews'
Houses " were almost the first houses of stone which
superseded the mere hovels' of the English burghers. Nor
was their influence simply industrial. Through their
connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain and the East
they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences. A
338
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1272-
1307.
CHAP. IV. Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford ;
Edward Roger Bacon himself studied under English rabbis. But
the general progress of civilization now drew little help
from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and
Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial
finance. He fell back on the petty usury of loans to the
poor, a trade necessarily accompanied with much, of
extortion and which roused into fiercer life the religious
hatred against their race. Wild stories floated about
of children carried off to be circumcized or crucified,
and a Lincoln boy who was found slain in a Jewish
house was canonized by popular reverence as " St. Hugh."
The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish
quarters and attempt their conversion, but the popular
fury rose too fast for these gentler means of reconciliation.
When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews from hanging
by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily
refused the brethren alms.
But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance.
The picture which is commonly drawn of the Jew as
timid, silent, crouching under oppression, however truly
it may represent the general position of his race through-
out mediaeval Europe, is far from being borne out by
historical fact on this side the Channel. Tn England the
attitude of the Jew, almost to the very end, was an
attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew
that the royal policy exempted him from the common
taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of
Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held' him
to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment
of his bonds. A royal commission visited with heavy
penalties any outbreak of violence against the King's
"chattels." The Red King actually forbade the conver-
sion of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor
exchange, he said, that would rid him of a valuable
property and give him only a subject. We see in such a
case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this
The
Jewish
Defiance.
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 339
consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere CHAP. IV.
the Jewry was a town within a town, with its own Edward
language, its own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, the First -
its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into the If off
square of little alleys which lay behind the present Town
Hall ;. the Church itself was powerless to prevent a
synagogue from rising in haughty rivalry over against the
cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St. Fridsswido
complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his
door as the procession of tho saint passed by, mocking at
the miracles which were said to be wrought at her shrine.
Halting and then walking firmly on hi? feet, showing his
hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his
fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and cbla.tions from the crowd
that flocked to St. Frideswide's shriiie on the ground that
such recoveries of life and liml <yere quite as real as any
that Frideswide ever wrought. Sickness and death in the
prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer, but no
earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have
ventured to deal with him. A more daring act of
fanaticism showed the temper of the Jews even at the
close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual procession
of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's on
the Ascension Day of 1268 a Jew suddenly burst from a
group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and
wrenching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot.
But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror
of the Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from any burst of
popular vengeance. The sentence of the King condemned
them to set up a cross of marble on the spot where the
3rime was committed, but even this sentence was in part
remitted, and a less offensive place was found for the cross
in an open plot by Merton College.
Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection had Expulsion
never wavered. Henry the Second granted the Jews j cl
a right of burial outside every city where they dwelt.
Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York,
340
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAI-. IV. and organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for
Edward tne registration of their contracts. John suffered none to
theFirst. pi un der them save himself, though he once wrested from
ilo/r them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The
troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater
than even the royal greed could reap ; the Jews grew
wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only a burst of
popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would
have enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of
Jewry after Jewry showed the popular hatred during the
Barons' war, and at its close fell on the Jews the more
terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury
and the religious fanaticism which threatened them was now
added the jealousy with which the nation that had grown
up round the Charter regarded all exceptional jurisdictions
or exemptions from the common law and the common
burthens of the realm. As Edward looked on the privileges
of the Church or the baronage, so his people looked on
the privileges of the Jews. The growing weight of the
Parliament told against them. Statute after statute
hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real
property, to employ Christian servants, to move through
the streets without the two white tablets of wool on their
breasts which distinguished their race. They were pro-
hibited from building new synagogues or eating with
Christians cr acting as physicians to them. Their trade,
already crippled by the rivalry of the bankers of Cahors,
was annihilated by a royal order which bade them renounce
usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do
no more, and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies
for his treasury and himself swayed by the fanaticism of
his subjects, bought the grant of a fifteenth from clergy
and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his realm.
No share of the enormities which accompanied this
expulsion can fall upon the King, for he not only suffered
the fugitives to take their personal wealth with them but
punished with the halter those who plundered them at
Hi: THE CHARTER. 12041291. 341
sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the CHAP. IV,
sixteen thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few Ed^ r i
reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked, others the F " rst
robbed and flung overboard. One ship-master turned out J|o7*
a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank and bade
them call a new Moses to save them from the sea.
From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler Scotland.
schemes of legal and administrative reforms, Edward was
suddenly called away to face complex questions which
awaited him in the North. At the moment which we have
reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an aggregate
of four distinct countries, each with its different people,
its different tongue, its different history The old Pictish
kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the original Scot
kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde,
and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth
to the English border, had become united under the Kings
of the Scot3 ; Pictland by inheritance, Cumbria by a grant
from the English King Eadmund, the Lowlands by conquest,-
confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.
The shadowy claim of dependence on the English Crown
which dated from the days when a Scotch King "com-
mended " himself and his people to Alfred's son Eadward,
a claim strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm
as a " fellow worker " of the English sovereign " by sea and
land," may have been made more real through this last
convention. But whatever change the acquisition of the
Lowlands made in the relation of the Scot Kings to the
English sovereigns, it certainly affected in a very marked
way their relation both to England and to their own
realm. Its first result was the fixing of the royal resi-
dence in their new southern dominion at Edinburgh;
and the English civilization which surrounded them from
the moment of this settlement on what was purely English
ground changed the Scot Kings in all but blood into
Englishmen. The marriage of King Malcolm with
Margaret, the sister of Eadgar ^Etheling, not only
YOL. I. 23
342
HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1272-
13O7.
CHAP. IV. hastened this change but opened a way to the English
Edward crown. Their children were regarded by a large party
the First. w ithin England as representatives of the older royal race
and as claimants of the throne, and this danger grew as
William's devastation of the North not only drove fresh
multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands but
filled the Scotch court with English nobles who fled
thither for refuge. So formidable indeed became the
pretensions of the Scot Kings that they forced the ablest
of our Norman sovereigns into a complete change of
policy. The Conqueror and William the Red had met
the threats of the Scot sovereigns by invasions which
ended again and again in an illusory homage, but the
marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda
robbed the claims of the Scottish line of much of their force
while it enabled him to draw their kings into far closer
relations with the Norman throne. King David not only
abandoned the ambitious dreams of his predecessors to
place himself at the head of his niece Matilda's party
in her contest with Stephen, but as Henry's brother-in-law
he figured as the first noble of the English Court and
found English models and English support in the work
of organization which he attempted within his own
dominions. As the marriage with Margaret had changed
Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain into an English King, so
that of Matilda brought about the conversion of David
into a Norman and feudal sovereign. His court was
filled with Norman nobles from the South, such as the
Balliols and Bruces who were destined to play so great a
part afterwards but who now for the first time obtained
fiefs in the Scottish realm, and a feudal jurisprudence
modelled on that of England was introduced into the
Lowlands.
A fresh connexion between Scotland and the English
sovereigns began with the grant of lordships within
England itself to the Scot kings or their sons. The Earldom
of Northumberland was held by David's son Henry, that of
Scotch
and
English
Crowns.
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 343
Huntingdon by Henry the Lion. Homage was sometimes CHAP. IV.
rendered, whether for these lordships, for the Lowlands, or Edward
for the whole Scottish realm, but it was the capture of theFirst
William the Lion during the revolt of the English baronage llo/T
which first suggested to the ambition of Henry the Second
the project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the
English Crown. To gain his freedom William consented
to hold his kingdom of Henry and his heirs. The pre-
latas and lords of Scotland did homage to Hemy as
to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all Scotch
causes was allowed to the superior court of the English
suzerain. From this bondage however Scotland was freed
by the prodigality of Eichard who allowed her to buy back
the freedom she had forfeited. Both sides fell into their
old position, but both were ceasing gradually to remember
the distinctions between the various relations in which the
Scot King stood for his different provinces to the English,
Crown. Scotland had come to be thought of as a single
country; and the court of London transferred to the whole
of it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which at most
applied only to Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh
looked on the English Lowlands as holding no closer
relation to England than the Pictish lands beyond the
Forth. Any difficulties w T hich arose were evaded by a legal
compromise. The Scot Kings repeatedly did homage to
the English sovereign.but with a reservation of rights which
were prudently left unspecified. The English King accepted
the homage on the assumption that it was rendered to him
as overlord of the Scottish realm, and this assumption was
neither granted nor denied. For nearly a hundred years the
relations of the two countries were thus kept peaceful and
friendly, and the death of Alexander the Third seemed
destined to remove even the necessity of protests by a
closer union of the two kingdoms. Alexander had wedded
his only daughter to the .King of Norway, and after
long negotiation the Scotch Parliament proposed the
marriage of Margaret, " the Maid of Norway," the girl who
344 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK.
CHAP. IV. was the only issue of this marriage and so heiress of the
Edward kingdom, with the son of Edward the First. It was hovv-
thejFirst. ever care f u lly provided in the marriage treaty which was
1307^ concluded at Brigham in 1290 that Scotland should re-
main a separate and free kingdom, and that its laws and
customs should be preserved inviolate. No military aid
was to be claimed by the English King, no Scotch appeal
to be carried to an English court. But this project
was abruptly frustrated by the child's death during her
voyage to Scotland in the following October, and with the
rise of claimant after claimant of the vacant throne Edward
was drawn into far other relations to the Scottish realm.
The Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland
Scotch 01) ]y three could be regarded as serious claimants. By
' the extinction of the line of William the Lion the rio-ht
O
of succession passed to the daughters of his brother David.
The claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, rested on his
descnnt from the elder of these ; that of Robert Bruce, Lord
of Annan dale, on his descent from the second ; that of John
Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his descent from the
third. It is clear that at this crisis nvery one in Scotland
or out of it recognized some sort of overlordship in Edward,
for the Norwegian King, the Primate of St. Andrews, and
seven of the Scotch Earls had already appealed to him
before Margaret's death; and her death was followed by the
consent both of the claimants and the Council of Regency
to refer the question of the succession to his decision in a
Parliament at JSTorham. But the overlordship which the
Scots acknowledged was something far less direct and
definite than the superiority which Edward claimed at the
opening of this conference in May, 1291. His claim was
supported by excerpts from monastic chronicles and by the
slow advance of an English army ; while the Scotch lords,
taken by surprize, found little help in the delay which was
granted them. At the opening of June therefore in com-
mon with nine of the claimants they formally admitted
Edward's direct suzerainty. To the nobles in fact the
6-reenJ History
.,, rfJ ^ rr ^r-^> ']
f SCOTLAND
J IT C C <*
IN I29O
Har
per
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
345
concession must have seemed a small one, for like the CHAP. IV.
principal claimants they were for the most part Norman Edward
in blood, with estates in both countries, and looking for the _^i rst
honours and pensions from the English Court. From the Hof"
Commons who were gathered with the nobles at Norham
no such admission of Edward's claims could be extorted ;
but in Scotland, feudalized as it had been by David, the
Commons were as yet of little weight and their opposition
was quietly passed by. All the rights of a feudal suzerain
were at once assumed by the English King ; he entered into
the possession of the country as into that of a disputed fief
to be held by its overlord till the dispute was settled, his
peace was sworn throughout the land, its castles delivered
into his charge, while its bishops and nobles swore homage
to him directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus
reduced to the subjection which she had experienced under
Henry the Secoc d ; but the full discussion which followed
over the various claims to the throne showed that while
exacting to the full what he believed to be his right Edward
desired to do justice to the country itself. The body of
commissioners which the King named to report on the
claims to the throne were mainly Scotch. A proposal for
the partition of the realm among the claimants was rejected
as contrary to Scotch law. On the report of the commis-
sioners after a twelvemonth's investigation in favour of
Balliol as representative of the elder branch at the close
of the year 1292, his homage was accepted for the whole
kingdom of Scotland with a full acknowledgement of the '
services due from him to its overlord. The castles were at
once delivered to the new monarch, and for a time there
was peace.
With the accession of Balliol and the rendering of his
homage for the Scottish realm the greatness of Edward
reached its height. He was lord of Britain as no English
King had been before. The last traces of Welsh in-
dependence were trodden under foot. The shadowy claims
of supremacy over Scotland were changed into a direct
Edward
and
Scotland,
346 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. overlordship. Across the one sea Edward was lord of
Edward Guienne, across the other of Ireland, and in England itself
theFirst. a w i se an d generous policy had knit the whole nation
1307" round his throne. Firmly as he still clung to pre-
rogatives which the baronage were as firm not to own,
the main struggle for the Charter was over. Justice and
good government were secured. The personal despotisrr
which John had striven to build up, the imperial autocracy
which had haunted the imagination of Henry the Third,
were alike set aside. The rule of Edward, vigorous and
effective as it was, was a rule of law, and of law enacted
not by the royal will, but by the common council of the
realm. Never had English ruler reached a greater height
of power, nor was there any sign to warn the King of the
troubles which awaited him. France, jealous as it was of
his greatness and covetous of his Gascon possessions, he
could hold at bay. Wales was growing tranquil. Scotland
gave few signs of discontent or restlessness in the first
year that followed the homage of its King. Under John
Balliol it had simply fallen back into the position of
dependence which it held under William the Lion , and
Edward had no purpose of pushing further his rights as
suzerain than Henry the Second had done. One claim of
the English Crown indeed was soon a subject of dispute
between the lawyers of the Scotch and of the English
Council boards. Edward would have granted as freely
as Balliol himself that though Scotland was a dependent
kingdom it was far from being an ordinary fief of the
English Crown. By feudal custom a distinction had
always been held to exist between the relations of a
dependent king to a superior lord and those of a vassal
noble to his sovereign. At Balliol's homage indeed
Edward had disclaimed any right to the ordinary feudal
incidents of a fief, those of wardship or marriage, and in
this disclaimer he was only repeating the reservations
of the marriage treaty of Brigham. There were other
customs of the Scotch realm as incontestable as these,
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
347
Even after the treaty of Falaise the Scotch King had CHAP. IV.
not been held bound to attend the council of the English Edward
baronage, to do service in English warfare, or to con- the j^ rst -
tribute on the part of his Scotch realm to English aids. Ho?"
If no express acknowledgement of these rights had been
made by Edward, for some time after his acceptance of
Balliol's homage they were practically observed. The
claim of independent justice was more doubtful, as it
was of higher import than these. The judicial independ-
ence of Scotland had been expressly reserved in the
marriage treaty. It was certain that no appeal from a
Scotch King's court to that of his overlord had been
allowed since the days of William the Lion. But in the
jurisprudence of the feudal lawyers the right of ultimate
appeal was the test of sovereignty, and Edward regarded
Balliol's homage as having placed him precisely in the
position of William the Lion and subjected his decisions
to those of his overlord. He was resolute therefore to
assert the supremacy of his court and to receive Scotch
appeals.
Even here however the quarrel seemed likely to end
only in legal bickering. Balliol at first gave way, and it
was not till 1293 that he alleged himself forced by the
resentment both of his Baronage and his people to take
up an attitude of resistance. While appearing therefore
formally at Westminster he refused to answer an appeal
before the English courts save by advice of his Council.
But real as the resentment of his barons may have been,
it was not Scotland which really spurred Balliol to this
defiance. His wounded pride had made him the tool
of a power beyond the s,ea. The keenness with which
France had watched every step of Edward's success in the
north sprang not merely from a natural jealousy of his
greatness but from its bearing on a great object of French
ambition. One fragment of Eleanor's inheritance still
remained to her descendants, Guienne and Gascony, the
fair lands along the Garonne and the territory which
The
French
Attack.
348 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. stretched south of that river to the Pyrenees. It was this
Edward territory that now tempted the greed of Philip the Fair,
theFirst. an( j ^ was j n feeding the strife between England and the
1307. Scotch King that Philip saw an opening for winning it.
French envoys therefore brought promises of aid to the
Scotch Court ; and no sooner had these intrigues moved
Balliol to resent the claimc of his overlord than Philip
found a pretext for open quarrel with Edward in the frays
which went constantly on in the Channel between the
mariners of Normandy and those of the Cinque Ports.
They culminated at this moment in a great sea-fight which
proved fatal to eight thousand Frenchmen, and for this
Philip haughtily demanded redress. Edward saw at once
the danger of his position. He did his best to allay the
storm by promise of satisfaction to France, atid by address-
ing threats of punishment to the English seamen. But
Philip still clung to his wrong, while the national passion
which was to prove tor a hundred years to come strong
enough to hold down the royal policy of peace showed
itself in a characteristic defiance with which the seamen
of the Cinque Ports met Edward's menaces. " Be the
King's Council well advised," ran this remonstrance, "that
if wrong or grievance be done them in any fashion against
right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all that
they have, and go seek through the seas where they shall
think to make their profit." In spite therefore of Edward's
efforts the contest continued, and Philip found in it an oppor-
tunity to cite the King before his court at Paris for wrongs
done to him as suzerain. It was hard for Edward to
dispute the summons without weakening the position
which his own sovereign courts Jiad taken up towards the
Scotch King, and in a final effort to avert the conflict the
King submitted to a legal decision of the question, and to
a formal cession of Guienne into Philip's hands for forty
days in acknowledgement of his supremacy. Bitter as the
sacrifice must have been it failed to win peace. The forty
days had no sooner passed than Philip refused to restore
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 349
the fortresses which had been left in pledge. In February CHAP. IV.
1294 he declared the English king contumacious, and in May Edward
declared his fiefs forfeited to the French Crown. Edward the j^ rst
was driven to take up arms, but a revolt in Wales deferred 1307"
the expedition to the following year. No sooner however
was it again taken in hand than it became clear that a
double danger had to be met. The summons which
Edward addressed to the Scotch barons to follow him
in arms to Guienne was disregarded. It was in truth,
as we have seen, a breach of customary law, and was
probably meant to force Scotland into an open declaration
of its connexion with France. A second summons was
followed by a more formal refusal. The greatness of the
danger threw Edward on England itself. For a war in
Guienne and the north he needed supplies ; but he needed
yet more the firm support of his people in a struggle
which, little as he foresaw its ultimate results, would
plainly be one of great difficulty and danger. In 1295
he called a Parliament to counsel with him on the affairs
of the realm, but with the large statesmanship which
distinguished him he took this occasion of giving the
Parliament a shape and organization which has left its
assembly the most important event in English history.
To realize its importance we must briefly review the The
changes by which the Great Council of the Norman Kings Q 16a /
had been gradually transforming itself into what was
henceforth to be known as the English Parliament.
Neither the Meeting of the Wise Men before the Con-
quest nor the Great Council of the Barons after it had
been in any legal or formal way representative bodies.
The first theoretically included all free holders of land,
but it shrank at an early time into a gathering of earls,
higher nobles, and bishops with the officers and thegns
of the royal household. Little change was made in
the composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for
the Great Council of the Norman kings was supposed to
include all tenants who held directly of the Crown, the
350
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1272-
1307.
CHAP. IV. bishops and greater abbots (whose character as independent
Edward spiritual members tended more and more to merge in their
the_First. p OS ition as barons), and the high officers of the Court.
But though its composition remained the same, the
character of the assembly was essentially altered ; from
a free gathering of " Wise Men " it sank to a Royal
Court of feudal vassals. Its functions too seem to have
become almost nominal and its powers to have been re-
stricted to the sanctioning, without debate or possibility
of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown.
But nominal as such a sanction might be, the " counsel
and consent " of the Great Council was necessary for the
legal validity of every considerable fiscal or political
measure. Its existence therefore remained an effectual
protest against the imperial theories advanced by the law-
yers of Henry the Second which declared all legislative
power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It was in fact
under Henry that these assemblies became more regular,
and their functions more important. The reforms which
marked his reign were issued in the Great Council, and
even financial matters were suffered to be debated there.
But it was not till the grant of the Great Charter that
the powers of this assembly over taxation were formally
recognized, and the principle established that no burthen
beyond the customary feudal aids might be imposed
" save by the Common Council of the Realm."
The same document first expressly regulated its form.
In theory, as we have; seen, the Great Council consioted
of all who held land directly of the Crown. But the samo
causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemote
to the greater nobles told on tho actual composition of
the Council of Barons. While the attendance of the
ordinary tenants in chief, the Knights or " Lesser Barons "
as they were called, was burthensome from its expense
to themselves, their numbers and their dependence on
the higher nobles made the assembly of these knights
dangerous to the Crown. As early therefore as the
Greater
and
Lesser
Barons.
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
351
Edward
the First
1272-
13O7,
time of Henry the First we find a distinction recognized CHAP. IV.
between the " Greater Barons," of whom the Council
was usually composed, and the "Lesser Barons" who
formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown. But though
the attendance of the latter had become rare their right
of attendance remained intact. While enacting that
the prelates and greater barons should be summoned by
special writs to each gathering of the Council a remarkable
provision of the Great Charter orders a general summons
to be issued through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the
Crown. The provision was probably intended to rouse the
lesser Baronage to the exercize of rights which had prac-
tically passed into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted
in later issues of the Charter we may doubt whether the
principle it embodied ever received more than a very
limited application. There are traces of the attendance
of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps of the
neighbourhood where the assembly was held, in some of its
meetings under Henry the Third, but till a late period in
the reign of his successor the Great Council practically
remained a gathering of the greater barons, the prelates,
and the high officers of the Crown.
The change which the Great Charter had failed to Constiiw
accomplish was now however brought about by the social tl nal
P i /^\ f* i J-fyJlUfiYlCCj
circumstances of the time. One of the most remarkable n f
of these was a steady decrease in the number of the
greater nobles. The bulk of the earldoms had already
lapsed to the Crown through the extinction of the families
of their possessors ; of the greater baronies, many had
practically ceased to exist by their division among female
co-heires?es, many through the constant struggle of the
poorer nobles to rid themselves of their rank by a dis-
claimer so as to escape the burthen of higher taxation
and attendance in Parliament which it involved. How
far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact
that hardly more than a hundred barons sat in the earlier
Councils of Edward's reign. But while the number of
r,.
Finance.
352 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. those who actually exercized the privilege of assisting
Edward ^ n Parliament was rapidly diminishing, the numbers and
thejrirst. W ealth of the " lesser baronage," whose right of attendance
ifof ~. h & d become a mere constitutional tradition, was as rapidly
increasing. The long peace and prosperity of the realm,
the extension of its commerce and the increased export of
wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of the country
gentry as well as of the freeholders and substantial
yeomanry. We have already noticed the effects of the
increase of wealth in begetting a passion for the posses-
sion of land which makes this reign so critical a period
in the history of the English freeholder; but the same
tendency had to some extent existed in the preceding
century, and it was a consciousness of the growing im-
portance of this class of rural proprietors which induced
the barons at the moment of the Great Charter to
make their fruitless attempt to induce them to take part
in the deliberations of the Great Council. But while the
3, barons desired their presence as an aid against the Crown,
the Crown itself desired it as a means of rendering taxation
more efficient. So long as the Great Council remained
a mere assembly of magnates it was necessary for the
King's ministers to treat separately with the other orders
of the state as to the amount and assessment of their
contributions. The grant made in the Great Council was
binding only on the barons and prelates who made it ; but
before the aids of the boroughs, the Church, or the shires
could reach the royal treasury, a separate negotiation had
to be conducted by the officers of the Exchequer with the
reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court of each
county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of
this sort would be the more tedious and disappointing as
the necessities of the Crown increased in the later years
of Edward, and it became a matter of fiscal expediency to
obtain the sanction of any proposed taxation through the
presence of these classes in the Great Council itself.
The effort however to revive the old personal attendance
Hi.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 353
of the lesser baronage which had broken down half a CHAP. IV.
century before could hardly be renewed at a time when Edward
the increase of their numbers made it more impracticable -^*
than ever; but a means of escape from this difficulty was 1^07,
fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court
through which alone a summons could be addressed to the
landed knighthood. Amidst the many judicial reforms
of Henry or Edward the Shire Court remained unchanged.
The haunted mound or the immemorial oak round which
the assembly gathered (for the court was often held in the
open air) were the relics of a time before the free kingdom
had sunk into a shire and its Meetings of the Wise into
a County Court. But save that the King's reeve had
taken the place of the King and that the Norman legisla-
tion had displaced the Bishop and set four Coroners by
the Sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders remained
much as of old. The local knighthood, the yeomanry,
the husbandmen of tlie county, were all represented in
the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff, as guarded
by his liveried followers he published the King's writs,
announced his demand of aids, received the present-
ment of criminals and the inquest of the local jurors,
assessed the taxation of each district, or listened solemnly
to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who
held themselves oppressed in the lesser courts of the
hundred or the soke. It was in the County Court alone
that the Sheriff could legally summon the lesser baronage
to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual
constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a
solution of the difficulty which we have stated. For the
principle of representation by which it was finally solved
was coeval with the Shire Court itself. In all cases of
civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the
Sheriff, as members of a class, though not formally de-
puted for that purpose, practically represented the judicial
opinion of the county at large. From every hundred came
groups of twelve s\vorn deputies, the "jurors " through
354
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-
1307.
Knights
of the
Shire.
whom the presentments of the district were made to the
royal officer and with whom the assessment of its share in
the general taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on
the outskirts of the crowd, clad in the brown smock frock
which still lingers in the garb of our carters and plough-
men, were broken up into little knots of five, a reeve and four
assistants, each of which knots formed the representative of
a rural township. If in fact we regard the Shire Courts as
lineally the descendants of our earliest English Witenage-
motes, we may justly claim the principle of parliamentary
representation as among the oldest of our institutions.
It was easy to give this principle a further extension
by the choice of representatives of the lesser barons in
the shire courts to which they were summoned; but
it was only slowly and tentatively that this process was
applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. As
early as the close of John's reign there are indications of
the approaching change in the summons of " four discreet
knights " from every county. Fresh need of local support
was felt by both parties in the conflict of the succeeding
reign, and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights
from each shire " to meet on the common business of the
realm." It was no doubt with the same purpose that
the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in
each shire for his famous Parliament of 1265. Something
like a continuous attendance may be dated from the
accession of Edward, but it was long before the knights
were regarded as more than local deputies for the assess-
ment of taxation or admitted to a share in the general
business of the Great Council. The statute " Quia
Emptores," for instance, was passed in it before the
knights who had been summoned could attend. Their
participation in the deliberative power of Parliament, as
well as their regular and continuous attendance, dates
only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater
constitutional change in their position had already taken
place through the extension of electoral rights to the
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 355
freeholders at large. The one class entitled to a seat in CHAP. IV.
the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the lesser Edward
baronage ; and it was of the lesser baronage alone that the th e First,
knights were in theory the representatives. But the necessity HoiT
of holding their election in the County Court rendered any
restriction of the electoral body physically impossible.
The court was composed of the whole body of freeholders,
and no sheriff could distinguish the " aye, aye " of the
yeoman from the " aye, aye " of the lesser baron. From
the first moment therefore of their attendance we find
the knights regarded not as mere representatives of the
baronage but as knights of the shire, and by this silent
revolution the whole body of the rural freeholders were
admitted to a share in the government of the realm.
The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more Boroughs
radical revolution in the admission into the Great Council a J^
of representatives from the boroughs. The presence of
knights from each shire was the recognition of an older
right, but no right of attendance or share in the national
"counsel and assent" could be pleaded for the burgesses
of the towns. On the other hand the rapid developement
of their wealth made them every day more important as
elements in the national taxation. From all payment of
the dues or fines exacted by the King as the original
lord of the soil on which they had in most cases grown
up the towns had long since freed themselves- by what
was called the purchase of the " farm of the borough ; " in
other words, by the commutation of these uncertain dues
for a fixed sum paid annually to the Crown and appor-
tioned by their own magistrates among the general body of
the burghers. All that the King legally retained was the
right enjoyed by every great proprietor of levying a corre-
sponding taxation on his tenants in demesne under the
name of " a free aid " whenever a grant was made for the
national necessities by the barons of the Great Council.
But the temptation of appropriating the growing wealth
of the mercantile class proved stronger than legal restric-
356
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272
1307.
Burgesses
in Par-
liament,
tions, and we find both Henry the Third and his son
assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure and without
any authority from the Council even over London itself.
The burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation to con-
tribute to the " free aids " demanded by the royal officers,
but the suspension of their markets or trading privileges
brought them in the end to submission. Each of these " free
aids " however had to be extorted after a long wrangle
between the borough and the officers of the Exchequei ;
and if the towns were driven to comply with what they
considered an extortion they could generally force the
Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and
abatement of its original demands.
The same financial reasons therefore existed for desiring
the presence of borough representatives in the Great
Council as existed in the case of the shires ; but it was the
genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the older
constitutional tradition and summoned two burgesses from
each town to the Parliament of 1265. Time had indeed
to pass before the large and statesmanlike conception of
the great patriot could meet with full acceptance. Through
the earlier part of Edward's reign we find a few instances
of the presence of representatives from the towns, but
their scanty numbers and the irregularity of their atten-
dance show that they were summoned rather to afford
financial information to the Great Council than as repre-
sentatives in it of an Estate of the Eealm. But every
year pleaded stronger and stronger for their inclusion, and
in the Parliament of 1295 that of 1265 found itself at last
reproduced. " It was from me that he learnt it," Earl
Simon had cried, as he recognized the military skill of
Edward's onset at Evesham ; " it was from me that he
learnt it," his spirit might have exclaimed as he saw the
King gathering at last two burgesses "from every city,
borough, and leading town " within his realm to sit side
by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the Great
Council. To the Crown the change was from the first an
III.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 357
advantageous one. The grants of subsidies by the burgesses CHAP. IV.
in Parliament proved more profitable than the previous Edward
extortions of the Exchequer. The proportions of their the Jl rst -
grant generally exceeded that of the other estates. Their Ho/'
representatives too proved far more compliant with the
royal will than the barons or knights of the shire ; only
on one occasion during Edward's reign did the burgesses
waver from their general support of the Crown.
It was easy indeed to control them, for the selection
of boroughs to be represented remained wholly in the
King's hands, and their numbers could be increased or
diminished at the King's pleasure. The determination
was left to the sheriff, and at a hint from the royal
Council a sheriff of Wilts would cut down the number of
represented boroughs in his shire from eleven to three,
or a sheriff of Bucks declare he could find but a single
borough, that of Wycomb, within the bounds of his
county. Nor was this exercize of the prerogative ham-
pered by any anxiety on the part of the towns to claim
representative privileges. It was hard to suspect that a
power before which the Crown would have to bow lay
in the ranks of soberly- clad traders, summoned only to
assess the contributions of their boroughs, and whose
attendance was as difficult to secure as it seemed burthen-
some to themselves and the towns who sent them. The
mass of citizens took little or no part in their choice, for
they were elected in the county court by a few of the
principal burghers deputed for the purpose ; but the cost
of their maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the
burgess by his town as four were paid to the knight by
his county, was a burden from which the boroughs made
desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making no
return to the sheriff. Some bought charters of exemption
from the troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were
summoned by Edward the First more than a third ceased
to send representatives after a single compliance with the
royal summons. During the whole time from the reign of
VOL. I. 24
358
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-
1307.
Parlia-
ment and
the
Clergy.
Edward the Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the
sheriff of Lancashire declined to return the names of any
boroughs at all within that county " on account of their
poverty." Nor were the representatives themselves more
anxious to appear than their boroughs to send them. The
busy country squire and the thrifty trader were equally
reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of a journey
to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to
ensure their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such
as that by which Walter le Kous is " held to bail in eight
oxen and four cart-horses to come before the King on the
day specified " for attendance in Parliament. But in spite
of obstacles such as these the presence of representatives
from the boroughs may be regarded as continuous from the
Parliament of 1295. As the representation of the lesser
barons had widened through a silent change into that of
the shire, so that of the boroughs restricted in theory
to those in the royal demesne seems practically from
Edward's time to have been extended to all who were in a
condition to pay the cost of their representatives' support.
By a change as silent within the Parliament itself the
burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters
of taxation, was at last admitted to a full share in the deli-
berations and authority of the other orders of the State.
The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire
to the assembly of 1295 completed the fabric of our
representative constitution. The Great Council of the
Barons became the Parliament of the Realm. Every order
of the state found itself represented in this assembly, and
took part in the grant of supplies, the work of legislation,
and in the end the control of government. But though in all
essential points the character of Parliament has remained
the same from that time to this, there were some remark-
able particulars in which the assembly of 1295 differed
widely from the present Parliament at St. Stephen's.
Some of these differences, such as those which sprang
from the increased powers and changed relations of the
ill.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
359
1272-
1307.
different orders among themselves, we shall have occasion CHAP. IV.
to consider at a later time. But a difference of a far Edward
more startling kind than these lay in the presence of the the 3
clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme
of Edward the .First which can be regarded as especially
his own, it is his project for the representation of the
ecclesiastical order. The King had twice at least summoned
its "proctors" to Great Councils before 1295, but it was
then, only that the complete representation of the Church
was definitely organized by the insertion of a clause in the
writ which summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring
the personal attendance of all archdeacons, deans, or priors
of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each cathedral
chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The
clause is repeated in the writs of the present day, but
its practical effect was foiled almost from the first by the
resolute opposition of those to whom it was addressed.
What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did.
Even when forced to comply with the royal summons, as
they seem to have been forced during Edward's reign, they
sat jealously by themselves, and their refusal to vote
supplies in any but their own provincial assemblies, or con-
vocations, of Canterbury and York left the Crown without
a motive for insisting on their continued attendance.
Their presence indeed, though still at times granted on
some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality that by
the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into
desuetude. In their anxiety to preserve their existence as
an isolated and privileged order the clergy flung away a
power which, had they retained it, would have ruinously
hampered the healthy developement of the state. To take
'a single instance, it is difficult to see how the great
changes of the Eeformation could have been brought
about had a good half of the House of Commons consisted
purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been
backed by the weight of their property as possessors of a
third of the landed estates of the realm.
360
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272
1307.
Parlia-
ment at
West-
minster.
Conquest
of
Scotlaid.
A hardly less important difference may be found in
the gradual restriction of the meetings of Parliament
to Westminster. The names of Edward's statutes remind
us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at
Winchester, Acton Burnell, Northampton. It was at a
later time that Parliament became settled in the straggling
village which had grown up in the marshy swamp of the Isle
of Thorns beside the palace whose embattled pile towered
over the Thames and the new West-minster which was
still rising in Edward's day on the site of the older church
of the Confessor. It is possible that, while contributing
greatly to its constitutional importance, this settlement
of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the
background its character as a supreme court of appeal.
The proclamation by which it was called together invited
"all who had any grace to demand of the King in
Parliament, or any plaint to make of matters which
could not be redressed or determined by ordinary course
of law, or who had been in any way aggrieved by any
of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or their
bailiffs, or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed,
rated, charged, or sur-charged to aids, subsidies, or taxes,"
to deliver their petitions to receivers who sat in the Great
Hall of the Palace of Westminster. The petitions were
forwarded to the King's Council, and it was probably
the extension of the jurisdiction of that body and the
rise of the Court of Chancery which reduced this ancient
right of the subject to the formal election of " Triers of
Petitions" at the opening of every new Parliament by
the House of Lords, a usage which is still continued.
But it must have been owing to some memory of the
older custom that ihe subject always looked for redress
against injuries from the Crown or its ministers to the
Parliament of the realm.
The subsidies granted by the Parliament of 1295
furnished the King with the means of warfare with
both Scotland and France while they assured him of the
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
361
sympathy of his people in the contest. But from the
first the reluctance of Edward to enter on the double war
was strongly marked. The refusal of the Scotch baronage
to obey his summons had been followed on Balliol's part
by two secret steps which made a struggle inevitable, by
a request to Eome for absolution from his oath of fealty
and by a treaty of alliance with Philip the Fair. As yet
however no open breach had taken place, and while
Edward in 1296 summoned his knighthood to meet him
in the north he called a Parliament at Newcastle in the
hope of bringing about an accommodation with the Scot
King. But all thought of accommodation was roughly
ended by the refusal of Balliol to attend the Parliament,
by the rout of a small body of English troops, and by
the Scotch investment of Carlisle. Taken as he was by
surprize, Edward showed at once the vigour and rapidity
of his temper. His army marched upon Berwick. The
town was a rich and well-peopled one, and although a
wooden stockade furnished its only rampart the serried
ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy
conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the King to the
quick. As his engineers threw up rough entrenchments
for the besieging army the burghers bade him wait till he
won the town before he began digging round it. " Kynge
Edward," they shouted, " waune thou havest Berwick, pike
thee ; waune thou havest geten, dike thee." But the
stockade was stormed with the loss of a single knight,
nearly eight thousand of the citizens were mown down in
a ruthless carnage, and a handful of Flemish traders who
held the town-hall stoutly against all assailants were burned
alive in it. The massacre only ceased when a procession
of priests bore the host to the King's presence, praying for
mercy. Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of
tears called off his troops ; but the town was ruined for
ever, and the greatest merchant city of northern Britain
sank from that time into a petty sea-port.
At Berwick Edward received Balliol's formal defiance.
CHAP. IV.
Edward
the First.
1272-]
13O7.
362 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. "Has the fool done this folly?" the King cried in haughty
Edward scorn ; "if he will not come to us, we will come to him."
thePirst. ^ e terrible slaughter however had done its work, and his
iio7 march northward was a triumphal progress. Edinburgh,
Stirling, and Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the
English army, and Balliol himself surrendered and passed
without a blow from his throne to an English prison. No
further punishment however was exacted from the prostrate
realm. Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its
forfeiture to be the legal consequence of Balliol's treason.
It lapsed in fact to its suzerain ; and its earls, barons, and
gentry swore homage in Parliament at Berwick to Edward
as their King. The sacred stone on which its older sove-
reigns had been installed, an oblong block of limestone
which legend asserted to have been the pillow of Jacob as
angels ascended arid descended upon him, was removed
from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the
Confessor. It was enclosed by Edward's order in a stately
seat, which became from that hour the coronation chair of
English Kings. To the King himself the whole business
must have seemed another and easier conquest of Wales,
and the mercy and just government which had followed
his first success followed his second also. The govern-
ment of the new dependency was entrusted to John of
Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English
Council of Regency. Pardon was freely extended to all
who had resisted the invasion, and order and public peace
were rigidly enforced.
Confirma- But the triumph, rapid and complete as it was, had
tion of the In0 re than exhausted the aids granted by the Parliament.
Charters
The treasury was utterly drained. The struggle indeed
widened as every month went on ; the costly fight with the
French in Gascony called for supplies, while Edward was
planning a yet costlier attack on northern France with
the aid of Flanders. Need drove him on his return from
Scotland in 1297 to measures of tyrannical extortion which
seemed to recall the times of John. His first blow fell on
III.]
THE CHARTER. 1204-1291.
363
1272
1307
the Church. At the close of 1294 he had already demanded CHAP. IV.
half their annual income from the clergy, and so terrible E<iwa r(i
was his wrath at their resistance that the Dean of St. Paul's, the First,
who stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead of sheer terror
at his feet. " If any oppose the King's demand," said a
royal envoy in the midst of the Convocation, "let him
stand up that he may be noted as an enemy to the King's
peace." The outraged Churchmen fell back on an unten-
able plea that their aid was due solely to Rome, and
alleged the bull of "Clericis Laicos," issued by Boniface
the Eighth at this moment, a bull which forbad the
clergy to pay secular taxes from their ecclesiastical
revenues, as a ground for refusing to comply with further
taxation. In 1297 Archbishop AVinchelsey refused on the
ground of this bull to make any grant, and Edward met
his refusal by a general outlawry of the whole order. The
King's courts were closed, and all justice denied to those
who refused the King aid. By their actual plea the
clergy had put themselves formally in the wrong, and the
outlawry soon forced them to submission ; but their aid
did little to recruit the exhausted treasury. The pressure
of the war steadily increased, and far wider measures of
arbitrary taxation w r ere needful to equip an expedition
which Edward prepared to lead in person to Flanders.
The country gentlemen were compelled to take up knight-
hood or to compound for exemption from the burthensome
honour, and forced contributions of cattle and corn were
demanded from the counties. Edward no doubt purposed
to pay honestly for these supplies, but his exactions from
the merchant class rested on a deliberate theory of his royal
rights. He looked on the customs as levied absolutely at
his pleasure, and the export duty on wool now the staple
produce of the country was raised to six times its former
amount. Although he infringed no positive provision of
charter or statute in his action, it was plain that his course
really undid all that had been gained by the Barons' war.
But the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found
364
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. stout resistance within his realm. The barons drew together
Edward an( ^ catted a meeting for the redress of their grievances,
the First.
1272-
1307.
two greatest of the English nobles, Humfrey cle Bohun,
Earl of Hereford, and Eoger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed
themselves at the head of the opposition. The first was
Constable, the second Earl Marshal, and Edward bade
them lead a force to Gascony as his lieutenants while he
himself sailed to Flanders. Their departure would have
left the Baronage without leaders, and the two earls availed
themselves of a plea that they were riot bound to foreign
service save in attendance on the King to refuse obedience
to the royal orders. "By God, Sir Earl," swore the King
to the Earl Marshal, " you shall either go or hang ! " " By
God, Sir King," was the cool reply, " I will neither go nor
hang !" Both parties separated in bitter anger; the King
to seize fresh wool, to outlaw the clergy, and to call an
army to his aid ; the barons to gather in arms, backed by
the excommunication of the Primate. But the strife went
no further than words. Ere the Parliament he had con-
vened could meet, Edward had discovered his own power-
lessness; Winchelsey offered his mediation; and Edward
confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of Forests as
the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the
Commons. With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling
of which his nature was capable the King stood before his
people in Westminster Hall and owned with a burst of
tears that he had taken their substance without due warrant
of law. His passionate appeal to their loyalty wrested a re-
luctant assent to the prosecution of the war, and in August
Edward sailed for Flanders, leaving his son regent of
the realm. But the crisis had taught the need of further
securities against the royal power, and as Edward was
about to embark the barons demanded his acceptance of
additional articles to the Charter, expressly renoun-
cing his right of taxing the nation without its own
consent. The King sailed without complying, but Win-
chelsey joined the two earls and the citizens of London in
ill.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 365
forbidding any levy of supplies till the Great Charter with CHAP. IV.
these clauses was again confirmed, and the trouble in Edward
Scotland as well as the still pending strife with France
left Edward helpless in the barons' hands. The Great 1307.
Charter and the Charter of the Forests were solemnly
confirmed by him at Ghent in November ; and formal
pardon was issued to the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk.
The confirmation of the Charter, the renunciation of any Revolt of
right to the exactions by which the people were aggrieved,
the pledge that the King would no more take " such aids,
tasks, and prizes but by common assent of the realm," the
promise not to impose on wool any heavy customs or
" maletot " without the same assent, was the close of the
great struggle which had begun at Eunnymede. The
clauses so soon removed from the Great Charter were
now restored ; and evade them as they might, the kings
were never able to free themselves from the obligation to
seek aid solely from the general consent of their subjects.
It was Scotland which had won this victory for English
freedom. At the moment when Edward and the earls
stood face to face the King saw his work in the north
suddenly undone. Botli the justice and injustice of the
new rule proved fatal to it. The wrath of the Scots, already
kindled by the intrusion of English priests into Scotch
livings and by the grant of lands across the border to
English barons, was fanned to fury by the strict adminis-
tration of law and the repression of feuds and cattle-
lifting. The disbanding too of troops, which was caused
by the penury of the royal exchequer, united with the
licence of the soldiery who remained to quicken the
national sense of wrong. The disgraceful submission of
their leaders brought the people themselves to the front.
In spite of a hundred years of peace the farmer of Fife or
the Lowlands and the artizan of the towns remained stout-
hearted Northumbrian Englishmen. They had never
consented to Edward's supremacy, and their blood rose
against the insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of
366
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
BOOK
CHAP. IV. an outlaw knight, William Wallace, saw in their smoulder-
Edward i n g discontent a hope of freedom for his country, and his
thejFirst. <3 ar i n g ra ids on outlying parties of the English soldiery
ilofT roused the country at last into revolt.
Wallace ^ Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know
little or nothing ; the very traditions of his gigantic stature
and enormous strength are dim and unhistorical. But the
instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright in choos-
ing him for its national hero. He was the first to assert
freedom as a national birthright, and amidst the despair
of nobles and priests to call the people itself to arms. At
the head of an army drawn principally from the coast
districts north of the Tay, which were inhabited by a
population of the same blood as that of the Lowlands,
Wallace in September 1297 encamped near Stirling, the
pass between the north and the south, and awaited the
English advance. It was here that he was found by the
English army. The offers of John of Warenne were
scornfully rejected : " W T e have come," said the Scottish
leader, " not to make peace, but to free our country." The
position of Wallace behind a loop of Forth was in fact
chosen with consummate skill The one bridge which
crossed the river was only broad enough to admit two
horsemen abreast ; and though the English army had been
passing from daybreak but half its force was across at
noon when Wallace closed on it and cut it after a short
combat to pieces in sight of its comrades. The retreat of
the Earl of Surrey over the border left Wallace head of
the country he had freed, and for a few months he acted as
" Guardian of the Realm " in Balliol's name, and headed
a wild foray into Northumberland in which the barbarous
cruelties of his men left a bitter hatred behind them
which was to wreak its vengeance in the later bloodshed
of the war. His reduction of Stirling Castle at last called
Edward to the field. In the spring of 1298 the King's
diplomacy had at last wrung a trace for two years from
Philip the Fair ; and he at once returned to England to
in.] THE CHARTER. 12041291. 367
face the troubles in Scotland. Marching northward with CHAP. IV.
a larger host than had ever followed his banner, he was Edward
enabled by treachery to surprize Wallace as he fell back to the j^ rst --
avoid an engagement, and to force him on the twenty- \%O7,
second of July to battle near Falkirk. The Scotch force
consisted almost wholly of foot, and Wallace drew up
his spearmen in four great hollow circles or squares, the
outer ranks kneeling and the whole supported by bow-
men within, while a small force of horse were drawn up as
a reserve in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo,
the first appearance in our history since the day of Senlac
of " that unconquerable British infantry " before which
chivalry was destined to go down. For a moment it had
all Waterloo's success. " I have brought you to the ring,
hop (dance) if you can," are words of rough humour that
reveal the very soul of the patriot leader, and the ser-
ried ranks answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of
Durham who led the English van shrank wisely from the
look of the squares. " Back to your mass, Bishop," shouted
the reckless knights behind him, but the body of horse
dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. Terror spread
through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew
off in a body from' the field. But the generalship of
Wallace was met by that of the King. Drawing his bow-
men to the front, Edward riddled the Scottish ranks with
arrows and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the wavering
line. In a moment all was over, the maddened knights
rode in and out of the broken ranks, slaying without
mercy. Thousands fell on the field, and Wallace himself
escaped with difficulty, followed by a handful of men.
But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work Second
was done. He had roused Scotland into life, and even Conquest
a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered. Edward g co ^ an d.
remained master only of the ground he stood on : want of
supplies forced .him at last to retreat ; and in the summer
of the following year, 1299, when Balliol, released from
his English prison, withdrew into France, a regency of the
368 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. Scotch nobles under Robert Bruce and John Coinyn
Edward continued the struggle for independence. Troubles at
theirst. } lonie anc l danger from abroad stayed Edward's hand. The
ilo? barons still distrusted his sincerity, and though at
their demand he renewed the Confirmation in the spring
of 1299, his attempt to add an evasive clause saving the
right of the Crown proved the justice of their distrust,
In spite of a fresh and unconditional renewal of it a
strife over the Forest Charter went on till the opening of
1301 when a new gathering of the barons in arms with
the support of Archbishop Winchelsey wrested from him
its full execution. What aided freedom within was as of
old the peril without. France was still menacing, and a
claim advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth at its sug-
.gestion to the feudal superiority over Scotland arrested
a new advance of the King across the border. A
quarrel however which broke out between Philip le Bel
and the Papacy removed all obstacles. It enabled Edward
to defy Boniface and to wring from France a treaty in
which Scotland was abandoned. In 1304 he resumed the
work of invasion, and again the nobles flung dow r n their
arms as he marched to the North. Comyn, at the head
of the Eegency, acknowledged his sovereignty, and the
surrender of Stirling completed the conquest of Scotland.
But the triumph of Edward was only the prelude to the
carrying out of his designs for knitting the two countries
together by a generosity and wisdom which reveal the
greatness of his statesmanship. A general amnesty was
extended to all who had shared in the resistance. Wallace,
who refused to avail himself of Edward's mercy, was
captured and condemned to death at Westminster on
charges of treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The head of
the great patriot, crowned in mockery with a circlet of
laurel, was placed upon London Bridge. But the execution
of Wallace was the one blot on Edward's clemency. With
a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of the
country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were
III.]
THE CHARTER. 12041291.
369
1272
13O7.
Rising of
Bruce.
freshly pardoned for their share in the war, and anticipated CHAP. IV.
the policy of Cromwell by allotting ten representatives Edward
to Scotland in the Common Parliament of his realm. >A theiirst -
Convocation was summoned at Perth for the election of
these representatives, and a great judicial scheme which
was promulgated in this assembly adopted the amended
laws of King David as the base of a new legislation, and
divided the country for judicial purposes into four districts,
Lothian, Galloway, the Highlands, and the land between
the Highlands and the Forth, at the head of each of
which were placed two justiciaries, the one English and
the other Scotch.
With the conquest and settlement of Scotland the
glory of Edward seemed again complete. The bitterness
of his humiliation at home indeed still preyed upon
him, and in measure after measure we see his purpose
of renewing the strife with the baronage. In 1303 he
found a means of evading his pledge to levy no new
taxes on merchandize save by assent of the realm in a
consent of the foreign merchants, whether procured by
royal pressure or no, to purchase by stated payments
certain privileges of trading. In this " New Custom "
lay the origin of our import duties. A formal absolu-
tion from his promises which he obtained from Pope
Clement the Fifth in 1305 showed that he looked on his
triumph in the North as enabling him to reopen the ques-
tions which he had yielded. But again Scotland stayed
his hand. Only four months had passed since its submis-
sion, and he was preparing for a joint Parliament of the two
nations at Carlisle, when the conquered country suddenly
sprang again to arms. Its new leader was Eobert Bruce,
a grandson of one of the original claimants of the crown.
o o
The Norman house of Bruce formed a part of the York-
shire baronage, "but it had acquired through intermarriages
the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale.
Both the claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on
the English side in the contest with Balliol and Wallace,
370 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. and Eobert had himself been trained in the English court
Edward an( l stood high in the King's favour. But the withdrawal
theFirst. O f ;g a ]ji o i g ave a new force to his claims upon the crown,
ilozT and the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot
with the Bishop of St. Andrews so roused Edward's jeal-
ousy that Bruce fled for his life across the border. Early
in 1306 he met Cornyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose
treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, in
the church of the Grey Friars at Dumfries, and after the
interchange of a few hot words struck him with his dagger
to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted of no for-
giveness, and Bruce for very safety was forced to assume
the crown six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The
news roused Scotland again to arms, and summoned
Edward to a fresh contest with his unconquerable foe.
But the murder of Comyn had changed the King's mood
to a terrible pitilessness. He threatened death against all
concerned in the outrage, and exposed the Countess of
Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a cage
or open chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers
of Berwick. At the solemn feast which celebrated his son's
knighthood Edward vowed on the swan which formed the
chief dish at the banquet to devote the rest of his days to
exact vengeance from the murderer himself. But even at
the moment of the vow Bruce was already flying for his
life to the western islands. " Henceforth " he said to his
wife at their coronation " thou art Queen of Scotland and I
King." " I fear " replied Mary Bruce " we are only playing
at royalty like children in their games." The play was soon
turned into bitter earnest. A small English force under
Aymer de Valence sufficed to rout the disorderly levies
which gathered round the new monarch, and the flight of
Bruce left his followers at Edward's mercy. Noble after
noble was sent to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded
kindred with royalty. " His only privilege," burst forth the
King, " shall be that of being hanged on a higher gallows
than the rest." Knights and priests were strung up side
III.] THE CHARTER. 1204-1291. 371
by side by the English justiciaries ; while the wife and CHAP, iv
daughters of Robert Bruce were flung into Edward's Edward
prisons. Bruce himself had offered to capitulate to Prince
Edward. But the offer only roused the old King to fury.
" Who is so bold," he cried, " as to treat with our traitors
without our knowledge ? " and rising from his sick bed he
led his army northwards in the summer of 1307 to com-
plete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon' him,
and in the very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his
last at Burgh-upon-sands.
BOOK IV.
THE PARLIAMENT.
13071461.
VOL. 1. 25
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK IV.
FOR Edward the Second we have three important contemporaries :
Thomas de la More, Trokelowe's Annals, and the life by a monk of
Malmesbury printed by Hearne. The sympathies of the first are with
the King, those of the last two with the Barons. Murimuth's short
Chronicle is also contemporary. John Barbour's " Bruce," the great
legendary storehouse for his hero's adventures, is historically
worthless.
Important as it is, the reign of Edward the Third is by no means
fortunate in its annalists. The concluding part of the Chronicle of
Walter of Hemingford or Heminburgh seems to have been jotted
down as news of the passing events reached its author : it ends at the
battle of Crecy. Hearne has published another contemporary account,
that of Robert of Avesbury, which closes in 1356. A third account
by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, will be found in the collection of
Twysden. At the end of this century and the beginning of the next
the annals which had been carried on in the Abbey of St. Albans were
thrown together by Walsingham in the " Historia Anglicana " which
bears his name, a compilation whose history may be found in the
prefaces to the " Chronica Monasterii S. Albani " issued in the Rolls
Series. An anonymous chronicler whose work is printed in the 22nd
volume of the " Archneologia " has given us the story of the Good
Parliament, another account is preserved in the " Chronica Anglise
from 1328 to 1388," published in the Rolls Series, and fresh light has
been recently thrown on the time by the publication of a Chronicle by
Adam of Usk which extends from 1377 to 1404. Fortunately the
scantiness of historical narrative is compensated by the growing
fulness and abundance of our Statepapers. Rymer's Fcedera is rich
in diplomatic and other documents for this period, and from this time
we have a storehouse of political and social information in the Parlia-
mentary Rolls.
For the French war itself our primary authority is the Chronicle
of Jehan le Bel, a canon of the church of St. Lambert of Liege,
who himself served in Edward's campaign against the Scots and
spent the rest of his life at the court of John of Hainault. Up to
the Treaty of Bretigny, where it closes, Froissart has done little
more than copy this work, making however large additions from
his own enquiries, especially in the Flemish and Breton campaigns
376 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
and in the account of Crecj. Froissart was himself a Hainaulter
of Valenciennes ; he held a post in Queen Philippa's household
from 1361 to 1369, and under this influence produced in 1373 the
first edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later edition is far
less English in tone, and a third version, begun by him in his old age
after long absence from England, is distinctly French in its sympathies.
Froissart's vivacity and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of
his details ; as an historical authority he is of little value. The
"Fasciculi Zizanioruin" in the Rolls Series with the documents
appended to it is a work of primary authority for the history of Wyclii
and his followers : a selection from his English tracts has been made by
Mr. T. Arnold for the University of Oxford, which has also published
his " Trias." The version of the Bible that bears his name has been
edited with a valuable preface by the Rev. J, Forshall and Sir F.
Madden. William Longland's poem, " The Complaint of Piers the
Ploughman " (edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society)
throws a flood of light on the social state of England after the Treaty
of Bretigny.
The " Annals of Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth,"
now published by the Master of the Rolls, are our main authority for
the period which follows Edward's death. They serve as the basis
of the St. Alban's compilation which bears the name of Walsingham,
and from which the " Life of Richard," by a monk of Evesham is
for the most part derived. The sams violent Lancastrian sympathy
runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton's Chronicle.
The French authorities on the other hand are vehemently on Richard's
side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is supplemented by the
metrical history of Creton (" Archseologia," vol. xx.), and by the
" Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart " (English Historical
Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the
time of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French
feeling against the House of Lancaster and the war-policy which it
had revived. The popular feeling in England may be seen in
" Political Songs from Ed ward III. to Richard III." (Rolls Series). A
poem on " The Deposition of Richard II." which has been published
by the Camden Society is now ascribed to William Longland.
With Henry the Fifth our historic materials become more abundant.
We have the " Acta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, a chaplain in
the royal army; a life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style
but identical in arrangement and facts with the former work ; a
biography by Robert Redman ; a metrical chronicle by Elmham
(published in Rolls Series in " Memorials of Henry the Fifth ") ;
and the meagre chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne. The King's
Norman campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's '"'Siege de
Rouen" (Caen, 1867). The "Wars of the English in France "and
Blondel's work " De Reductione Normannise " (both in Rolls Series)
give ample information on the military side of this and the next reign.
But with the accession of Henry the Sixth we again enter on a
period of singular dearth in its historical authorities. The " Proces de
Jeanne d Arc " (published by the Soci6te" de 1'Histoire de France) is
the only real authority for her history. For English affairs we are
reduced to the meagre accounts of William of Worcester, of the
AUTHORITIES. 377
Continuator of the Crowland Chronicle, and of Fabyan. Fabyan is a
London alderman with a strong bias in favour of the House of Lancaster,
and his work is useful for London only. The Continuator is one of
the best of his class ; and though connected with the house of York,
the date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field,
makes him fairly impartial ; but he is sketchy and deficient in
information. The more copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far
superior to these in literary ability, but of later date, and strongly
Lancastrian in tone. For the struggle between Edward and Warwick,
the valuable narrative of "The Arrival of Edward the Fourth"
(Camden Society) may be taken as the official account on the royal
side. The Paston Letters are the first instance in English history
of a family correspondence, and throw great light on the social
condition of the tims.
CHAPTER I.
EDWARD II.
13071327.
IN his calling together the estates of the realm Edward Parlia-
the First determined the course of English history. From |5*^L.
the first moment of its appearance the Parliament became
the centre of English affairs. The hundred years indeed
which follow its assembly at Westminster saw its rise
into a power which checked and overawed the Crown.
Of the Kings in whose reigns the Parliament gathered
this mighty strength not one was likely to look with
indifference on the growth of a rival authority, and the
bulk of them were men who in other times would have
roughly checked it. What held their hand was the need
of the Crown. The century and a half that followed the
gathering of the estates at Westminster was a time of
almost continual war, and of the financial pressure that
springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered
them. In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought
mainly an effective means of procuring supplies for that
policy of national consolidation which had triumphed in
Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland.
But the triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one,
and the strife brought wider strifes in its train. When
Edward wrung from Balliol an acknowledgement of his
suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France, the
war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the up-
growth of social, of political, of religious revolution within
380 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. England itself, of which that acknowledgement was to be
Edward the prelude. But the thicker troubles gathered round
Second. England the more the royal treasury was drained, and
13O7- now that arbitrary taxation was impossible the one means
13a7 ' of filling it lay in a summons of the Houses. The Crown
was chained to the Parliament by a tie of absolute need.
From the first moment of parliamentary existence the
life and power of the estates assembled at "Westminster
hung on the question of supplies. So long as war went
on no ruler could dispense with the grants which fed the
war and which Parliament alone could afford. But it
was impossible to procure supplies save by redressing the
grievances of which Parliament complained and by grant-
ing the powers which Parliament demanded. It was in
vain that King after King, conscious that war bound them
to the Parliament, strove to rid themselves of the war.
So far was the ambition of our rulers from being the cause
of the long struggle that, save in the one case of Henry
the Fifth, the desperate effort of every ruler was to arrive at
peace. Forced as they were to fight, their restless diplomacy
strove to draw from victory as from defeat a means of
escape from the strife that was enslaving the Crown. The
royal Council, the royal favourites, were always on the
side of peace. But fortunately for English freedom peace
was impossible. The pride of the English people, the
greed of France, foiled every attempt at accommodation.
The wisest ministers sacrificed themselves in vain. King
after King patched up truces which never grew into
treaties, and concluded marriages which brought fresh
discord instead of peace. War went ceaselessly on, and
with the march of war went on the ceaseless growth of
the Parliament.
Robert The death of Edward the First arrested only for a
Bruce, moment the advance of his army to the north. The Earl
of Pembroke led it across the border, and found himself
master of the country without a blow. Bruce's career
became that of a desperate adventurer, for even the
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
381
CHAP. I.
Edward
the
Second.
1307-
1327.
Highland chiefs in whose fastnesses he found shelter were
bitterly hostile to one who claimed to be King of their
foes in the Lowlands. It was this adversity that trans-
formed the murderer of Comyn into the noble leader of a
nation's cause. Strong and of commanding presence,
brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships of
his career with a courage and hopefulness that never
failed. In the legends that clustered round his name we
see him listening in Highland glens to the bay of the
bloodhounds on his track, or holding a pass single-handed
against a crowd of savage clansmen. Sometimes the
small band which clung to him were forced to support
themselves by hunting and fishing, sometimes to break
up for safety as their enemies tracked them to their lair-
Bruce himself had more than once to fling off his coat-
of-mail and scramble barefoot for very life up the crags.
Little by little however the dark sky cleared. The
English pressure relaxed. James Douglas, the darling of
Scottish story, was the first of the Lowland Barons to rally
to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the King's
cause. Once he surprized his own house, which had
been given to an Englishman, ate the dinner which was
prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and tossed
their bodies on to a pile of wood at the castle gate. Then
he staved in the wine-vats that the wine might mingle
with their blood, and set house and wood-pile on fire.
A ferocity like this degraded everywhere the work of Edward
freedom ; but the revival of the country went steadily on.
Pembroke and the English forces were in fact paralyzed
by a strife which had broken out in England between
the new King and his baronage. The moral purpose
which had raised his father to grandeur was wholly want-
ing in Edward the Second; he was showy, idle, and
stubborn in temper ; but he was far from being destitute
of the intellectual quickness which seemed inborn in
the Plantagenets. He had no love for his father, but he
had seen him in the later years of his reign struggling
382 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as
Edward to taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to
Smmd. observe the clauses added to the Charter. The son's purpose
1307- was the same, that of throwing off what he looked on as
1327. ^ e vo k e O f the baronage ; but the means by which he
designed to bring about his purpose was the choice of a
minister wholly dependent on the Crown. We have already
noticed the change by which the " clerks of the King's
chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary govern-
ment under the Norman and Angevin sovereigns, had been
quietly superseded by the prelates and lords of the Con-
tinual Council. At the close of the late reign a direct
demand on the part of the barons to nominate the great
officers of state had been curtly rejected ; but the royal choice
had been practically limited in the selection of its ministers
to the class of prelates and nobles, and however closely con-
nected with royalty they might be such officers always to
a great extent shared the feelings and opinions of their
order. The aim of the young King seems to have been to
undo the change which had been silently brought about,
and to imitate the policy of the contemporary sovereigns
of France by choosing as his ministers men of an inferior
position, wholly dependent on the Crown for their power,
and representatives of nothing but the policy and interests
of their master. Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from
a family of Guienne, had been his friend and companion
during his father's reign, at the close of which he had
been banished from the realm for his share in intrigues
which divided Edward from his son. At the accession of
the new king he was at once recalled, created Earl of
Cornwall, and placed at the head, of the administration
When Edward crossed the sea to wed Isabella of France,
the daughter of Philip the Fair, a marriage planned by his
father to provide against any further intervention of France
in his difficulties with Scotland, the new minister was left
as Ptegent in his room. The offence given by this rapid
promotion was embittered by his personal temper. Gay,
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 383
genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the CHAP. I.
quickness and audacity of Southern Gaul. The older Edward
ministers were dismissed, all claims of precedence or in- second
heritance were set aside in the distribution of offices at the 1307-
coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud 13a . 7 '
baronage to fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and
his lance unhorsed his opponents in tourney after tourney.
His reckless wit flung nicknames about the Court, the
Earl of Lancaster was " the Actor," Pembroke " the Jew,"
Warwick " the Black Bog." But taunt and defiance broke
helplessly against the iron mass of the baronage. After a
few months of power the formal demand of the Parlia-
ment for his dismissal could not be resisted, and in May,
1308, Gaveston was formally banished from the realm.
But Edward was far from abandoning his favourite. Thomas
In Ireland he was unfettered by the Baronage, and here f
Gaveston found a refuge as the King's Lieutenant while
Edward sought to obtain his recall by the intervention of
France and the Papacy. But the financial pressure of the
Scotch war again brought the King and his Parliament
together in the spring of 1309. It was only by con-
ceding the rights which his father had sought to estab-
lish of imposing import duties on the merchants by their
own assent that he procured a subsidy. The firmness
of the baronage sprang from their having found a head.
In no point had the policy of Henry the Third more
utterly broken down than in his attempt to weaken the
power of the nobles by filling the great earldoms with
kinsmen of the royal house. He had made Simon of
Montfort his brother-in-law only to furnish a leader to
the nation in the Barons' war. In loading his second
son, Edmund Crouchback, with honours and estates he
raised a family to greatness which overawed the Crown.
Edmund had been created Earl of Lancaster; after Evesham
he had received the forfeited Earldom of Leicester; he
had been made Earl of Derby on the extinction of tho
house of Ferrers. His son, Thomas of Lancaster,
384
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1307-
1327.
CHAP. I. the son-in-law of Henry de Lacy, and was soon to add
Edward to these lordships the Earldom of Lincoln. And to the
Second weight of these great baronies was added his royal blood.
The father of Thomas had been a titular King of
Sicily. His mother was dowager Queen of Navarre.
His half sister by the mother's side was wife of the
French King Philip le Bel and mother of the English
Queen Isabella. He was himself a grandson of Henry
the Third and not far from the succession to the throne.
Had Earl Thomas been a wiser and a nobler man, his
adhesion to the cause of the baronage might have guided
the King into a really national policy. As it was his
weight proved irresistible. When Edward at the close of
the Parliament recalled Gaveston the Earl of Lancaster
withdrew from the royal Council, and a Parliament which
met in the spring of 1310 resolved that the affairs of the
realm should be entrusted for a year to a body of twenty-
one "Ordainers" with Archbishop Winchelsey at their
head.
Edward with Gaveston withdrew sullenly to the North.
A triumph in Scotland would have given him strength to
baffle the Ordainers, but he had little of his father's
military skill, the wasted country made it hard to keep
an army together, and after a fruitless campaign he fell
back to his southern realm to meet the Parliament of
1311 and the "Ordinances" which the twenty-one laid
before it. By this long and important statute Gaveston
was banished, other advisers were driven from the Council,
and the Florentine bankers whose loans had enabled
Edward to hold the baronage at bay sent out of the
realm. The customs duties imposed by Edward the First
were declared to be illegal. Its administrative provisions
showed the relations which the barons sought to establish
between the new Parliament and the Crown. Parliaments
were to be called every year, and in these assemblies the
King's servants were to be brought, if need were, to
justice. The great officers of state were to be appointed
Edward
and the
Ordainers
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
385
Edward
the
Second.
1307-
1327.
with the counsel and consent of the baronage, and to be CHAP. I.
sworn in Parliament. The same consent of the barons in
Parliament was to be needful ere the King could declare
war or absent himself from the realm. As the Ordinances
show, the baronage still looked on Parliament rather as a
political organization of the nobles than as a gathering of
the three Estates of the realm. The lower clergy pass
unnoticed; the Commons are regarded as mere tax-
payers whose part was still confined to the presentation
of petitions of grievances and the grant of money. But
even in this imperfect fashion the Parliament was a real
representation of the country. The barons no longer
depended for their force on the rise of some active leader,
or gathered in exceptional assemblies to wrest reforms
from the Crown by threat of war. Their action was made
regular and legal. Even if the Commons took little part
in forming decisions, their force when formed hung on the
assent of the knights and burgesses to them; and the
grant which alone could purchase from the Crown the
concessions which the Baronage demanded lay absolutely
within the control of the Third Estate. It was this which
made the King's struggles so fruitless. He assented to
the Ordinances, and then withdrawing to the North re-
called Gaveston and annulled them. But Winchelsey
excommunicated the favourite and the barons, gathering
in arms, besieged him in Scarborough. His surrender in
May 1312 ended the strife. The "Black Dog" of
Warwick had sworn that the favourite should feel his
teeth ; and Gaveston flung himself in vain at the feet of
the Earl of Lancaster, praying for pity " from his gentle
lord." In defiance of the terms of his capitulation he was
beheaded on Blacklow Hill.
The King's burst of grief was as fruitless as his threats Bannock-
of vengeance ; a feigned submission of the conquerors
completed the royal humiliation, and the barons knelt
before Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon
which seemed the deathblow of the royal power. But if
burn.
386 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. Edward was powerless to conquer the baronage he could still
Edward by evading the observances of the Ordinances throw the
Second whole realm into confusion. The two years that follow
1307- Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A
1327. terrible succession of famines intensified the suffering
which sprang from the utter absence of all rule as dis-
sension raged between the barons and the King. At last
a common peril drew both parties together. The Scots
had profited by the English troubles, and Bruce's " harry-
ing of Buchan " after his defeat of its Earl, who had
joined the English army, fairly turned the tide of success
in his favour. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of
the Scotch fortresses fell one by one into King Eobert's
hands. The clergy met in council and owned him as
their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who still
held to the English cause were coerced into submission,
and Bruce found himself strong enough to invest Stirling,
the last and the most important of the Scotch fortresses
which held out for Edward. Stirling was in fact the key
of Scotland, and its danger roused England out of its
civil strife to an effort for the recovery of its prey. At
the close of 1313 Edward recognized the Ordinances, and
a liberal grant from the Parliament enabled him to take
the field. Lancaster indeed still held aloof on the ground
that the King had not sought the assent of Parliament to
the war, but thirty thousand men followed Edward to the
North, and a host of wild marauders were summoned
from Ireland and Wales. The army which Bruce gathered
to oppose this inroad was formed almost wholly of foot-
men, and was stationed to the south of Stirling on a rising
ground flanked by a little brook, the Bannockburn, which
gave its name to the engagement. The battle took place on
the twenty-fourth of June 1314. Again two systems of
warfare were brought face to face as they had been brought
at Ealkirk, for Robert like Wallace drew up his forces in
hollow squares or circles of spearmen. The English were
dispirited at the very outset by the failure of an attempt
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
387
Edward
the
Second.
1307-
1327.
to relieve Stirling and by the issue of a single combat CHAP. I.
between Bruce and Henry de Boliun, a knight who bore
down upon him as he was riding peacefully along the
front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small
hackney and held only a light battle-axe in his hand, but
warding off his opponent's spear he cleft his skull with
so terrible a blow that the handle of his axe was shattered
in his grasp. At the opening of the battle the English
archers were thrown forward to rake the Scottish squares,
but they were without support and were easily dispersed
by a handful of horse whom Bruce held in reserve for
the purpose. The body of men-at-arms next flung them-
selves on the Scottish front, but their charge was embar-
rassed by the narrow space along which the line was
forced to move, and the steady resistance of the squares
soon threw the knighthood into disorder. "The horses
that were stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, " rushed
and reeled right rudely." In the moment of failure the
sight of a body of camp-followers, whom they mistook
for reinforcements to the enemy, spread panic through
the English host. It broke in a headlong rout. Its
thousands of brilliant horsemen were soon floundering in
pits which guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or
riding in wild haste for the border. Few however were
fortunate enough to reach it. Edward himself, with a
body of five hundred knights, succeeded in escaping to
D unbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood
fell into the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and
the footmen were ruthlessly cut down by the country
folk as they fled. For centuries to come the rich plunder
of the English camp left its traces on the treasure-rolls
and the vestment-rolls of castle and abbey throughout
the Lowlands.
Bannockburn left Bruce the master of Scotland : but
terrible as the blow was England could not humble herself Lanca8ter
to relinquish her claim on the Scottish crown. Edward
was eager indeed for a truce, but with equal firmness
Fall of
388 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. I. Bruce refused all negotiation while the royal title was
Edward withheld from him and steadily pushed on the recovery
c econd ^ ^ s southern dominions. His progress was unhindered.
1307- Bannockburn left Edward powerless, and Lancaster at the
1827. head of the Ordainers became supreme. But it was still
impossible to trust the King or to act with him, and in
the dead-lock of both parties the Scots plundered as they
would. Their ravages in the North brought shame on Eng-
land such as it had never known. At last Brace's capture
of Berwick in the spring of 1318 forced the King to give
way. The Ordinances were formally accepted, an amnesty
granted, and a small number of peers belonging to the
barons' party added to the great officers of state. Had a
statesman been at the head of the baronage the weakness
of Edward might have now been turned to good purpose.
But the character of the Earl of Lancaster seems to have
fallen far beneath the greatness of his position. Dis-
trustful of his cousin, yet himself incapable of governing,
he stood sullenly aloof from the royal Council and the
royal armies, and Edward was able to lay his failure in
recovering Berwick during the campaign of 1319 to the
Earl's charge. His influence over the country was sensibly
weakened ; and in this weakness the new advisers on whom
the King was leaning saw a hope of destroying his power.
These were a younger and elder Hugh Le Despenser,
son and grandson of the Justiciar who had fallen beside
Earl Simon at Evesham. Greedy and ambitious as they
may have been, they were able men, and their policy was
of a higher stamp than the wilful defiance of Gaveston.
It lay, if we may gather it from the faint indications which
remain, in a frank recognition of the power of the three
Estates as opposed to the separate action of the baronage.
The rise of the younger Hugh, on whom the King bestowed
the county of Glamorgan with the hand of one of its
coheiresses, a daughter of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, was
rapid enough to excite general jealousy; and in 1321
Lancaster found little difficulty in extorting by force of
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
389
Edward
the
Second.
13O7-
1327.
arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of popular CHAP. I.
sympathy was already wavering, and it was turned to the
royal cause by aii insult offered to the Queen, against
whom Lady Badlesmere closed the doors of Ledes Castle.
The unexpected energy shown by Edward in avenging
this insult gave fresh strength to his cause. At the
opening of 1322 he found himself strong enough to recall
Despenser, and when Lancaster convoked the baronage to
force him again into exile the weakness of their party was
shown by some negotiations into which the Earl entered
with the Scots and by his precipitate retreat to the north
on the advance of the royal army. At Boroughbridge his
forces were arrested and dispersed, and Thomas himself,
brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, was tried
and condemned to death as a traitor. " Have mercy on
me, King of Heaven," cried Lancaster, as, mounted on
a grey pony without a bridle, he was hurried to execution,
" for my earthly King has forsaken me." His death was
followed, by that of a number of his adherents and by the
captivity of others ; while a Parliament at York annulled
the proceedings against the Despeusers and repealed the
Ordinances.
It is to this Parliament however, and perhaps to the vic-
torious confidence of the royalists, that we owe the famous
provision which reveals the policy of the Despensers, the
provision that all laws concerning " the estate of our Lord
the King and his heirs or for the estate of the realm and
the people shall be treated, accorded, and established in
Parliaments by our Lord the King and by the consent of
the prelates, earls, barons, and commonalty of the realm
according as hath been hitherto accustomed." It w r ould
seem from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that
much of the sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been
owing to the assumption of all legislative action by the
baronage alone. The same policy was seen in a reissue
in the form of a royal Ordinance of some of the most
beneficial provisions of the Ordinances which had been
VOL. I. 26
The De-
spensers.
390
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Edward
the
Second.
1307-
1327.
CHAP. I. formally repealed. But the arrogance of the Despensers
gave new offence ; and the utter failure of a fresh cam-
paign against Scotland again weakened the Crown. The
barbarous forays in which the borderers under Earl
Douglas were wasting Northumberland woke a general
indignation ; and a grant from the Parliament at York
enabled Edward to march with a great army to the North.
But Bruce as of old declined an engagement till the wasted
Lowlands starved the invaders into a ruinous retreat.
The failure forced England in the spring of 1323 to stoop
to a truce for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which
Bruce was suffered to take the royal title. We see in this
act of the Despensers the first of a series of such attempts
by which minister after minister strove to free the Crown
from the bondage under which the war- pressure laid it
to the growing power of Parliament ; but it ended as
these after attempts ended only in the ruin of the coun-
sellors who planned it. The pride of the country had
been roused by the struggle, and the humiliation of such
a truce robbed the Crown of its temporary popularity.
It led the way to the sudden catastrophe which closed
this disastrous reign.
Isabella. In his struggle with the Scots Edward, like his
father, had been hampered not only by internal divi-
sions but by the harassing intervention of France. The
rising under Bruce had been backed by French aid as
well as by a revival of the old quarrel over Guienne,
and on the accession of Charles the Fourth in 1322
a demand of homage for Ponthieu and Gascony called
Edward over sea. But the Despensers dared not let
him quit the realm, and a fresh dispute as to the right
of possession in the Agenois brought about the seizure
of the bulk of Gascony by a sudden attack on the
part of the French. The quarrel verged upon open war,
and to close it Edward's Queen, Isabella, a sister of the
French King, undertook in 1325 to revisit her home and
bring about a treaty of peace between the two countries.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
391
Isabella hated the Despensers; she was alienated from
her husband ; but hatred and alienation were as yet
jealously concealed. At the close of the year the terms
of peace seemed to be arranged ; and though declining to
cross the sea, Edward evaded the difficulty created by the
demand for personal homage by investing his son with the
Duchies of Aquitaine and Gascony, and despatching him
to join his mother at Paris. The boy did homage to
King Charles for the two Duchies, the question of the
Agenois being reserved for legal decision, and Edward
at once recalled his wife and son to England. Neither
threats nor prayers however could induce either wife
or child to return to his court. Eoger Mortimer, the
most powerful of the Marcher barons and a deadly
foe to the Despensers, had taken refuge in France; and
his influence over the Queen made her the centre of
a vast conspiracy. With the young Edward in her
hands she was able to procure soldiers from the Count of
Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter;
the Italian bankers supplied funds ; and after a year's pre-
paration the Queen set sail in the autumn of 1326. A
secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed when the
primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing
at Orwell. Deserted by all and repulsed by the citizens
of London whose aid he implored, the King fled hastily
to the west and embarked with the Despensers for Lundy
Island, which Despenser had fortified as a possible refuge ;
but contrary winds flung him again on the Welsh coast,
where he fell into the hands of Earl Henry of Lancaster,
the brother of the Earl whom they had slain. The
younger Despenser, who accompanied him, was at once
hung on a gibbet fifty feet high, and the King placed in
ward at Kenilworth till his fate could be decided by a
Parliament summoned for that purpose at Westminster
in January 1327.
The peers who assembled fearlessly revived the con-
stitutional usage of the earlier English freedom, and
CHAP. I.
Edward
the
Second
1307-
1327
Deposi-
tion of
Edward
392 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK iv.
CHAP. I. asserted their right to depose a King who had proved
Edward himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice was raised in
Second. Edward's behalf, and only four prelates protested when
1307- the young Prince was proclaimed King by acclama-
1327. ^ on an( j presented as their sovereign to the multitudes
without. The revolution took legal form in a bill which
charged the captive monarch with indolence, incapacity,
the loss of Scotland, the violation of his coronation oath
and oppression of the Church and baronage ; and on the
approval of this it was resolved that the reign of Edward
of Caernarvon had ceased and that the crown had passed
to his son, Edward of Windsor. A deputation of the
Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent
of the discrowned King to his own deposition, and Edward
" clad in a plain black gown " bowed quietly to his fate.
Sir William Trussel at once addressed him in words which
better than any other mark the nature of the step which
the Parliament had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor
of the earls, barons, and others, having for this full and
sufficient power, do render and give back to you, Edward,
once King of England, the homage and fealty of the
persons named in my procuracy ; and acquit and dis-
charge them thereof in the best manner that law and
custom will give. And I now make protestation in their
name that they will no longer be in your fealty and
allegiance, nor claim to hold anything of you as king,
but will account you hereafter as a private person, without
any manner of royal dignity." A significant act followed
these emphatic words. Sir Thomas Blount, the steward of
the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony used
only at a king's death, and declared that all persons
engaged in the royal service were discharged. The act
of Blount was only an omen of the fate which awaited
the miserable King. In the following September he was
murdered in Berkeley Castle.
CHAPTER II.
EDWARD THE THIRD.
13271347.
THE deposition of Edward the Second proclaimed to the Estate of
world the power which the English Parliament had gained. i
In thirty years from their first assembly at Westminster
the Estates had wrested from the Crown the last relic of
arbitrary taxation, had forced on it new ministers and
a new system of government, had claimed a right of
confirming the choice of its councillors and of punishing
their misconduct, and had established the principle that
redress of grievances precedes a grant of supply. Nor
had the time been less important in the internal growth
of Parliament. Step by step the practical sense of the
Houses themselves completed the work of Edward by
bringing about change after change in its composition.
The very division into a House of Lords and a House of
Commons formed no part of the original plan of Edward
the First; in the earlier Parliaments each of the four
orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses met,
deliberated, and made their grants apart from each other.
This isolation however of the Estates soon showed signs
of breaking down. Though the clergy held steadily aloof
from any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of
the shire were drawn by the similarity of their social
position into a close connexion with the lords. They
seem in fact to have been soon admitted by the baronage
394
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1327-
13*7.
CHAP. II. to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as
Edward legislators or counsellors of the Crown. The burgesses on
the Third. t j ie O ther hand took little part at first in Parliamentary
proceedings, save in those which related to the taxation
of their class. But their position was raised by the strifes
of the reign of Edward the Second when their aid was
needed by the baronage in its struggle with the Crown ;
and their right to share fully in all legislative action was
asserted in the statute of 1322. From this moment no
proceedings can have been considered as formally legislative
save those conducted in full Parliament of all the estates.
In subjects of public policy however the barons were still
regarded as the sole advisers of the Crown, though the
knights of the shire were sometimes consulted with them.
But the barons and knighthood were not fated to be drawn
into a single body whose weight would have given an
aristocratic impress to the constitution. Gradually, through
causes with which we are imperfectly acquainted, the knights
of the shire drifted from their older connexion with the
baronage into so close and intimate a union with the
representatives of the towns that at the opening of the
reign of Edward the Third the two orders are found
grouped formally together, under the name of "The
Commons." It is difficult to over-estimate the importance
of this change. Had Parliament remained broken up into
its four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and citizens, its
power would have been neutralized at every great crisis by
the jealousies and difficulty of co-operation among its
component parts. A permanent union of the knighthood
and the baronage on the other hand would have converted
Parliament into the mere representative of an aristocratic
caste, and would have robbed it of the strength which it
has drawn from its connexion with the great body of the
commercial classes. The new attitude of the knighthood,
their social connexion as landed gentry with the baronage,
their political union with the burgesses, really welded the
three orders into one, and gave that unity of feeling and
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 1307-1461. 395
action to our Parliament on which its power has ever CHAP. II.
since mainly depended, Edward
The weight of the two Houses was seen in their settle- the _^ Lird
ment of the new government by the nomination of a 1347"
Council with Earl Henry of Lancaster at its head. The Scotch
Council had at once to meet fresh difficulties in the Xorth. War.
The truce so recently made ceased legally with Edward's
deposition ; and the withdrawal of his royal title in further
offers of peace warned Bruce of the new temper of the
English rulers. Troops gathered on either side, and the
English Council sought to pave the way for an attack
by dividing Scotland against itself. Edward Balliol, a
son of the former King John, was solemnly received as a
vassal-king of Scotland at the English court. Robert
was disabled by leprosy from taking the field in person,
but the insult roused him to hurl his marauders again
over the border under Douglas and Sir Thomas Randolph.
The Scotch army has been painted for us by an eye-
witness whose description is embodied in the work of
Jehan le Bel. "It consisted of four thousand men-at-
arms, knights, and esquires, well mounted, besides twenty
thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner of
their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are
never tied up or dressed, but turned immediately after the
day's march to pasture on the heath or in the fields. . .
They bring no carriages with them on account of the
mountains they have to pass in Northumberland, neither
do they carry with them any provisions of bread or wine,
for their habits of sobriety are such in time of war that
they will live for a long time on flesh half-sodden without
bread, and drink the river water without wine. They
have therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they
dress the flesh of the cattle in their skins after they have
flayed them, and being sure to find plenty of them in
the country which they invade they carry none with
them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a
broad piece of metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal :
396 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAV. II. when they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh and
Edward their stomach appears weak and empty, they set this
thejTMrd. p} a t e over the fire, knead the meal with water, and
1347' when the plate is hot put a little of the paste upon it
in a thin cake like a biscuit, which they eat to warm
their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they
perform a longer day's march than other soldiers."
Though twenty thousand horsemen and forty thousand foot
marched under their boy-king to protect the border, the
English troops were utterly helpless against such a foe as
this. At one time the whole army lost its way in the border
wastes : at another all traces of the enemy disappeared,
and an offer of knighthood and a hundred marks was
made to any who could tell where the Scots were encamped.
But when they were found their position behind the Wear
proved unassailable, and after a bold sally on. the English
camp Douglas foiled an attempt at intercepting him by a
clever retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly up,
and a fresh foray into Northumberland forced the English
Court in 1328 to submit to peace. By the treaty of
Northampton which was solemnly confirmed by Parlia-
ment in September the independence of Scotland was re-
cognized, and Eobert Bruce owned as its King. Edward
formally abandoned his claim of feudal superiority over
Scotland; while Bruce promised to make compensation
for the damage done in the North, to marry his son David
to Edward's sister Joan, and to restore their forfeited
estates to those nobles who had sided with the English
King.
Fall of But the pride of England had been too much roused
Mortimer, by the struggle with the Scots to bear this defeat easily,
and the first result of the treaty of Northampton was the
overthrow of the government which concluded it. This
result was hastened by the pride of Roger Mortimer, who
was now created Earl of March, and who had made
himself supreme through his influence over Isabella and
his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all practical
iv-l THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 397
share in the administration of the realm. The first efforts
to shake Roger's power were unsuccessful. The Earl
of Lancaster stood, like his brother, at the head of the the _^L ird
baronage; the parliamentary settlement at Edward's iflj"
accession had placed him first in the royal Council ; and
it was to him that the task of defying Mortimer naturally
fell. At the close of 1328 therefore Earl Henry formed
a league with the Archbishop of Canterbury and with
the young King's uncles, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent,
to bring Mortimer to account lor the peace with Scotland
and the usurpation of the government as well as for the
iate King's murder, a murder which had been the work
of his private partizans and which had profoundly
shocked the general conscience. But the young King clave
firmly to his mother, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent deserted
to Mortimer, and powerful as it seemed the league broke
up without result. A feeling of insecurity however
spurred the Earl of March to a bold stroke at his op-
ponents. The Earl of Kent, who was persuaded that his
brother, Edward the Second, still lived a prisoner in
Corfe Castle, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to
restore him to the throne, tried before a Parliament filled
with Mortimer's adherents, and sent to the block. But
the death of a prince of the royal blood roused the young
King to resentment at the greed and arrogance of a
minister who treated Edward himself as little more than
a state-prisoner. A few months after his uncle's execu-
tion the King entered the Council chamber in Nott-
ingham Castle with a force which he had introduced
through a secret passage in the rock on which it stands,
and arrested Mortimer with his own hands. A Parlia-
ment which was at once summoned condemned the Earl
of March to a traitor's death, and in November 1330
he was beheaded at Tyburn, while the Queen-mother
was sent for the rest of her life into confinement at
Castle Rising.
Young as he was, and he had only reached his
398
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Edward
and
CHAP. II. eighteenth year, Edward at once assumed the control of
Edward affairs. His first care was to restore good order through-
theThird. ou fc the country, which under the late government had
1347^ fallen into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with
France for further enterprizes in the North. A formal
peace had been concluded by Isabella after her husband's
fall ; but the death of Charles the Fourth soon brought
about new jealousies between the two courts. The three
sons of Philip the Fair had followed him on the throne
in succession, but all had now died without male issue, and
Isabella, as Philip's daughter, claimed the crown for her son.
The claim in any case was a hard one to make out. Though
her brothers had left no sons, they had lefc daughters, and
if female succession were admitted these daughters of
Philip's sons would precede a son of Philip's daughter.
Isabella met this difficulty by a contention that though
females could transmit the right of succession they could
not themselves possess it, and that her son, as the nearest
living male descendant of Philip the Fair, and born in the
lifetime of the King from whom he claimed, could claim in
preference to females who were related to Philip in as near
a degree. But the bulk of French jurists asserted that only
male succession gave right to the French throne. On such
a theory the right inheritable from Philip the Fair was
exhausted ; and the crown passed to the son of Philip's
younger brother, Charles of Valois, who in fact peacefully
mounted the throne as Philip the Fifth. Purely formal
as the claim which Isabella advanced seems to have been,
it revived the irritation between the two .courts, and
though Edward's obedience to a summons which Philip
addressed to him to do homage for Aquitaine brought
about an agreement that both parties should restore the
gains they had made since the last treaty the agreement
was never carried out. Fresh threats of war ended in
the conclusion of a new treaty of peace,, but the question
whether liege or simple homage was due for the duchies
remained unsettled when the fall of Mortimer gave the
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
399
young King full mastery of affairs. His action was rapid
and decisive. Clad as a merchant, and with but fifteen
horsemen at his back, Edward suddenly made his appear-
ance in 1331 at the French court and did homage as fully
as Philip required. The question of the Agenois remained
unsettled, though the English Parliament insisted that its
decision should rest with negotiation and not with war,
but on all other points a complete peace was made ; and
the young King rode back with his hands free for an
attack which he was planning on the North.
The provisions of the Treaty of Northampton for the
restitution of estates had never been fully carried out.
Till this was done the English court held that the rights
of feudal superiority over Scotland which it had yielded
in the treaty remained in force ; and at this moment an
opening seemed to present itself for again asserting these
rights with success. Fortune seemed at last to have veered
to the English side. The death of Robert Bruce only a
year after the Treaty of Northampton left the Scottish
throne to his son David, a child of but eight years old.
The death of the King was followed by the loss of Ean-
dolph and Douglas ; and the internal difficulties of the
realm broke out in civil strife. To the great barons on
either side the border the late peace involved serious losses,
for many of the Scotch houses held large estates in England
as many of the English lords held large estates in Scotland,
and although the treaty had provided for their claims they
had in each case been practically set aside. It is this dis-
content of the barons at the new settlement which explains
the sudden success of Edward Balliol in a snatch which
he made at the Scottish throne. Balliol's design was
known at the English court, where he had found shelter for
some years ; and Edward, whether sincerely or no, forbad
his barons from joining him and posted troops on the
border to hinder his crossing it. But Balliol found little
difficulty in making his attack by sea. He sailed from
England at the head of a body of nobles who claimed
CHAP. II.
Edward
1347?
New
Scotch
War.
400
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. estates in the north, landed in August 1332 on the shores
Edward f Fife, and after repulsing with immense loss an army
the Third.
1327-
1347.
which attacked him near Perth was crowned at Scone two
months after his landing, w r hile David Bruce fled helplessly
to France. Edward had given no open aid to this enter-
prize, but the crisis tempted his ambition, and he demanded
and obtained from Balliolan acknowledgement of the Eng-
lish suzerainty. The acknowledgement however was fatal
to Balliol himself. Surprized at Annan by a party of
Scottish nobles, their sudden attack drove him in
December over the border after a reign of but five
months ; and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender
to Edward, was strongly garrisoned against an English
attack. The sudden breakdown of his vassal-king left
Edward face to face with a new Scotch war. The Parlia-
ment which he summoned to advise on the enforcement of
his claim showed no wish to plunge again into the contest
and met him only with evasions and delays. But Edward
had gone too far to withdraw. In March 1333 he appeared
before Berwick, and besieged the town. A Scotch army
under the regent, Sir Archibald Douglas, brother to the
famous Sir James, advanced to its relief in July and
attacked a covering force which was encamped on the
strong position of Halidon Hill. The English bowmen
however vindicated the fame they had first won at Falkirk
and were soon to crown, in the victory of Cre9y. The
Scotch only struggled through the marsh which covered
the English front to be riddled with a storm of arrows and
to break in utter rout. The battle decided the fate of
Berwick. From that time the town has remained English
territory. It was in fact the one part of Edward's con-
quests which was preserved in the end by the English
crown. But fragment as it was, it was always viewed
legally as representing the realm of which it once formed
a part. As Scotland, it had its chancellor, chamberlain,
and other officers of State : and the peculiar heading of
Acts of Parliament enacted for England " and the town of
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
401
Edward
the Third.
1327-
13A7.
Scotland
freed.
Benvick-upon-Tweed " still preserves the memory of its CH.U-. II
peculiar position. But the victory did more than give
Berwick to England. The defeat of Douglas was followed
by the submission of a large part of the Scotch nobles, by
the flight of the boy-king David, and by the return of
Balliol unopposed to the throne. Edward exacted a heavy
price for his aid. All Scotland south of the Firth of Forth
was ceded to England, and Balliol did homage as vassal-
king for the rest.
It was at the moment of this submission that the young
King reached the climax of his success. A king at
fourteen, a father at seventeen, he had carried out at
eighteen a political revolution in the overthrow of
Mortimer, and restored at twenty-two the ruined work
of his grandfather. The northern frontier was carried to
its old line under the Northumbrian kings. His kingdom
within was peaceful and orderly ; and the strife with
France seemed at an end. During the next three years
Edward persisted in the line of policy he had adopted,
retaining his hold over Southern Scotland, aiding his sub-
king Balliol in campaign after campaign against the
despairing efforts of the nobles who still adhered to the
house of Bruce, a party who were now headed by Robert
the Steward of Scotland and by Earl Randolph of Moray.
His perseverance was all but crowned with success, when
Scotland was again saved by the intervention of France.
The successes of Edward roused anew the jealousy of the
French court. David Bruce found a refuge with Philip ;
French ships appeared off the Scotch coast and brought aid
to the patriot nobles ; and the old legal questions about the
Agenois and Aquitaine were mooted afresh by the French
council. For a time Edward staved off the contest by
repeated embassies ; but his refusal to accept Philip as a
mediator between England and the Scots stirred France to
threats of war. In 1335 fleets gathered on its coast
descents were made on the English shores ; and troops and
galleys were hired in Italy and the north for an invasion
402 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. of England. The mere threat of war saved Scotland.
Edward Edward's forces there were drawn to the south to meet the
theTMrd. } 00 k e d f or attack from across the Channel ; and the patriot
1347" P art J freed from their pressure at once drew together again.
The actual declaration of war against France at tlie close
of 1337 was the knell of Balliol's greatness; he found
himself without an adherent and withdrew two years later
to the court of Edward, while David returned to his
kingdom in 1342 and won back the chief fastnesses of the
Lowlands. From that moment the freedom of Scotland
was secured. From a war of conquest and patriotic
resistance the struggle died into a petty strife between
two angry neighbours, which became a mere episode in
the larger contest which it had stirred between England
o o
and France.
The Whether in its national or in its European bearings it is
Hundred difficult to over-estimate the importance of the contest
War. which was now to open between these two nations. To
England it brought a social, a religious, and in the end a
political revolution. The Peasant Kevolfc, Lollardry, and
the New Monarchy were direct issues of the Hundred
Years' War. With it began the military renown of
England ; with it opened her struggle for the mastery of
the seas. The pride begotten by great victories and a
sudden revelation of warlike prowess roused the country
not only to a new ambition, a new resolve to assert itself
as a European power, but to a repudiation of the claims
of the Papacy and an assertion of the ecclesiastical inde-
pendence both of Church and Crown which paved the way
for and gave its ultimate form to the English Eeformation.
The peculiar shape which English warfare assumed, the
triumph of the yeoman and archer over noble and knight,
gave new force to the political advance of the Commons.
On the other hand the misery of the war produced the
first great open feud between labour and capital. The
glory of Cre$y or Poitiers was dearly bought by the up-
growth of English pauperism. The warlike temper nursed
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071401.
403
1327-
1347.
The
Imperial
Alliance,
on foreign fields begot at home a new turbulence and scorn CHAP. II.
of law, woke a new feudal spirit in the baronage, and Edward
sowed in the revolution which placed a new house on theTh
the throne the seeds of that fatal strife over the succes-
sion which troubled England to the days of Elizabeth.
Nor was the contest of less import in the history of
France. If it struck her for the moment from her height
of pride, it raised her in the end to the front rank among
the states of Europe. It carried her boundaries to the
Ehone and the Pyrenees. It wrecked alike the feudal
power of her noblesse and the hopes of constitutional
liberty which might have sprung from the emancipation
of the peasant or the action of the burgher. It founded a
royal despotism which reached its height in Eichelieu and
finally plunged France into the gulf of the Revolution.
Of these mighty issues little could be foreseen at the
moment when Philip and Edward declared war. But from
the very first the war took European dimensions. The
young King saw clearly the greater strength of France.
The weakness of the Empire, the captivity of the Papacy
at Avignon, left her without a rival among European
powers. The French chivalry was the envy of the world,
and its military fame had just been heightened by a
victory over the Flemish communes at CasseL In num-
bers, in wealth, the French people far surpassed their
neighbours over the Channel. England can hardly have
counted more than four millions of inhabitants, France
boasted of twenty. The clinging of our kings to their
foreign dominions is explained by the fact that their
subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have
equalled in number their subjects in England. There
was the same disproportion in the wealth of the two
countries and, as men held then, in their military re-
sources. Edward could bring only eight thousand men-
at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force
was busy elsewhero, could appear at the head of forty
thousand. Of th? revolution in wa.rfare which was to
404
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II.
Edward
the Third.
1327-
1347.
Its
Relation
to the
Papacy.
reverse this superiority, to make the footman rather than
the horseman the strength of an army, the world and
even the English King, in spite of Falkirk and Halidon,
as yet recked little. Edward's whole energy was bent on
meeting the strength of France by a coalition of powers
against her, and his plans were helped by the dread
which the great feudatories of the empire who lay nearest
to him, the Duke of Brabant, the Counts of Hainault and
Gelders, the Markgrave of Juliers, felt of French annex-
ation. They listened willingly enough to his offers. Sixty
thousand crowns purchased the alliance of Brabant. Lesser
subsidies bought that of the two counts and the Mark-
grave. The King's work was helped indeed by his domestic
relations. The Count of Hainault was Edward's father-in-
law; he was also the father-in-law of the Count of Gelders.
But the marriage of a third of the Count's daughters
brought the English King a more important ally. She was
wedded to the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, and the con-
nexion that thus existed between the English and Imperial
Courts facilitated the negotiations which ended in a
formal alliance.
But the league had a more solid ground. The Emperor,
like Edward, had his strife with France. His strife sprang
from the new position of the Papacy. The removal of the
Popes to Avignon which followed on the quarrel of
Boniface the Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection
to the French court which resulted from it affected the
whole state of European politics. In the ever-recurring
contest between the Papacy and the Empire France had of
old been the lieutenant of the Roman See. But with the
settlement at Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope
became the lieutenant of France. Instead of the Papacy
using the French Kings in its war of ideas against the
Empire the French Kings used the Papacy as an instru-
ment in their political rivalry with the Emperors. But if
the position of the Pope drew Lewis to the side of England,
it had much to do with drawing Edward to the side of
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
405
1327-
1347
Lewis. It was this that made the alliance, fruitless as it CHAP. II.
proved in a military sense, so memorable in its religious Edward
results. Hitherto England had been mainly on the side of
the Popes in their strife against the Emperors. Now that
the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a power which
was to be its great enemy, the country was driven to close
alliances with the Empire and to an ever-growing aliena-
tion from the Roman See. In Scotch affairs the hostility
of the Popes had been steady and vexatious ever since
Edward the First's time, and from the moment that this
fresh struggle commenced they again showed their French
partizanship. When Lewis made a last appeal for peace,
Philip of Valois made Benedict XII. lay down as a
condition that the Emperor should form no alliance with
an enemy of France. The quarrel of both England and
Germany with the Papacy at once grew ripe. The German
Diet met to declare that the Imperial power came from
God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor needed no
Papal confirmation, while Benedict replied by a formal
excommunication of Lewis. England on the other hand
entered on a religious revolution when she stood hand in
hand with an excommunicated power. It was significant
that though worship ceased in Flanders on the Pope's
interdict, the English priests who were brought over set
the interdict at nought.
The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of
1337 ; it ended in a promise of the Emperor on payment
of 3,000 gold florins to furnish two thousand men at arms.
In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on the
Agenois forced Edward into open war. His profuse ex-
penditure however brought little fruit. Though Edward
crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the year was spent in
negotiations with the princes of the Lower Rhine and in
an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis
appointed him Vicar- General of the Emperor for all terri-
tories on the left bank of the Rhine. The occupation of
Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French King gave a
VOL. L 27
Failure
of the
A lliance.
406
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
.OOK
1327-
1347.
CHAP. II. formal ground for calling the princes of this district to
Edward Edward's standard. But already the great alliance showed
the Third. g jg ns o f yielding. Edward, uneasy at his connexion with
an Emperor under the ban of the Church and harassed by
vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into
negotiations with France in the winter of 1338 ; and Lewis,
alarmed in his turn, listened to fresh overtures from Bene-
dict, who held out vague hopes of reconciliation while he
threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis persisted
in invading France. The non-arrival of the English
subsidy decided the Emperor to take no personal part in
the war, and the attitude of Lewis told on the temper of
Edward's German allies. Though all joined him in the
summer of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-
General of the Empire, and his army when it appeared
before Cambray numbered forty thousand men, their ardour
cooled as the town held out. Philip approached it from
the south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve to cross
the river and attack him he was at once deserted by the
two border princes who had most to lose from a contest
with France, the Counts of Hainault and 'Namur. But
the King was still full of hope. He pushed forward to the
country round St. Quentin between the head waters of the
Somme and the Oise with the purpose of forcing a decisive
engagement. But he found Philip strongly encamped, and
declaring their supplies exhausted his allies at once called
for a retreat. It was in vain that Edward moved slowly
for a week along the French border. Philip's position was
too strongly guarded by marshes and entrenchments to be
attacked, and at last the allies would stay no longer. At
the news that the French King had withdrawn to the
south the whole army in turn fell back upon Brussels.
The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which
Edward had drawn from his alliance with the Empire.
With the exhaustion of his subsidies the princes of the
Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant
became cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself,
England
and the
Papacy.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
407
the Third
1327
.1347.
still looking to an accommodation with the Pope and justly CHAP. II.
jealous of Edward's own intrigues at Avignon, wavered Edward,
and at last fell away. But though the alliance ended in
disappointment it had given a new impulse to the grudge
against the Papacy which began with its extortions in
the reign of Henry the Third. The hold of Rome on the
loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the Popes of half
the awe which they had inspired among Englishmen.
Not only did it bring them nearer and more into the light
of common day, but it dwarfed them into mere agents of
French policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was re-
vived by the greed to which they were driven through their
costly efforts to impose a French and Papal Emperor on
Germany as well as to secure themselves in their new
capital on the Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress,
half palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon has
played its part in our history. Its erection was to the
rise of Lollardry what the erection of St. Peter's was to
the rise of Lutheranism. Its massive walls, its stately
chapel, its chambers glowing with the frescoes of Simone
Memmi. the garden which covered its roof with a strange
verdure, called year by year for fresh supplies of gold ; and
for this as for the wider and costlier schemes of Papal
policy gold could be got only by pressing harder and
harder on the national churches the worst claims of the
Papal court, by demands of first-fruits and annates from
rectory and bishoprick, by pretensions to the right of
bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical
patronage and by the sale of these presentations, by the
direct taxation of the clergy, by the intrusion of foreign
priests into English livings, by opening a mart for the
disposal of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by
encouraging appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction
to the Papal court. ISTo grievance was more bitterly felt
than this grievance of appeals. Cases of the most trifling
importance were called for decision out of the realm to a
408 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees
Edward were enormous. The envoy of an Oxford College which
theThird. SOU ght only a formal licence to turn a vicarage into a
13477 rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil of a
journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was
kept dangling at Avignon for three-aud-twenty weeks.
Humiliating and vexatious however as these appeals were,
they were but one among the means of extortion which
the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The
protest of a later Parliament, exaggerated as its statements
no doubt are, shows the extent of the national irritation,
if not of the grievances which produced it. It asserted
that the taxes levied by the Pope amounted to five times
the amount of those levied by the king ; that by reserva-
tions during the life of actual holders the Pope disposed
of the same bishoprick four or five times over, receiving
each time the first-fruits. " The brokers of the sinful city
of Home promote for money unlearned and unworthy
caitiffs to benefices to the value of a thousand marks,
while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty.
So decays sound learning. They present aliens who
neither see nor care to see their parishioners, despise
God's services, convey away the treasure of the realm, and
are worse than Jews or Saracens. The Pope's revenue
from England alone is larger than that of any prince in
Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not
to be shaven and shorn." At the close of this reign
indeed the deaneries of Lichfield, Salisbury, and York,
the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was reputed the
wealthiest English benefice, together with a host of
prebends and preferments, were held by Italian cardinals
and priests, while the Pope's collector from his office
in London sent twenty thousand marks a year to the
Papal treasury.
Protest of But the greed of the Popes was no new grievance,
the. Par- though the increase of these exactions since the removal
Itament.
to Avignon gave it a new force. What alienated England
IV]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
409
Edward
the Third
1327
134?
most was their connexion with and dependence on France. CHAP. H.
From the first outset of the troubles in the North their
attitude had been one of hostility to the English projects.
France was too useful a supporter of the Papal court to
find much difficulty in inducing it to aid in hampering the
growth of English greatness. Boniface the Eighth released
Balliol from his oath of fealty, and forbad Edward to
attack Scotland on the ground that it was a fief of the
Eoman see. His intervention was met by a solemn and
emphatic protest from the English Parliament; but it
none the less formed a terrible obstacle in Edward's way.
The obstacle was at last removed by the quarrel of Boniface
with Philip the Fair; but the end of this quarrel only
threw the Papacy more completely into the hands of
France. Though Avignon remained imperial soil, the
removal of the Popes to this city on the verge of their
dominions made them mere tools of the French Kings.
Much no doubt of the endless negotiation which the
Papal court carried on with Edward the Third in his strife
with Philip of Valois was an honest struggle for peace.
But to England it seemed the mere interference of a
dependent on behalf of " our enemy of France." The
people scorned a "French Pope," and threatened Papal
legates with stoning when they landed on English shores.
The alliance of Edward with an excommunicated Emperor,
the bold defiance with which English priests said mass in
Flanders when an interdict reduced the Flemish priests to
silence, were significant tokens of the new attitude which
England was taking up in the face of Popes who were
leagued with its enemy. The old quarrel over ecclesiastical
wrongs was renewed in a formal and decisive way. In
1343 the Commons petitioned for the redress of the
grievance of Papal appointments to vacant livings in
despite of the rights of patrons or the Crown ; and
Edward formally complained to the Pope of his appointing
" foreigners, most of them suspicious persons, who do
not reside on their benefices, who do not know the faces
410 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. of the flocks entrusted to them, who do not understand
Edward their language, but, neglecting the cure of souls, seek as
the Third. hi re ii n g S only their worldly hire." In yet sharper words
1347? the King rebuked the Papal greed. " The successor of
the Apostles was set over the Lord's sheep to feed and
not to shear them." The Parliament declared " that they
neither could nor would tolerate such things any longer ; "
and the general irritation moved slowly towards those
statutes of Provisors and Praemunire which heralded the
policy of Henry the Eighth.
Flanders. But for the moment the strife with the Papacy was
set aside in the efforts which were needed for a new
struggle with France. The campaign of 1339 had not
only ended in failure, it had dispelled the trust of Edward
in an Imperial alliance. But as this hope faded away a
fresh hope dawned on the King from another quarter.
Flanders, still bleeding from the defeat of its burghers
by the French knighthood, was his natural ally. England
was the great wool-producing country of the west, but
few woollen fabrics were woven in England. The number
of weavers' gilds shows that the trade was gradually ex-
tending, and at the very outset of his reign Edward had
taken steps for its encouragement. He invited Flemish
weavers to settle in his country, and took the new immi-
grants, who chose the eastern counties for the seat of their
trade, under his royal protection. But English manufac-
tures were still in their infancy and nine-tenths of the
English wool went to the looms of Bruges or of Ghent.
We may see the rapid growth of this export trade in the
fact that the King received in a single year more than
30,000 from duties levied on wool alone. The wool-sack
which forms the Chancellors seat in the House of Lords
is said to witness to the importance which the govern-
ment attached to this new source of wealth. A stoppage
of this export threw half the population of the great
Flemish towns out of work, and the irritation caused in
Flanders by the interruption which this trade sustained
IV .J THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 411
through the piracies that Philip's ships were carrying on CHAP. II.
in the Channel showed how effective the threat of such Edward
a stoppage would be in securing their alliance. Nor was the Third
this the only ground for hoping for aid from the Flemish 1347"
towns. Their democratic spirit jostled roughly with the
feudalism of France. If their counts clung to the French
monarchy, the towns themselves, proud of their immense
population, their thriving industry, their vast wealth, drew
more and more to independence. Jacques van Arteveldt,
a great brewer of Ghent, wielded the chief influence in
their councils, and his aim was to build up a confederacy
which might hold France in check along her northern
border.
His plans had as yet brought no help from the Flemish The
towns, but at the close of 1339 they set aside their J//^L
neutrality for open aid. The great plan of Federation
which Van Arteveldt had been devising as a check on
the aggression of France was carried out in a treaty
concluded between Edward, the Duke of Brabant, the
cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain, Ghent, Bruges,
Ypres, and seven others. By this remarkable treaty it
was provided that war should be begun and ended only
by mutual consent, free commerce be encouraged between
Flanders and Brabant, and no change made in their com-
mercial arrangements save with the consent of the whole
league. By a subsequent treaty the Flemish towns owned
Edward as King of France, and declared war against
Philip of Valois. But their voice was decisive on the
course of the campaign which opened in 1340. As Philip
held the Upper Scheldt by the occupation of Carnbray, so
he held the Lower Scheldt by that of Tournay, a fortress
which broke the line of commerce between Flanders and
Brabant. It was a condition of the Flemish alliance
therefore that the war should open with the capture of
Tournay. It was only at the cost of a fight however
that Edward could now cross the Channel to undertake
the siege. France was as superior in force at sea as on
412 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. land ; and a fleet of two hundred vessels gathered at Sluys
Edward to intercept him. But the fine seamanship of the
theThird. E n gii sn sailors justified the courage of their King in
13477 attacking this fleet with far smaller forces ; the French
ships were utterly destroyed and twenty thousand French-
men slain in the encounter. It was with the lustre of
this great victory about him that Edward marched upon
Tournay. Its siege however proved as fruitless as that
of Cambray in the preceding year, and after two months
of investment his vast army of one hundred thousand
men broke up without either capturing the town or
bringing Philip when he approached it to an engagement.
Want of money forced Edward to a truce for a year, and
he returned beggared and embittered to England.
Edward's He had been worsted in war as in diplomacy. One
distress. nava } V i c t ry alone redeemed years of failure and expense.
Guienne was all but lost, England was suffering from the
terrible taxation, from the ruin of commerce, from the
ravages of her coast. Five years of constant reverses were
hard blows for a King of twenty-eight who had been
glorious and successful at twenty-three. His financial
difficulties indeed were enormous. It was in vain that,
availing himself of an Act which forbad the exportation
of wool " till by the King and his Council it is otherwise
provided," he turned for the time the wool-trade into a
royal monopoly and became the sole wool exporter, buying
at 3 and selling at 20 the sack. The campaign of 1339
brought with it a crushing debt : that of 1340 proved yet
more costly. Edward attributed his failure to the slack-
ness of his ministers in sending money and supplies, and
this to their silent opposition to the war. But wroth as
he was on his return, a short struggle between the minis-
ters and the King ended in a reconciliation, and prepar-
ations for renewed hostilities went on. Abroad indeed
nothing could be done. The Emperor finally withdrew
from Edward's friendship. A new Pope, Clement the Sixth,
proved even more French in sentiment than his prede-
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
413
cessor. Flanders alone held true of all England's foreign
allies. Edward was powerless to attack Philip in the
realm he claimed for his own; what strength he could
gather was needed to prevent the utter ruin of the English
cause in Scotland on the return of David Bruce. Edward's
soldiers had been driven from the open country and con-
fined to the fortresses of the Lowlands. Even these were
at last reft away. Perth was taken by siege, and the
King was too late to prevent the surrender of Stirling.
Edinburgh was captured by a stratagem. Only Roxburgh
and Berwick were saved by a truce which Edward was
driven to conclude with the Scots.
But with the difficulties of the Crown the weight of
the two Houses made itself more and more sensibly
felt. The almost incessant warfare which had gone on
since the accession of Edward the Third consolidated
and developed the power which they had gained from
the dissensions of his father's reign. The need of con-
tinual grants brought about an assembly of Parliament
year by year, and the subsidies that were accorded to
the King showed the potency of the financial engine
which the Crown could now bring into play. In a single
year the Parliament granted twenty thousand sacks, or
half the wool of the realm. Two years later the Commons
voted an aid of thirty thousand sacks. In 1339 the
barons granted the tenth sheep and fleece and lamb. The
clergy granted two tenths in one year, and a tenth for
three years in the next. But with each supply some step
was made to greater political influence. In his earlier
years Edward showed no jealousy of the Parliament. His
policy was to make the struggle with France a national
one by winning for it the sympathy of the people at large;
and with this view he not only published in the County
Courts the efforts he had made for peace, but appealed
again and again for the sanction and advice of Parliament
in his enterprize. In 1331 he asked the Estates whether
they would prefer negotiation or war: in 1338 he declared
CHAP. II.
Edward
the Third,
1327-
1347.
Progress
of Par-
liament.
414 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. that his expedition to Flanders was made by the assent of
Edward t' ne Lords and at the prayer of the Commons. The part
thejThird. Q f foe last in public affairs grew greater in spite of their
1347! own efforts to remain obscure. From the opening of the
reign a crowd of enactments for the regulation of trade,
whether wise or unwise, shows the influence of the burgesses.
But the final division of Parliament into two Houses, a
change which was completed by 1341, necessarily increased
the weight of the Commons. The humble trader who
shrank from counselling the Crown in great matters of
policy gathered courage as he found himself sitting side
by side with the knights of the shire. It was at the
moment when this great change was being brought about
that the disasters of the war spurred the Parliament to
greater activity. The enormous grants of 1340 were bought
by the King's assent to statutes which provided reme-
dies for grievances of which the Commons complained.
The most important of these put an end to the attempts
which Edward had made like his grandfather to deal with
the merchant class apart from the Houses. No charges or
aid was henceforth to be made save by the common assent
of the Estates assembled in Parliament. The progress of
the next year was yet more important. The strife of the
King with his ministers, the foremost of whom was
Archbishop Stratford, ended in the Primate's refusal to
make answer to the royal charges save in full Parliament,
and in the assent of the King to a resolution of the Lords
that none of their number, whether ministers of the Crown
or no, should be brought to trial elsewhere than before his
peers. The Commons demanded and obtained the appoint-
ment of commissioners elected in Parliament to audit the
grants already made. Finally it was enacted ' that at
each Parliament the ministers should hold themselves
accountable for all grievances ; that on any vacancy the
King should take counsel with his lords as to the choice
of the new minister ; and that, when chosen, each minister
should be sworn in Parliament.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 415
At the moment which we have reached therefore the CHAP. II.
position of the Parliament had become far more important Edward
.than at Edward's accession. Its form was settled. The the ThirA
third estate had gained a fuller parliamentary power. The iff 7"
principle of ministerial responsibility to the Houses had .
been established by formal statute. Bat the jealousy of the truce.
Edward was at last completely roused, and from this
moment he looked on the new power as a rival to his
own. The Parliament of 1341 had no sooner broken up
than he revoked by Letters Patent the statutes it had
passed as done in prejudice of his prerogative and only
assented to for the time to prevent worse confusion. The
regular assembly of the Estates was suddenly interrupted,
and two years passed without a Parliament. It was only
the continual presence of war which from this time drove
Edward to summon the Houses at all. Though the truce
still held good between England and France a quarrel of
succession to the Duchy of Brittany which broke out in
1341 and called Philip to the support of one claimant, his
cousin Charles of Blois, and Edward to the support of a
rival claimant, John of Montfort, dragged on year after
year. In Flanders things went ill for the English cause.
The dissensions between the great and the smaller towns,
and in the greater towns themselves between the weavers
and fullers, dissensions which had taxed the genius of
Van Arteveldt through the nine years of his wonderful
rule, broke out in 1345 into a revolt at Ghent in which
the great statesman was slain. "With him fell a design
for the deposition of the Count of Flanders and the re-
ception of the Prince of "Wales in his stead which he
was ardently pressing, and whose political results might
have been immense. Deputies were at once sent to
England to excuse Van Arteveldt's murder and to promise
loyalty to Edward; but the King's difficulties had now
reached their height. His loans from the Florentine
bankers amounted to half a million. His claim on the
French crown found not a single adherent save among the
416
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347!
Edward
CHAP. ii. burghers of the Flemish towns. The overtures which he
Edward niade for peace were contemptuously rejected, and the
theihird. ex pi ra ti n of the truce in 1345 found him again face to
f ace with France.
But ^ was P erna P s this breakdown of all foreign hope
marches that contributed to Edward's success in the fresh out-
on Paris. ^ rea ]j O f war ^he war opened in Guienne, and Henry of
Lancaster, who was now known as the Earl of Derby, and
who with the Hainaulter Sir Walter Maunay took the
command in that quarter, at once showed the abilities of a
great general. The course of the Garonne was cleared by
his capture of La Reole and Aiguillon, that of the Dor-
dogne by the reduction of Bergerac, and a way opened for
the reconquest of Poitou by the capture of Angouleme.
These unexpected successes roused Philip to strenuous
efforts, and a hundred thousand men gathered under. his
son/John, Duke of Normandy, for the subjugation of the
South. Angouleme was won back, and Aiguillon besieged
when Edward sailed to the aid of his hard-pressed lieu-
tenant. It was with an arrny of thirty thousand men,
half English, half Irish and Welsh, that he commenced
a march which was to change the whole face of the war.
His aim was simple. Flanders was still true to Edward's
cause, and while Derby was pressing on in the south a
Flemish army besieged Bouvines and threatened France
from the north. The King had at first proposed to land
in Guienne and relieve the forces in the south ; but sud-
denly changing his design he disembarked at La Hogue and
advanced through Normandy. By this skilful movement
Edward not only relieved Derby but threatened Paris, and
left himself able to co-operate with either his own army in
the south or the Flemings in the north. Normandy was
totally without defence, and after the sack of Caen, which
was then one of the wealthiest towns in France, Edward
marched upon the Seine. His march threatened Eouen
and Paris, and its strategical value was seen by the sudden
panic of the French King. Philip was wholly taken by
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
417
1327-
1347.
Creqy.
surprize. He attempted to arrest Edward's .march by an CHAP. II.
offer to restore the Duchy of Aquitaine as Edward the Edward
Second had held it, but the offer was fruitless. Philip was the j^ ird -
forced to call his sou to the rescue. John at once raised
the siege of Aiguillon, and the French army moved
rapidly to the north, its withdrawal enabling Derby to
capture Poitiers and make himself thorough master of
the south. But John was too distant from Paris for his
forces to avail Philip in his emergency, for Edward, findin^
the bridges on the Lower Seine broken, pushed straight on
Paris, rebuilt the bridge of Poissy, and threatened the
capital.
At this crisis however France found an unexpected
help in a body of German knights. The long strife
between Lewis of Bavaria and the Papacy had ended at
last in Clement's carrying out his sentence of deposition
by the nomination and coronation as emperor of Charles
of Luxemburg, a son of King John of Bohemia, the
well known Charles IV. of the Golden Bull. But against
this Papal assumption of a right to bestow the German
Crown Germany rose as one man. Not a town opened its
gates to the Papal claimant, and driven to seek help and
refuge from Philip of Valois he found himself at this
moment on the eastern frontier of France with his father
and 500 knights. Hurrying to Paris this German force
formed the nucleus of an army which assembled at St.
Denys ; and which was soon reinforced by 15,000 Genoese
cross-bowmen who had been hired from among the soldiers
of the Lord of Monaco on the sunny Riviera and arrived
at this hour of need. With this host rapidly gathering in
his front Edward abandoned his march on Paris, which
had already served its purpose in relieving Derby, and
threw himself across the Seine to carry out the second
part of his programme by a junction with the Flemings at
Gravelines and a campaign in the north. But the rivers
in his path were carefully guarded, and it was only by
surprizing the ford of Blanche-Taque on the Somme that
418
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. the King escaped the necessity of surrendering to the vast
Edward nos ^ which was now hastening in pursuit. His comnmni-
the Third. Ca ti ns however were no sooner secured than he halted on
1347." tne twenty-sixth of August at the little village of Cre^y
in Fonthieu and resolved to give battle. Half of his army,
which had been greatly reduced in strength by his rapid
marches, consisted of light-armed footmen from Ireland
and Wales ; the bulk of the remainder was composed of
English bowmen. The King ordered his men-at-arms to
dismount, and drew up his forces on a low rise sloping
gently to the south-east, with a deep ditch covering its
front, and its flanks protected by woods and a little
brook. From a windmill on the summit of this rise
Edward could overlook the whole field of battle. Imme-
diately beneath him lay his reserve, while at the base of
the slope was placed the main body of the army in two
divisions, that to the right commanded by the young
Prince of Wales, Edward " the Black Prince," as he was
called, that to the left by the Earl of Northampton. A
small ditch protected the English front, and behind it the
bowmen were drawn up " in the form of a harrow " with
small bombards between them " which with fire threw
little iron balls to frighten the horses," the first instance
known of the use of artillery in field-warfare.
The halt of the English army took Philip by surprize,
and he attempted for a time to check the advance of his
army. But the attempt was fruitless and the disorderly
host rolled on to the English front. The sight of his
enemies indeed stirred Philip's own blood to fury, " for he
hated them." The fight began at vespers. The Genoese
cross-bowmen were ordered to open the attack, but the
men were weary with their march, a sudden storm wetted
and rendered useless their bowstrings, and the loud shouts
with which they leapt forward to the encounter were met
with dogged silence in the English ranks. Their first
arrow flight however brought a terrible reply. So rapid
was the English shot " that it seemed as if it snowed."
IV. J
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
419
1327-
1347.
" Kill me these scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese CHAP. II.
fell back; and his men-at-arms plunged butchering into Edward
their broken ranks while the Counts of Alen9on and the Third -
Flanders at the head of the French knighthood fell hotly
on the Prince's line. For an instant his small force seemed
lost, and he called his father to support him. But Edward
refused to send him aid. " Is he dead, or unhorsed, or so
wounded that he cannot help himself?" he asked the
envoy. "No, sir," was the reply, "but he is in a hard
passage of arms, and sorely needs your help." "Pceturn
to those that sent you," said the King, " and bid them not
send to me again so long as my son lives ! Let the boy
win his spurs, for, if God so order it, I will that the day
may be his and that the honour may be with him and
them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward could
see in fact from his higher ground that all went well.
The English bowmen and men-at-arms held their ground
stoutly while the Welshmen stabbed the French horses in
the melly and brought knight after knight to the ground.
Soon the French host was wavering in a fatal confusion.
" You are my vassals, my friends," cried the blind John of
Bohemia to the German nobles around him, " I pray and
beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that I may
strike one good blow with this sword of mine ! " Linking
their bridles together, the little company plunged into the
thick of the combat to fall as their fellows were falling.
The battle went steadily against the French. At last
Philip himself hurried from the field, and the defeat
became a rout. Twelve hundred knights and thirty
thousand footmen a number equal to the whole English
force lay dead upon the ground.
" God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler
of St. Deuys in a passion of bewildered grief as he tells
the rout of the great host which he had seen mustering
beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was
hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a
single blow of a system of warfare, and with it of the
The
Yeoman.
420 HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
v'HAF. II. political and social fabric which had risen out of that
Edward sy stem - Feudalism rested on the superiority of the horse-
(hejrhird. man ^o the footman, of the mounted noble to the un-
1347 mounted churl. The real fighting power of a feudal army
lay in its knighthood, in the baronage and landowners who
took the field, each with his group of esquires and mounted
men-at-arms. A host of footmen followed them, but they
were ill-armed, ill-disciplined, and seldom called on to play
any decisive part on the actual battle-field. In France,
and especially at the moment we have reached, the con-
trast between the efficiency of these two elements of
warfare was more striking than elsewhere. Nowhere was
the chivalry so splendid, nowhere was the general misery
and oppression of the poor more terribly expressed in the
worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were driven by
their lords to the camp. In England, on the other hand,
the failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the
country was seen in the persistence of the older national
institutions which based its defence on the general levy
of its freemen. If the foreign Kings added to this a system
of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its
military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding
this as superseding the national " fyrd." The Assize of
Arms, the Statute of Winchester, show with what care
the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency. Its force
indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the
age of Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third.
The social changes on which we have already dwelt, the
facilities given to alienation and the subdivision of lands,
the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of the
copyholder by redemption of his services into a free-
holder, the rise of a new class of " farmers " as the lords
ceased to till their demesne by means of bailiffs and
adopted the practise of leasing it at a rent or " farm " to
one of the customary tenants, the general increase of
wealth which was telling on the social position even of
those who still remained in villenage, undid more and
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 1307 14G1 421
more the earlier process which had degraded the free ceorl CHAP. II
of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norrnan Edward
Conquest, and covered the land with a population of ^J^d.
yeomen, some freeholders, some with services that every 1347
day became less weighty and already left them virtually
free.
Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal The Bu:.
law, called by attendance in the county court to a share in
the judicial, the financial, and the political life of the
realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a different
sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords
of the Continent ; and they were equipped with a weapon
which as they wielded it was enough of itself to make
a revolution in the art of war. The bow, identified as it
became with English warfare, was the weapon not of
Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the
Norman arrow-flight that decided the day of Senlac.
But in the organization of the national army it had been
assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were
liable to serve at the King's summons ; and we see how
closely it had become associated with them in the picture
of Chaucer's yeoman. " In his hand he bore a mighty
bow." Its might lay not only in the range of the heavy
war-shaft, a range we are told of four hundred yards, but
in its force. The English archer, taught from very child-
hood " how to draw, how to lay his body to the bow," his
skill quickened by incessant practise and constant rivalry
with his fellows, raised the bow into a terrible engine of
war. Thrown out along the front in a loose order that
alone showed their vigour and self-dependence, the bow-
men faced ^nd riddled the splendid line of knighthood
as it charged upon them. The galled horses " reeled right
rudely." Their riders found even the steel of Milan a
poor defence against the grey-goose shaft. Gradually the
bow dictated the very tactics of an English battle. If the
mass of cavalry still plunged forward, the screen of archers
broke to ri^ht and left and the men-at-arms who lay in
VOL. I. 28
422
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1327-
1347.
Siege of
Calais.
CHAP. II. reserve behind them made short work of the broken and
Edward disordered horsemen, while the light troops from Wales
thejrhird. au( j i re l anc l flinging themselves into the melly with their
long knives and darts brought steed after steed to the
ground. It was this new military engine that Edward the
Third carried to the fields of France. His armies were
practically bodies of hired soldiery, for the short period of
feudal service was insufficient for foreign campaigns, and
yeoman and baron were alike drawn by a high rate of pay.
An archer's daily wages equalled some five shillings of onr
present money. Such payment when coupled with the
hope of plunder was enough to draw yeomen from thorpe
and farm ; and though the royal treasury was drained as
it had never been drained before the English King saw
himself after the day of Cre9y the master of a force
without rival in the stress of war.
To England her success was the beginning of a career
of military glory, which fatal as it was destined to prove
to the higher sentiments and interests of the nation gave
it a warlike energy such as it had never known before.
Victory followed victory. A few months after Cregy a
Scotch army marched over the border and faced on the
seventeenth of October an English force at Neville's Cross.
But it was soon broken by the arrow-flight of the English
archers, and the Scotch King David Bruce was taken
prisoner. The withdrawal of the French from the Garonne
enabled Henry of Derby to recover Poitou. Edward
meanwhile with a decision which marks his military
capacity marched from the field of Cregy to form the
siege of Calais. No measure could have been more
popular with the English merchant class, for Calais was
a great pirate-haven and in a single year twenty-two
privateers from its port had swept the Channel. But
Edward was guided by weightier considerations than this.
In spite of his victory at Sluys the superiority of France
at sea had been a constant embarrassment. From this
difficulty the capture of Calais would do much to deliver
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 423
him, for Dover and Calais together bridled the Channel. CHAP. II.
Nor was this all. Not only would the possession of the Edward
town give Edward a base of operations against France, tlle ^ ird -
but it afforded an easy means of communication with the 13477
only sure allies of England, the towns of Flanders. Flanders
seemed at this moment to be wavering. Its Count had
fallen at Cre^y, but his son Lewis le Male, though his
sympathies were as French as his father's, was received in
November by his subjects with the invariable loyalty
which they showed to their rulers ; and his own efforts to
detach them from England were seconded by the influence
of the Duke of Brabant. But with Edward close at hand
beneath the walls of Calais the Flemish towns stood true.
They prayed the young Count to marry Edward's daughter,
imprisoned him on his refusal, and on his escape to the
French Court in the spring of 1347 they threw themselves
heartily into the English cause. A hundred thousand
Flemings advanced to Cassel and ravaged the French
frontier.
The danger of Calais roused Philip from the panic
which had followed his defeat, and with a vast army he
advanced to the north. But Edward's lines were impreg-
nable. The French King failed in another attempt to
dislodge the Flemings, and was at last driven to retreat
without a blow. Hopeless of further succour, the town after
a year's siege was starved into surrender in August 1347.
Mercy was granted to the garrison and the people on
condition that six of the citizens gave themselves into
the English King's hands. " On them," said Edward
with a burst of bitter hatred, " I will do my will." At
the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the
folk of Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms,
" desiring to hear their good news, for they were all inad
with hunger. When the said knight told them his news,
then began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was
great pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the
town, Master Eustache de St. Pierre by name, and spake
424 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. II. thus before all : ' My masters, great grief and mishap
Edward ^ were for all to leave such a people as this is to die
thejTMrd. ^y famine or otherwise ; and great charity and grace
J2i~ would he win from our Lord who could defend them from
lO*r/
dying. For me, I have great hope in the Lord that if I
can save this people by my death I shall have pardon for
-my faults, wherefore will I be the first of the six, and of
my own will put myself barefoot in my shirt and with a
halter round my neck in the mercy of King Edward.' "
The list of devoted men was soon made up, and the
victims were led before the king. " All the host assembled
together ; there was great press, and many bade hang
them openly, and many wept for pity. The noble King
came with his train of counts and barons to the place, and
the Queen followed him, though great with child, to see
what there would be. The six citizens knelt down at once
before the King, and Master Eustache spake thus :
' Gentle King, here we be six who have been of the old
bourgeoisie of Calais and great merchants ; we bring you
the keys of the town and castle of Calais, and render them
to you at your pleasure. We set ourselves in such wise
as you see purely at your will, to save the remnant of
the people that has suffered much pain. So may you have
pity and mercy on us for your high nobleness' sake.'
Certes, there was then in that place neither lord nor
knight that wept not for pity, nor who could speak for
pity ; but the King had his heart so hardened by wrath
that for a long while he could not reply ; then he com-
manded to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords
prayed him with tears, as much as they could, to have
pity on them, but he would not hear. Then spoke the
gentle knight, Master Walter de Maunay, and said, ' Ha,
gentle sire ! bridle your wrath ; you have the renown and
good fame of all gentleness ; do not a thing whereby men
can speak any villany of you ! If you have no pity, all
men will say that you have a heart full of all cruelty to
put these good citizens to death that of their own will are
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 425
come to render themselves to you to save the remnant of CHAP. II.
the people.' At this point the King changed countenance Edward
with wrath, and said ' Hold your peace, Master Walter !
it shall be none otherwise. Call the headsman. They of
Calais have made so many of my men die, that they must
die themselves ! ' Then did the noble Queen of England
a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she was great with child,
and wept so tenderly for pity that she could no longer
stand upright ; therefore she cast herself on her knees
before her lord the King and spake on this wise : ' Ah,
gentle sire, from the day that I passed over sea in great
peril, as you know, I have asked for nothing : now r pray I
and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love of our
Lady's Son to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King
waited a while before speaking, and looked on the Queen
as she knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then began
his heart to soften a little, and he said, ' Lady, I would
rather you had been otherwhere ; you pray so tenderly
that I dare not refuse you ; and though I do it against my
will, nevertheless take them, I give them to you.' Then
took he the six citizens by the halters and delivered them
to the Queen, and released from death all those of Calais
for the love of her ; and the good lady bade them clothe
the six burgesses and make them good cheer."
CHAPTER III.
THE PEASANT REVOLT.
13471381.
Edward STILL in the vigour of manhood, for he was but thiru\-
ihe Third. fiv ^ g^ward the Third stood at the height of his re-
nown. He had won the greatest victory of his age.
France, till now the first of European states, was broken
and dashed from her pride of place at a single blow. The
kingdom seemed to lie at Edward's mercy, for Guienne
was recovered, Flanders was wholly on his side, and
Brittany, where the capture of Charles of Blois secured the
success of his rival and the English party which supported
him, opened the road to Paris. At home his government
was popular, and Scotland, the one enemy he had to dread,
was bridled by the capture of her King. How great his
renown was in Europe was seen in 1347, when on the
death of Lewis of Bavaria the electors offered him the
Imperial Crown. Edward was in truth a general of a
high order, and he had shown himself as consummate a
strategist in the campaign as a tactician in the field. But
to the world about him he was even more illustrious as
the foremost representative of the showy chivalry of his
day. He loved the pomp of tournaments ; he revived the
Round Table of the fabled Arthur; he celebrated his
victories by the creation of a new order of knighthood.
He had varied the sterner operations of the siege of Calais
by a hand to hand combat with one of the bravest of the
French knights. A naval picture of Froissart sketches
BOOK iv.] THE PAELIAMENT. 13071461. 427
Edward for us as he sailed to meet a Spanish fleet CHAP. I1L
which was sweeping the narrow seas. We see the King ^
sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head Jtevoitf
covered by a black beaver hat " which became him well," isl-
and calling on Sir John Chaudos to troll out the songs 1381 -
he had brought with him from Germany, till the Spanish
ships heave in sight and a furious fight begins which
ends in a victory that leaves Edward " King of the Seas."
But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle,
busy diplomatist. None of our Kings was so restless a'
negotiator. From the first hour of Edward's rule the
threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost in-
extricable confusion. And to all who dealt with him he
was equally false and tricky. Emperor was played off
against Pope and Pope against Emperor, the friendship of
the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on
their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the
Eoman see was employed to bridle the French sympathies
of the court of Avignon, and when the statutes which it
produced had served their purpose they were set aside for
a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of
the Church between them. His temper was as false in
his dealings with his people as in his dealings with the
European powers. Edward aired to country and parlia-
ment his English patriotism. " Above all other lands and
realms " he made his chancellor say " the King had most
tenderly at heart his land of England, a land more full of
delight and honour and profit to him than any other."
His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the
livery of a city gild ; he dined with a London merchant.
His perpetual parliaments, his appeals to them and to the
country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to promise a
ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he
ruled. But when once Edward passed from sheer careless-
ness and gratification at the new source of wealth which
the Parliament opened to a sense of what its power really
was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom
428
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
The
Black
Death
CHAP. III. as any king that had gone before him. He sold his
assent to its demands for heavy subsidies, and when he
had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes he
had sanctioned null and void. The constitutional pro-
gress which was made during his reign was due to his
absorption in showy schemes of foreign ambition, to his
preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober
business of civil administration. The same shallowness
of temper, the same showiness and falsehood, ran through
his personal character. The King who was a model of
chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed
himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even
the courtesy to his Queen which throws its halo over the
story of their deliverance went hand in hand with a con-
stant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead
his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mis-
tress as Queen of Beauty through the streets of London,
and set her in pomp over tournaments as the Lady of the
Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's example.
" In those days," writes a chronicler of v the time, " arose a
rumour and clamour among the people that wherever there
was a tournament there came a great concourse of ladies,
of the most costly and beautiful but not of the best in the
kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they
were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and
wonderful male apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with
short caps and bands wound cord-wise round their heads,
and girdles bound with gold and silver, and daggers in
pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice
coursers to the place of tourney ; and so spent and wasted
their goods and vexed their bodies with scurrilous wanton-
ness that the murmurs of the people sounded everywhere.
But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste
voice of the people."
The " chaste voice of the people " was soon to grow into
the stern moral protest of the Lollards, but for the moment
all murmurs were hushed bv the King's success. The
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 429
truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a CHAP. IIL
mere rest in the career of victories which opened before T^
Edward. England was drunk with her glory and with the ifevoit*
hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen had been brought 1347-
after the sack of that town to London. " There was no 13 J^}-
woman," says Walsingham, " who had not got garments,
furs, feather-beds, and utensils from the spoils of Calais
and other foreign cities." The Court revelled in gorgeous
tournaments and luxury of dress ; and the establishment
in 13-46 of the Order of the Garter which found its home
in the new castle that Edward was raising at Windsor
marked the highest reach of the spurious " Chivalry " of
the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the
whole colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The
most terrible plague the world has ever witnessed advanced
from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores
of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the close of
1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness
and the panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its
visitation have been amply justified by modern research.
Of the three or four millions who then formed the popu-
lation of England more than one half were swept away
in its repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the
greater towns where filthy and undrained streets afforded
a constant haunt to leprosy and fever. In the burial
ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased
for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards
marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand
corpses are said to have been interred. Thousands of people
perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the living were
hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell
on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More
than one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to
have perished ; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of
the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organ-
ization of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of
hands produced by the terrible mortality made it difficult
430 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
i
CHAP. III. for villeins to perform the services due for their lands,
^~ and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by
Peasant ^he landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to
Kevoit.
1347 refrain from the abandonment of their farms. For a time
i38i. cultivation became impossible. " The sheep and cattle
strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary,
" and there were none left who could drive them." Even
when the first burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of
wages consequent on the enormous diminution in the
supply of labour, though accompanied by a correspond-
ing rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course
of industrial employments. Harvests rotted on the ground
and fields were left untilled not merely from scarcity of
hands but from the strife which now for the first time
revealed itself between capital and labour.
Its Social Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly
Results, felt as in its bearing on the social revolution which had
been steadily going on for a century past throughout the
country. At the moment we have reached the lord of a
manor 'had been reduced over a large part of England to
the position of a modern landlord, receiving a rental in
money from his tenants and supplying their place in the
cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers. He
was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for
the purposes of cultivation on the supply of hired labour,
and hitherto this supply had been abundant and cheap.
But with the ravages of the Black Death and the decrease
of population labour at once became scarce and dear.
There was a general rise of wages, and the farmers of the
country as well as the wealthier craftsmen of the town
saw themselves threatened with ruin by what seemed to
their age the extravagant demands of the labour class.
Meanwhile the country was torn with riot and disorder.
An outbreak of lawless self-indulgence which followed
everywhere in the wake of the plague told especially upon
the " landless men," workers wandering in search of work
who found themselves for tha first time masters of the
IV.] THE PABLIAMENT. 13071401. 431
labour market ; and the wandering labourer or artizan CHAP. 111.
turned easily into the " sturdy beggar," or the bandit of the
woods. A summary redress for these evils was at once
provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation. " Because 1347-
a great part of the people," runs this ordinance, " and prin- 1381 '
cipally of labourers and servants, is dead of the plague,
some, seeing the need of their lords and the scarcity of
servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive ex-
cessive wages, and others are rather begging in idleness
than supporting themselves by labour, we have ordained
that any able-bodied man or woman, of whatsoever con-
dition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of
merchandize nor following a trade nor having of his own
wherewithal to live, either his own land with the culture
of which he could occupy himself, and not serving another,
shall if so required serve another for such wages as was the
custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or six
years before."
It was the failure of this ordinance to effect its ends Statute of
which brought about at the close of 1349 the passing
of the Statute of Labourers. "Every man or woman,"
runs this famous provision, " of whatsoever condition, free
or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore
years, . . . and not having of his own whereof he may
live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he
may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be
bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do
so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed
to be taken in the neighbourhood where he is bound to
serve " two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey
was punished by imprisonment. But sterner measures
were soon found to be necessary. Not only was the price
of labour fixed by the Parliament of 1350 but the labour
class was once more tied to the soil. The labourer was
forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search of
better paid employment ; if he disobeyed he became a
" fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands of
432
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally
must have been impossible, for corn rose to so high a
price that a day's labour at the old wages would not have
purchased wheat enough for a man's support. But -the
landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The repeated
re-enactment of the law shows the difficulty of applying
it and the stubbornness of the struggle which it brought
about. The fines and forfeitures which were levied for
infractions of its provisions formed a large source of royal
revenue, but so ineffectual were the original penalties that
the runaway labourer was at last ordered to be branded with
a hot iron on the forehead, while the harbouring of serfs in
towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it merely the
existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this
reactionary movement. The increase of their numbers by
a commutation of labour services for money payments was
suddenly checked, and the ingenuity of the lawyers who
were employed as stewards of each manor was exercized in
striving to restore to the landowners that customary
labour whose loss was now severely felt. Manumissions
and exemptions which had passed without question were
cancelled on grounds of informality, and labour services
from which they held themselves freed by redemption
were again demanded from the villeins. The attempt was
the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded in the
manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer
whose interest it was to give judgement in favour of his lord.
We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance through
the statutes which strove in vain to repress it. In the
towns, where the system of forced labour was applied with
even more rigour than in the country, strikes and combina-
tions became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the
country the free labourers found allies in the villeins whose
freedom from manorial service was questioned. These were
often men of position and substance, and throughout the
eastern counties the gatherings of " fugitive serfs " were
supported by an organized resistance and by large
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 433
contributions of money on the part of the wealthier CHAP. III.
tenantry. ^
With plague, famine, and social strife in the land, it was Revolt
no time for reaping the fruits even of such a victory as 1347-
Cre9y. Luckily for England the pestilence had fallen as 1381 -
heavily on her foe as on herself. A common suffering and Senegal
exhaustion forced both countries to a truce, and though de- jj- cn
sultory fighting went on along the Breton and Aquitanian
borders, the peace which was thus secured lasted with brief
intervals of fighting for seven years. It was not till 1355 j
that the failure of a last effort to turn the truce into a final
peace again drove Edward into war. The campaign opened
with a brilliant prospect of success. Charles the Bad, King
of Navarre, held as a prince of descent from the house of
Valois large fiefs in Normandy ; and a quarrel springing
suddenly up between him and John, who had now succeeded
his father Philip on the throne of France, Charles offered
to put his fortresses into Edward's hands. Master of
Cherbourg, Avranches, Pontauderner, Evreux and Meulan,
Mantes, Mortain, Pontoise, Charles held in his hands the
keys of France ; and Edward grasped at the opportunity
of delivering a crushing blow. Three armies were prepared
to act in Normandy, Britanny, and Guienne. But the first
two, with Edward and Henry of Derby, who had been
raised to the dukedom of Lancaster, at their head, were
detained by contrary winds, and Charles, despairing of
their arrival, made peace with John. Edward made his way
to Calais to meet the tidings of this desertion and to be
called back to England by news of a recapture of Berwick
by the Scots. But his hopes of Norman co-operation were
revived in 1356. The treachery of John, his seizure of the
King of Navarre, and his execution of the Count of Harcourt
who was looked upon as the adviser of Charles in his policy
of intrigue, stirred a general rising throughout Normandy.
Edward at once despatched troops under the Duke of Lan-
caster to its support. But the insurgents were soon forced
to fall back. Conscious of the danger to which an English
434
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [BOOK
occupation of Normandy would expose him, John hastened
with a large army to the west, drove Lancaster to Cher-
bourg, took Evreux, and besieged Breteuil.
Here however his progress was suddenly checked by
from the south. The Black Prince, as the hero of
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
news
Oec,y was called, had landed in Guienne during the
preceding year and won a disgraceful success. Unable to
pay his troops, he staved off their demands by a campaign
of sheer pillage. While plague and war and the anarchy
which sprang up under the weak government of John were
bringing ruin on the northern and central provinces of
France, the south remained prosperous and at peace. The
young prince led his army of freebooters up the Garonne
into " what was before one of the fat countries of the world,
the people good and simple, who did not know what war
was; indeed no war had been waged against them till the
Prince came. The English and Gascons found the country
full and gay, the rooms adorned with carpets and draperies,
the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was
safe from these robbers. They, and especially the Gascons,
who are very greedy, carried off everything." Glutted by
the sack of Carcassone and Narbonne the plunderers fell
back to Bordeaux, " their horses so laden with spoil that
they could hardly move." Worthier work awaited the
Black Prince in the following year. In the plan of cam-
paign for 1 356 it had been arranged that he should march
upon the Loire, and there unite with a force under the
Duke of Lancaster which was to land in Britanny and
push rapidly into the heart of France. Delays however
hindered the Prince from starting from Bordeaux till July,
and when his march brought him to the Loire the plan of
campaign had already broken down. The outbreak in
Normandy had tempted the English Council to divert the
force under Lancaster from Britanny to that province ; and
the Duke was now at Cherbourg, hard pressed by the French
army under John. But if its original purpose was foiled,
the march of the Black Prince on the Loire served still more
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
435
The
Peasant
Kevolt.
1347-
1381.
effectively the English cause. His advance pointed straight CHAP. Ill
upon Paris, and again as in the Cre9y campaign John
was forced to leave all for the protection of the capital.
Hasty marches brought the King to the Loire while Prince
Edward still lay at Yierzon on the Cher. Unconscious of
John's designs, he wasted some days in the capture of
Komorantin while the French troops were crossing the Loire
along its course from Oilcans to Tours and John with
the advance was hurrying through Loches upon Poitiers in
pursuit, as he supposed, of the retreating Englishmen.
But the movement of the French army, near as it was,
was unknown in the English camp; and when the news
of it forced the Black Prince to order a retreat the enemy
was already far ahead of him. Edward reached the fields
north of Poitiers to find his line of retreat cut off and a
French army of sixty thousand men interposed between his
forces and Bordeaux.
If the Prince had shown little ability in his manage- Poitiers.
ment of the campaign, he showed tactical skill in the fight
which was now forced on him. On the nineteenth of
September he took a strong position in the fields of Mau-
pertuis, where his front was covered by thick hedges and
approachable only by a deep and narrow lane which ran
between vineyards. The vineyards and hedges he lined
with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms
at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain
on which he was himself encamped. Edward's force num-
bered only eight thousand men, and the danger was great
enough to force him to offer in exchange for a free retreat
the surrender of his prisoners and of the places he had
taken, with an oath not to fight against France for seven
years to come. His offers however were rejected, and the
battle opened with a charge of three hundred French knights
up the narrow lane. But the lane w r as soon choked with
men and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing
army fell back before a galling fire of arrows from the
In this moment of confusion a body of English
hedgerows.
436
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. horsemen, posted unseen by their opponents on a hill to
^ the right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the
Bevoit* Prince watching the disorder which was caused by the
1347- repulse and surprize fell boldly on their front. The steady
1{ ^_ 1 ' shot of the English archers completed the panic produced
by this sudden attack. The first French line was driven
in, and on its rout the second, a force of sixteen thousand
men, at once broke in wild terror and fled from the field.
John still held his ground with the knights of the reserve,
whom he had unwisely ordered to dismount from their
horses, till a charge of the Black Prince with two thousand
lances threw this last body into confusion. The French
King was taken, desperately fighting ; and when his army
poured back at noon in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers
eight thousand of their number had fallen on the field,
three thousand in the flight, and two thousand men-at-
arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken prisoners. The
royal captive entered London in triumph, mounted on a
big white charger, while the Prince rode by his side on a
little black hackney to the palace of the Savoy which was
chosen as John's dwelling, and a truce for two years seemed
to give healing-time to France.
With the Scots Edward the Third had less good fortune.
Recalled from Calais by their seizure of Berwick, the
King induced Balliol to resign into his hands his shadowy
sovereignty, and in the spring of 1356 marched upon
Edinburgh with an overpowering army, harrying and
burning as he marched. But the Scots refused an en-
gagement, a fleet sent with provisions was beaten off by
a storm, and' the famine-stricken army was forced to
fall rapidly back on the border in a disastrous retreat.
The trial convinced Edward that the conquest of Scotland
was impossible, and by a rapid change of policy which
marks the man he resolved to seek the friendship of the
country he had wasted so long. David Bruce was released
on promise of ransom, a truce concluded for ten years,
and the prohibition of trade between the two kingdoms
Edward
and the
Scots.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
437
1347-
1381.
put an end to. But the fulness of this reconciliation CHAP. III.
screened a dexterous intrigue. David was childless and ^
Edward availed himself of the difficulty which the young Revolt*
King experienced in finding means of providing the sum
demanded for his ransom to bring him over to a proposal
which would have united the two countries for ever. The
scheme however was carefully concealed ; and it was not
till 1363 that David proposed to his Parliament to set aside
on his death the claims of the Steward of Scotland to his
crown, and to choose Edward's third son, Lionel, Duke
of Clarence, as his successor. Though the proposal was
scornfully rejected, negotiations were still carried on
between the two Kings for the realization of this project,
and were probably only put an end to by the calamities
of Edward's later years.
In France misery and misgovernment seemed to be Peace of
doing Edward's work more effectively than arms. The Bretigny.
miserable country found no rest in itself. Its routed
soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the
lords captured at Creqy or Poitiers procured the sums
needed for their ransom by extortion from the peasantry.
The reforms demanded by the States-General which met in
this agony of France were frustrated by the treachery of the
Ptegent, John's eldest son Charles, Duke of Normandy, till
Paris, impatient of his weakness and misrule, rose in arms
against the Crown. The peasants too, driven mad by
oppression and famine, rose in wild insurrection, butchering
their lords and firing their castles over the whole face of
France. Paris and the Jacquerie, as this peasant rising
was called, were at last crushed by treachery and the
sword : and, exhausted as it was, France still backed the
Eegent in rejecting a treaty of peace by which John in
1359 proposed to buy his release. By this treaty Maine.
Touraine and Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes.
Ponthieu, and Calais in the west were ceded to the English
King. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured ravaging
over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best
VOL. I. 29
438 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. defence. " I could not believe," said Petrarch of this time,
^ " that this was the same France which I had seen, so rich
Revolt* an ^ flourishing. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a
1347- fearful solitude, an utter poverty, laud uncultivated, houses
issi. m ril i ns Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed every-
where marks of desolation and conflagration. The streets
. are deserted, the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole
is a vast solitude." The utter desolation forced Edward
to carry with him an immense train of provisions, and
thousands of baggage waggons with mills, ovens, forges,
and fishing-boats, formed a long train which streamed
for six miles behind his army. After a fruitless attempt
upon Piheims he forced the Duke of Burgundy to con-
clude a treaty with him by pushing forward to Tonnerre,
and then descending the Seine appeared with his. army
before Paris. But the wasted country forbade a siege,
and Edward after summoning the town in vain was
forced to fall back for subsistence on the Loire. It was
during this march that the Duke of Normandy's envoys
overtook him with proposals of peace. The misery of the
land had at last bent Charles to submission and in May
a treaty was concluded at Bretigny, a small place to the
eastward of Chartres. By this treaty the English King
waived his claims on the crown of France and on the
Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his Duchy of
Aquitaine, which included Gascouy, Guienne, Poitou, and
Saintonge, the Limousin and the Angoumois, Perigord and
the counties of Bigorre and Bouerque, was not only re-
stored but freed from its obligations as a French fief and
granted in full sovereignty with Ponthieu, Edward's
heritage from the second wife of Edward the First, as well
as with Guisnes and his new conquest of Calais.
,,. ,, The Peace of Bretigny set its seal upon Edward's glory.
^England. But within England itself the misery of the people was
deepening every hour. Men believed the world to be
ending, and the judgement day to be near. A few months
after the Peace came a fresh swoop of the Black Death,
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 439
carrying off the Duke of Lancaster. The repressive CHAP. 111.
measures of Parliament and the landowners only widened ^
the social chasm which parted employer from employed, i^voit 1
We can see the growth of a fierce spirit of resistance both \34J-
to the reactionary efforts which were being made to bring 1381
back labour services and to the enactments which again
bound labour to the soil in statutes which strove in vain to
repress the strikes and combi nations w r hich became frequent
in the towns and the more formidable gatherings of villeins
and " fugitive serfs " in the country at large. A statute of
later date throws light on the nature of the resistance of
the last. It tells us that " villeins and holders of land in
villeinage withdrew their customs and services from their
lords, having attached themselves to other persons who main-
tained and abetted them, and who under colour of exempli-
fications from Domesday of the manors and villages where
they dwelt claimed to be quit of all manner of services
either of their body or of their lands, and would suffer no
distress or other course of justice to be taken against them ;
the villeins aiding their maintainers by threatening the
officers of their lords with peril to life and limb as well
by open assemblies as by confederacies to support each
other." It would seem not only as if the villein was
striving to resist the reactionary tendency of the lords of
manors to regain his labour service but that in the general
overturning of social institutions the copyholder was
struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to
be recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on
lease.
A more terrible outcome of the general suffering was jofa
seen in a new revolt against the whole system of social Ball
inequality which had till then passed unquestioned as the
divine order of the world. The Peace was hardly signed
when the cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the
words of " a mad priest of Kent " as the courtly Froissart
calls him, who for twenty years to come found audience
for his sermons in spite of interdict and imprisonment in
440
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. the stout yeomen who gathered round him in the church-
yards of Kent. " Mad " as the landowners held him to
be, it was in the preaching of John Ball that England
first listened to a declaration of the natural equality
and rights of man. " Good people," cried the preacher,
" things will never be well in England so long as goods
be not in common, and so long as there be villeins and
gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords
greater folk than we ? On what grounds have they
deserved it ? Why do they hold us in serfage ? If we
all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and
Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than
we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our
toil what they spend in their pride ? They are clothed in
velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and
fair bread ; and we oat-cake and straw, and water to drink.
They have leisure and fine houses ; we have pain and
labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is
of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It
was the tyranny of property that then as ever roused the
defiance of socialism. A spirit fatal to the whole system
of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime which
condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball :
" When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman ? "
William More impressive, because of the very restraint and
Longland. moderation of its tone, is the poem in which William
Longland began at the same moment to embody with
a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of
the time, its social revolt, its moral and religious awaken-
ing, the misery of the poor, the selfishness and corruption
of the rich. Nothing brings more vividly home to us
the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed
the rich from the poor than the contrast between his
" Complaint of Piers the Ploughman " and the " Canter-
bury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and laughter
FRANCE AT THE TREATY OF BRETIG> T Y
Rflrper c Brothers. tfew York.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
441
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
through which the courtly Chaucer moves with eyes CHAP. in.
downcast as in a pleasant dream is a far off world of
wrong and of ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor.
Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put
to school and received minor orders as a clerk, " Loner
O
Will," as Longland was nicknamed from his tall stature,
found his way at an early age to London, and earned
a miserable livelihood there by singing " placebos " and
" diriges " in the stately funerals of his day. Men took
the moody clerk for a madman ; his bitter poverty
quickened the defiant pride that made him loath, as he
tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode
decked in silver and minivere along the Cheap or to
exchange a " God save you " with the law sergeants as he
passed their new house in the Temple. His world is the
world of the poor : he dwells on the poor man's life, on his
hunger and toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the
narrow intensity of a man who has no outlook beyond it.
The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life he
paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and
there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath
quickens his rime into poetry ; there is not a gleam of the
bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh delight in
the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of the world about
him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest contrasts,
of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous
allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from
Scripture which form the staple of Longland's work, are
only broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd common
sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad Hogarthian
humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep under-
tone of sadness : the world is out of joint, and the gaunt
rimer who stalks silently along the Strand has no faith
in his power to put it right.
Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and
suffering of the great city to a May-morning in the
Malvern Hills. " I was very forwandered and went me
Pier*
Plough-
man-
442 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I
lay and leaned and looked in the water I slumbered
in a sleeping, it sweyved (sounded) so merry." Just as
1347- Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the world he saw
13 ^3" into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a
wide field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits
and solitaries, of minstrels, " japers and jinglers," bidders
and beggars, ploughmen that "in setting and in sowing
swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims " with their wenches
after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman,
lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and
pardoners " parting the silver " with the parish priest.
Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but to Truth ; their
guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the
Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it
is who bids the knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant
normisdo with the poor. " Though he be thine underling
here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set and
with more bliss than thou. . . . For in chain el at church
churles be evil to know, or a knight from a knave there."
The gospel of equality is backed by the gospel of labour.
The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make the
world work with him. He warns the labourer as he
warns the knight. Hunger is God's instrument in bring-
ing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits to work her
will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the
great struggle between wealth and labour, Longland stands
alone in his fairness to both, in his shrewd political and
religious common sense. In the face of the popular
hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he
paints the Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who,
greedy as she might be, at any rate keeps the noble
rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.
Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he pro-
claims a righteous life to be better than a host of indul-
gences, and God sends His pardon to Pieis when priests
dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 443
loneliness and without hope. It is only in a dream that CHAP. III.
he sees Corruption, " Lady Mead," brought to trial, and
the world repenting at the preaching of Eeason. In
the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet him- 1347-
self is looked upon he tells us bitterly as a madman. 1 ^ 1 -
There is a terrible despair in the close of his later poem,
where the triumph of Christ is only followed by the
reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst
the revel of Death and Sin ; and Conscience, hard beset
by Pride and Sloth, rouses himself with a last effort, and
seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the world to find
Piers Ploughman.
The strife indeed which Longland w r ould have averted Prcemunire,
raged only the fiercer as the dark years went by. If the
Statutes of Labourers were powerless for their immediate
ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in
restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas
of employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred
between employer and employed, between rich and poor.
But this social rift was not the only rift which was
opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The
close of William Longland's poem is the prophecy of a
religious revolution ; and the way for such a revolution
was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp
protests from king and parliament the need for money at
Avignon was too great to allow any relaxation in the
Papal claims. Almost on the eve of Crec.y Edward took
the decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of
any Papal bulls or documents interfering with the rights
of presentation belonging to private patrons. But the
tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this
source of revenue for all Edward's protests. Crecjr how-
ever gave a new boldness to the action of the state, and a
Statute of Provisors was passed by the Parliament in 1351
which again asserted the rights of the English Church and
enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction
444 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. of Papal " provisors " should suffer imprisonment. But
^ resistance to provisors only brought fresh vexations. The
^tevoi?* P^rons who withstood a Papal nominee in the name of
1347- the law were summoned to defend themselves in the
issi. Papal Court. From that moment the supremacy of the
Papal law over the law of the land became a great question
in which the lesser question of provisors merged. The
pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by
a statute which forbade any questioning of judgements
rendered in the king's courts or any prosecution of a suit
in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, 'perpetual im-
prisonment, or banishment from the land. It was this act
of Prsemunire as it came in after renewals to be called
which furnished so terrible a weapon to the Tudors in
their later strife with Eome. But the papacy paid little
heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving
suits and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the
pride of a conquering people. England was still fresh
from her glory at Bretigny when Edward appealed to the
Parliament of 1365. Complaints, he said, were constantly
being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters
which were cognizable in the King's courts. The practice
of provisors was thus maintained in the teeth of the laws,
and "the laws, usages, ancient customs, and franchises
of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the King's
crown degraded, and his person defamed." The King's
appeal was hotly met. "Biting words," which it was
thought wise to suppress, were used in the debate which
followed, and the statutes against provisors and appeals
were solemnly confirmed.
Wyclif. What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the
prelates to the proceedings of the Parliament; and the
pride of Urban V. at once met it by a counter-defiance.
He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum
of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknow-
ledgement of the suzerainty of the See of Piome. The
insult roused the temper of the realm. The King laid the
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 445
demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that CHAP. III.
" neither King John nor any king could put himself, his J^
kingdom, nor his people under subjection save with their Revolt 1
accord or assent." John's submission had been made 13^.
" without their assent and against his coronation oath " 1381 -
and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to
enforce his claim, to resist him with all their power.
Even Urban shrank from imperilling the Papacy by any
further demands, and the claim to a Papal lordship over
England was never again heard of. But the struggle
had brought to the front a man who was destined to
give a far wider scope and significance to this resistance
to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing is more
remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of
John Wyclif's earlier life and the fulness and vividness
of our knowledge of him during the twenty years which
preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the four-
teenth century, he had already passed middle age when
ho was appointed to the mastership of Balliol College in
the University of Oxford and recognized as first among the
schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic doctors those
of England had been throughout the keenest and most
daring in philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and
love of novelty was the common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus,
and Ockham, as against the sober and more disciplined
learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during
the English wars was transferring her intellectual supre-
macy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif stood without a
rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as
a scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative
treatises he published during this period, he inherited the
tendency to a predestinarian Augustinianism which formed
the groundwork of his later theological revolt. His debt to
Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church
reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunica-
tions of the Church, Ockham had supported the Emperor
446
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle, and he had
^~ e hot shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from
ifevo"^ attacking the foundations of the Papal supremacy or
from asserting the rights of the civil power. The spare,
emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and asceti-
cism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the
stormy work of Ockham ; but within this frail form lay a
temper quick and restless, an immense energy, an immov-
able conviction, an unconquerable pride. The personal
charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened
the influence he derived from the spotless purity of his
life. As yet indeed even Wyclif himself can hardly have
suspected the immense range of his intellectual power.
It was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed
in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later
English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of
persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious partizan, the
organizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of
abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controver-
sialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and
alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom
around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and
with his last breath to assert the freedom of religious
thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however
Wyclif was far from having advanced to such a position as
this. As the most prominent of English scholars it was
natural that he should come forward in defence of the
independence and freedom of the English Church ; and
he published a formal refutation of the claims advanced
by the Papacy to deal at its will with church property in
the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates which
we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the
doctrines of Eome but with its practices ; and it was on
the principles of Ockham that he defended the Parlia-
ment's refusal of the " tribute " which was claimed by
Urban. But his treatise on " The Kingdom of God," " De
"De
Dominio
Divino."
iv.l THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 447
Dominio Divino," which can hardly have been written CHAP. Ill
later than 1368, shows the breadth of the ground he was ^e
even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous juvoit*
of his works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal 1347-
of society. All authority, to use his own expression, is 1 ?!L 1 '
" founded in grace." Dominion in the highest sense is in
God alone ; it is God who as the suzerain of the universe
deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations
on tenure of their obedience to himself. It was easy to
object that in such a case " dominion " could never exist,
since mortal sin is a breach of such a tenure and all men sin.
But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely ideal one.
In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and
power, power which the wicked may have by God's per-
mission, and to which the Christian must submit from
motives of obedience to God. In his own scholastic phrase,
so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God
must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or prac-
tical view of the matter all power and dominion was of
God. It was granted by Him not to one person, His Vicar
on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The King was
as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was
as sacred as the ecclesiastical, and as complete over tem-
poral things, even over the temporalities of the Church, as
that of the Church over spiritual things. So far as the
question of Church and State therefore was concerned the
distinction between the ideal and practical view of " do-
minion" was of little account. "Wyclif 's application of
the theory to the individual conscience was of far higher
and wider importance. Obedient as each Christian might
be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of " do-
minion " held immediately of God. The throne of God
Himself was the tribunal of personal appeal. What the
Reformers of the sixteenth century attempted to do by
their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted to
do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establish-
ing a direct relation between man and God swept away the
448
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381.
England
and
Aqui-
taine.
CHAP. III. whole basis of a mediating priesthood, the very foundation
^ on which the mediaeval church was built.
As vet *he full bearing of these doctrines was little
seen. But the social and religious excitement which we
have described was quickened by the renewal of the war,
and the general suffering and discontent gathered bitter-
ness when the success which had flushed England with a
new and warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters
in which men forgot the glories of Creyj- and Poitiers.
Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of Bretigny was really
fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the
cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the tradi-
tional claim on which his strength rested lost its force.
The people of the south had clung to their Duke, even
though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had stub-
bornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While
preserving however their traditional fealty to the descend-
ants of Eleanor they still clung to the equally traditional
suzerainty of the Kings of France. But the treaty of
Bretigny not only severed them from the realm of France,
it subjected them to the realm of England. Edward
ceased to be their hereditary Duke, he became simply an
English king ruling Aquitaine as an English dominion. If
the Southerners loved the North-French little, they loved the
English less, and the treaty which thus changed their whole
position was followed by a quick revulsion of feeling from
the Garonne to the Pyrenees. The Gascon nobles declared
that John had no right to transfer their fealty to another
and to sever them from the realm of France. The city of
Eochelle prayed the French King not to release it from its
fealty to him. " We will obey the English with our lips "
said its citizens, "but our hearts shall never be moved
towards them." Edward strove to meet this passion for
local independence, this hatred of being ruled from London,
by sending the Black Prince to Bordeaux and investing
him in 1362 with the Duchy of Aquitaine. But the new
Duke held his Duchy as a fief from the English King, and
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 449
the grievance of the Southerners was left untouched. CHAP, lit
Charles V. who succeeded his father John in 1364 silently
prepared to reap this harvest of discontent. Patient,
wary, unscrupulous, he was hardly crowned before he put
an end to the war which had gone on without a pause in
Britanny by accepting homage from the claimant whom
France had hitherto opposed. Through Bertrand du
Guesclin, a fine soldier whom his sagacity had discovered,
he forced the King of Navarre to a peace which closed the
fighting in Normandy. A more formidable difficulty in the
way of pacification and order lay in the Free Companies,
a union of marauders whom the disbanding of both armies
after the peace had set free to harry the wasted land
and whom the King's military resources were insufficient
to cope with. It was the stroke by which Charles cleared
his realm of these scourges which forced on a new struggle
with the English in the south.
In the judgement of the English court the friendship of Pedro the
Castille was of the first importance for the security of Cruel.
Aquitaine. Spain was the strongest naval power of the
western world, and not only would the ports of Guienne
be closed but its communication with England would be
at once cut off by the appearance of a joint French and
Spanish fleet in the Channel. It was with satisfaction
therefore that Edward saw the growth of a bitter hostility
between Charles and the Castilian King, Pedro the Cruel,
through the murder of his wife, Blanche of Bourbon, the
French King's sister-in-law. Henry of Trastamara, a
bastard son of Pedro's father Alfonso the Eleventh, had
long been a refugee at the French court, and soon after
the treaty of Bretigny Charles in his desire to revenge this
murder on Pedro gave Henry aid in an attempt on the
Castilian throne. It was impossible for England to look on
with indifference while a dependant of the French King
became master of Castille ; and in 1362 a treaty offensive
and defensive was concluded between Pedro and Edward
the Third. The time was not ceme for open war ; but the
450
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
Charles
the
Fifth.
CHAP. III. subtle policy of Charles saw in this strife across the
Pyrenees an opportunity both of detaching Castille from
the English cause and of ridding himself of the Free Com-
panies. With characteristic caution he dexterously held
himself in the background while he made use of the Pope,
who had been threatened by the Free Companies in his
palace at Avignon and was as anxious to get rid of them
as himself. Pedro's cruelty, misgovernment, and alliance
with the Moslem of Cordova served as grounds for a
crusade which was proclaimed by Pope Urban; and Du
Guesclin, who was placed at the head of the expedition,
found in the Papal treasury and in the hope of booty from
an unravaged land means of gathering the marauders
round his standard. As soon as these Crusaders crossed
the Ebro Pedro was deserted by his subjects, and in 1366
Henry of Trastamara saw himself crowned without a
struggle at Burgos as King of Castille. Pedro with his
two daughters fled for shelter to Bordeaux and claimed
the aid promised in the treaty. The lords of Aquitaine
shrank from fighting for sucli a cause, but in spite of their
protests and the reluctance of the English council to
embark in so distant a struggle Edward held that he had
no choice save to replace his ally, for to leave Henry
seated on the throne was to leave Aquitaine to be crushed
between France and Castille.
The after course of the war proved that in his anticipa-
tions of the fatal result of a combination of the two powers
Edward was right, but his policy jarred not only against
the universal craving for rest, but against the moral sense
of the world. The Black Prince however proceeded to
carry out his father's design in the teeth of the general
opposition. His call to arms robbed Henry of the aid of
those English Companies who had marched till now with
the rest of the crusaders, but who returned at once to the
standard of the Prince ; the passes of Navarre were opened
with gold, and in the beginning of 1367 the English army
crossed the Pyrenees. Advancing to the Ebro the Prince
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 451
offered battle at Navarete with an army already reduced CHAP. III.
by famine and disease in its terrible winter march, and ^
Henry with double his numbers at once attacked him.
But in spite of the obstinate courage of the Castilian
troops the discipline and skill of the English soldiers once
more turned the wavering day into a victory. Du Guesclin
was taken, Henry lied across the Pyrenees, and Pedro was
again seated on his throne. The pay however which he
had promised was delayed ; and the Prince, whose army
had been thinned by disease to a fifth of its numbers and
whose strength never recovered from the hardships of this
campaign, fell back sick and beggared to Aquitaine. He
had hardly returned when his work was undone. In 1368
Henry re-entered Castille ; its towns threw open their
gates ; a general rising chased Pedro from the throne, and
a final battle in the spring of 1369 saw his utter overthrow.
His murder by Henry's hand left the bastard undisputed
master of Castille. Meanwhile the Black Prince, sick and
disheartened, was hampered at Bordeaux by the expenses
of the campaign which Pedro had left unpaid. To defray
his debt he was driven in 1368 to lay a hearth-tax on
Aquitaine, and the tax served as a pretext for an outbreak
of the long-hoarded discontent. Charles was now ready for
open action. He had won over the most powerful among
the Gascon nobles, and their influence secured the rejection
of the tax in a Parliament of the province which met
at Bordeaux. The Prince, pressed by debt, persisted
against the counsel of his wisest advisers in exacting it ;
and the lords of Aquitaine at once appealed to the King
of France. Such an appeal was a breach of the treaty of
Bretigny in which the French King had renounced his
sovereignty over the south ; but Charles had craftily
delayed year after year the formal execution of the renun-
ciations stipulated in the treaty, and he was still able to
treat it as not binding on him. The success of Henry
of Trastamara decided him to take immediate action, and
in 1369 he summoned the Black Prince as Duke of
452
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381.
Renewal
of the
War.
CHAP. III. Aquitaine to meet the appeal of the Gascon lords in his
^ court.
Kevoit* The Prince was maddened by the summons. "I
will come" he replied, "but with helmet on head, and
with sixty thousand men at my back." War however
had hardly been declared when the ability with which
Charles had laid his plans was seen in his seizure of
Ponthieu and in a rising of the whole country south of
the Garonne. Du Guesclin returned in 1370 from Spain
to throw life into the French attack. Two armies entered
Guienne from the east ; and a hundred castles with La
Reole and Limoges threw open their gates to Du Guesclin.
But the march of an English army from Calais upon
Paris recalled him from the south to guard the capital at
a moment when the English leader advanced to recover
Limoges, and the Black Prince borne in a litter to its walls
stormed the town and sullied by a merciless massacre of
its inhabitants the fame of his earlier exploits. Sickness
however recalled him home in the spring of 1371 ; and
the war, protracted by the caution of Charles who forbad
his armies to engage, did little but exhaust the energy
and treasure of England. As yet indeed the French
attack had made small impression on the south, where the
English troops stoutly held their ground against Du
Guesclin's inroads. But the protracted war drained
Edward's resources, while the diplomacy of Charles was
busy in rousing fresh dangers from Scotland and Castille.
It was in vain that Edward looked for allies to the
Flemish towns. The male line of the Counts of Flanders
ended in Count Louis le Male ; and the marriage of his
daughter Margaret with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, a
younger brother of the French King, secured Charles
from attack along his northern border. In Scotland the
death of David Bruce put an end to Edward's schemes
for a reunion of the two kingdoms ; and his successor,
Robert the Steward, renewed in 1371 the alliance with
France.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 453
Castille was a yet more serious danger ; and an effort CHAP. III.
which Edward made to neutralize its attack only forced ^
Henry of Trastamara to fling his whole weight into the aevoit 1
struggle. The two daughters of Pedro had remained since 1374.-
their father's flight at Bordeaux. The elder of these was 1381 ~
now wedded to John of Gaunt, Edward's fourth son, whom Loss of
he had created Duke of Lancaster on his previous marriage ?MJ
with Blanche, a daughter of Henry of Lancaster and the
heiress of that house, while the younger was wedded to
Edward's fifth son, the Earl of Cambridge. Edward's aim
was that of raising again the party of King Pedro and
giving Henry of Trastamara work to do at home which
would hinder his interposition in the war of Guienne.
It was with this view that John of Gaunt on his marriage
took the title of King of Castille. But no adherent of
Pedro's cause stirred in Spain, and Henry replied to the
challenge by sending a Spanish fleet to the Channel. A
decisive victory which this fleet won over an English
convoy off Rochelle proved a fatal blow to the English
cause. It wrested from Edward the mastery of the seas,
and cut off all communication between England and
Guienne. Charles was at once roused to new exertions.
Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded to his
general Du Guesclin; and Rochelle was surrendered by its
citizens in 1372. The next year saw a desperate attempt to
restore the fortune of the English arms. A great army
under John of Gaunt penetrated into the heart of France.
But it found no foe to engage, Charles had forbidden any
fighting. " If a storm rages over the land," said the King
coolly, "it disperses of itself; and so will it be with the
English." Winter in fact overtook the Duke of Lancaster
in the mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fragment of his
host reached Bordeaux. The failure of this attack was the
signal for a general defection, and ere the summer of 1374
had closed the two towns of Bordeaux and Bayonne were
all that remained of the English possessions in Southern
France. Even these were only saved by the exhaustion
VOL. I. 30
454 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
JHAP. III. of the conquerors. The treasury of Charles was as utterly
^ drained as the treasury of Edward; and the Kings were
BeVoU* forced to a truce.
1347- Only fourteen years had gone by since the Treaty of
1381. Bretigny raised England to a height of glory such as it
The had never known before. But the years had been years of
Strife. a shame and suffering which stung the people to madness.
Never had England fallen so low. Her conquests were
lost, her shores insulted, her commerce swept from the
seas. Within she was drained by the taxation and blood-
. shed of the war. Its popularity had wholly died away.
When the Commons were asked in 1354 whether they
would assent to a treaty of perpetual peace if they might
have it, " the said Commons responded all, and all
together, ' Yes, yes ! ' ' The population was thinned by
the ravages of pestilence, for till 1369, which saw its
last visitation, the Black Death returned again and
again. The social strife too gathered bitterness with
every effort at repression. It was in vain that Parliament
after Parliament increased the severity of its laws. The
demands of the Parliament of 1376 show how inoperative
the previous Statutes of Labourers had proved. They prayed
that constables be directed to arrest all who infringed the
Statute, that no labourer should be allowed to take refuge
in a town and become an artizan if there were need of
his service in the county from which he came, and that
the King would protect lords and employers against the
threats of death uttered by serfs who refused to serve.
The reply of the Eoyal Council shows that statesmen at
any rate were beginning to feel that repression might be
pushed too far. The King refused to interfere by any
further and harsher provisions between employers and
employed, and left cases of breach of law to be dealt with
in his ordinary courts of justice. On the one side he
forbade the threatening gatherings which were already
common in the country, but on the other he forbade the
illegal exactions of the employers. With such a reply
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 455
however the proprietary class were hardly likely to be CHAP. 111.
conu-ut. Two years later the Parliament of Gloucester ^
called for a Fugitive-slave Law, which would have enabled a^it 1
lords to seize their serfs in whatever county or town they 1347.
found retuge, and in 1379 they prayed that judges might 1381 -
be sent live times a year into every shire to enforce the
Statute of Labourers.
But the strife between employers and employed was Edward
not the only rift winch was opening in the social an d &*
structure, buffering and defeat had stripped off the men?'
veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish
temper of Edward the Third. His profligacy was
now bringing him to a premature old age. He was
sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mis-
tresses. The glitter and profusion of his court, his
splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Table Round, his
new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St.
Stephen whose frescoed walls were the glory of his
palace at Westminster, the vast keep w 7 hich crowned
the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour
round a King who tricked his Parliament and swindled
his creditors. Edward paid no debts. He had ruined
the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of
bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested
payment from him by holding his royal person as their
security. His own subjects fared no better than
foreigners. The prerogative of " purveyance " by which
the King in his progresses through the country had the
right of first purchase of all that he needed at fair
market price became a galling oppression in the hands
of a bankrupt King who was always moving from place
to place. " When men hear of your coming," Arch-
bishop Islip wrote to Edward, " everybody at once for
sheer fear sets about hiding or eating or getting rid of
their geese and chickens or other possessions that they
may not utterly lose them through your arrival. The
purveyors and servants of your court seize on men and
456
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Peasant
Bevolt.
1347-
1381.
horses in the midst of their field work. They seize on
the very bullocks that are at plough or at sowing, and
force them to work for two or three days at a time
without a penny of payment. It is no wonder that
men make dole and murmur at your approach, for, as
the truth is in God, I myself, whenever I hear a
rumour of it, be I at home or in chapter or in church
or at study, nay if I am saying mass, even I in my
own person tremble in every limb." But these irregular
exactions were little beside the steady pressure of
taxation. Even in the years of peace fifteenths and
tenths, subsidies on wool and subsidies on leather, were
demanded and obtained from Parliament ; and with the
outbreak of war the royal demands became heavier and
more frequent. As failure followed failure the expenses
of each campaign increased : an ineffectual attempt to
relieve Eochelle cost nearly a million ; the march of John
of Gaunt through France utterly drained the royal treasury.
Nor were these legal supplies all that the King drew from
the nation. He had repudiated his pledge to abstain
from arbitrary taxation of imports and exports. He sold
monopolies to the merchants in exchange for increased
customs. He wrested supplies from the clergy by arrange-
ments with the bishops or the Pope. There were signs
that Edward was longing to rid himself of the control
of Parliament altogether. The power of the Houses
seemed indeed as high as ever ; great statutes were passed.
Those of Provisors and Prsemunire settled the relations of
England to the Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352
defined that crime and its penalties. That of the Staples
in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and
the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted
it. But side by side with these exertions of influence
we note a series of steady encroachments by the Crown on
the power of the Houses. If their petitions were granted,
they were often altered in the royal ordinance which
professed to embody them. A plan of demanding supplies
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 457
for three years at once rendered the annual assembly of CHAP. III.
Parliament less necessary. Its very existence was ^
threatened by the convocation in 1352 and 1353 of 5^*
occasional councils with but a single knight from every 1347.
shire and a single burgess from a small number of the 1 ?? 1 -
greater towns, which acted as Parliament and granted
subsidies.
What aided Edward above all in. eluding or defying The
Tt
the constitutional restrictions on arbitrary taxation, as ^dl"^'
well as in these more insidious attempts to displace the Church.
Parliament, was the lessening of the check which the
Baronage and the Church had till now supplied. The same
causes which had long been reducing the number of the
greater lords who formed the upper house went steadily
on. Under Edward the Second little more than seventy
were commonly summoned to Parliament ; little more than
forty were summoned under Edward the Third, and of
these the bulk were now bound to the Crown, partly by
their employment on its service, partly by their interest
in the continuance of the war. The heads of the Baronage
too were members of the royal family. Edward had carried
out on a far wider scale than before the policy which had
been more or less adhered to from the days of Henry the
Third, that of gathering up in the hands of the royal house
all the greater heritages of the land. The Black Prince
was married to Joan of Kent, the heiress of Edward
the First's younger son, Earl Edmund of Woodstock.
His marriage with the heiress of the Earl of Ulster
brought to the King's second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence,
a great part of the possessions of the de Burghs. Later on
the possessions of the house of Bohun passed by like
matches to his youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, and
to his grandson Henry of Lancaster. Bat the greatest
English heritage fell to Edward's third living son, John of
Gaunt as he was called from his birth at Ghent during
his father's Flemish campaign. Originally created Earl
of Pdchmond, the death of his father-in-law, Henry of
458
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. Ill,
The
Peasant
Kevolt.
1347-
1381.
Weakness
of the
Church.
Lancaster, and of Henry's eldest daughter, raised John
in his wife's right to the Dukedom of Lancaster and the
Earldoms of Derby, Leicester, and Lincoln. But while the
baronage were thus bound to the Crown, they drifted more
and more into an hostility with the Church which in
time disabled the clergy from acting as a check on it.
What rent the ruling classes in twain was the {"rowin^
*-* o o
pressure of the war. The nobles and knighthood of the
country, already half ruined by the rise in the labour mar-
ket and the attitude of the peasantry, were pressed harder
than ever by the repeated subsidies which were called for
by the continuance of the struggle. In the hour of their
distress they cast their eyes greedily as in the Norman
and Angevin days on the riches of the Church. Never
had her wealth been greater. Out of a population of some
three millions the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty
and thirty thousand. Wild tales of their riches floated
about the country. They were said to own in landed
property alone more than a third of the soil, while their
" spiritualities " in dues and offerings amounted to twice
the King's revenue. Exaggerated as such statements were,
the wealth of the Church was really great ; but even
more galling to the nobles was its influence in the royal
councils. The feudal baronage, flushed with a new pride
by its victories at Crecj- and Poitiers, looked with envy
and wrath at the throng of bishops around the council-
board, and attributed to their love of peace the errors
and sluggishness which had caused, as they held, the
disasters of the war. To rob the Church of wealth and
of power became the aim of a great baronial party.
The efforts of the baronage indeed would have been
fruitless had the spiritual power of the Church remained as
of old. But the clergy were rent by their own dissensions.
The higher prelates were busy \vith the cares of political
office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scan-
dalous inequality between the revenues of the wealthier
ecclesiastics and the " poor parson " of the country. A bitter
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 459
hatred divided the secular clergy from the regular; and this CHAI> j,.
strife went fiercely on in the Universities. fitz-Balf, the
Thi*
Chancellor of Oxford, attributed to the friars the decline Peasant
which was already being felt in the number of academical
students, and the University checked by statute their lasi."
practice of admitting mere children into their order. The
clergy too at large shared in the discredit and unpopu-
larity of the Papacy. Though they suffered more than
any other class from tbe exactions of Avignon, they were
bound more and more to the Papal cause. The very
statutes which would have protected them were practically
set aside by the treacherous diplomacy of the Crown.
At home and abroad the Bornan see was too useful for the
King to come to any actual breach with it. However much
Edward might echo the bold words of his Parliament, he
shrank from an open contest which would have added the
Papacy to his many foes, and which would at the same
time have robbed him of his most effective means of
wresting aids from the English clergy by private arrange-
ment with the Boman court. Borne indeed was brought
to waive its alleged right of appointing foreigners to
English livings. But a compromise was arranged be-
tween the Pope and the Crown in which both united
in the spoliation and enslavement of the Church. The
voice of chapters, of monks, of ecclesiastical patrons,
went henceforth for nothing in the election of bishops
or abbots or the nomination to livings in the gift
of churchmen. The Crown recommended those whom it
chose to the Pope, and the Pope nominated them to see
or cure of souls. The treasuries of both King and Pope
profited by the arrangement ; but we can hardly wonder
that after a betrayal such as this the clergy placed little
trust in statutes or royal protection, and bowed humbly
before the claims of Borne.
But what weakened the clergy most was their severance ztsWorld-
from the general sympathies of the nation, their selfishness, liness.
and the worldliness of their temper. Immense as their
460
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. wealth was, they bore as little as they could of the common
xi^ burthens of the realm. They were still resolute to assert
Revolt* ^eir exemption from the common justice of the land,
though the mild punishments of the bishops' courts carried
as little dismay as ever into the mass of disorderly clerks.
But privileged as they thus held themselves against all inter-
ference from the lay world without them, they carried on
a ceaseless interference with the affairs of this lay world
through their control over wills, contracts and divorces.
No figure was better known or more hated than the sum-
moner who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues
of their courts. By their directly religious offices they
penetrated into the very heart of the social life about
them. But powerful as they were, their moral authority
was fast passing away. The wealthier churchmen with
their curled hair and hanging sleeves aped the costume
of the knightly society from which they were drawn and
to which they still really belonged. We see the general
impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's pictures of
the hunting monk and the courtly prioress with her love-
motto on her brooch. The older religious orders in fact
had sunk into mere landowners, while the enthusiasm of
the friars had in great part died away and left a crowd of
impudent mendicants behind it. Wyclif could soon with
general applause denounce them as sturdy beggars, and
declare that "the man who gives alms to a begging friar
is ipso facto excommunicate."
Advance It w r as this weakness of the Baronage and the Church,
Commons anc ^ tne conse( l uent; withdrawal of both as represented in
the temporal and spiritual Estates of the Upper House
from the active part which they had taken till now in
checking the Crown, that brought the Lower House to
the front. The Knight of the Shire was now finally
joined with the Burgess of the Town to form the Third
Estate of the realm: and this union of the trader and
the country gentleman gave a vigour and weight to the
action of the Commons which their House could never
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 461
have acquired had it remained as elsewhere a mere CHAP. III.
gathering of burgesses. But it was only slowly and T^
under the pressure of one necessity after another that j&v'oi? 1
the Commons took a growing part in public affairs. Their 1347.
primary business was with taxation, and here they stood 1381 '
firm against the evasions by which the King still managed
to battle their exclusive right of granting supplies by
voluntary agreements with the merchants of the Staple.
Their steady pressure at last obtained in 1362 an enact-
ment that no subsidy should henceforth be set upon wool
without assent of Parliament, while Purveyance was re-
stricted by a provision that payments should be made for
all things taken for the King's use in ready money. A
hardly less important advance was made by the change of
Ordinances into Statutes. Till this time, even when a
petition of the Houses was granted, the royal Council
had reserved to itself the right of modifying its form in
the Ordinance which professed to embody it. It was
under colour of this right that so many of the provisions
made in Parliament had hitherto been evaded or set aside.
But the Commons now met this abuse by a demand that
on the royal assent being given their petitions should be
turned without change into Statutes of the Realm and
derive force of law from their entry on the Rolls of
Parliament. The same practical sense was seen in their
dealings with Edward's attempt to introduce occasional
smaller councils with parliamentary powers. Such an
assembly in 1353 granted a subsidy on wool. The Parlia-
ment which met in the following year might have challenged
its proceedings as null and void, but the Commons more
wisely contented themselves with a demand that the
ordinances passed in the preceding assembly should receive
the sanction of the Three Estates. A precedent for evil
was thus turned into a precedent for good, and though
irregular gatherings of a like sort were for a while
occasionally held they were soon seen to be fruitless and
discontinued. But the Commons long shrank from
462
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
Baronage
attacks
the
Church.
meddling with purely administrative matters. When
Edward in his anxiety to shift from himself the responsi-
bility of the war referred to them in 1354 for advice on
one of the numerous propositions of peace, they referred
him to the lords of his Council. "Most dreaded lord,"
they replied, " as to this war and the equipment needful
for it we are so ignorant and simple that we know not
how nor have the power to devise. Wherefore we pray
your Grace to excuse us in this matter, and that it please
you with the advice of the great and wise persons of your
Council to ordain what seems best for you for the honour
and profit of yourself and of your kingdom. And what-
soever shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement on
the part of you and your Lords we readily assent to and
will hold it firmly established."
But humble as was their tone the growing power of the
Commons showed itself in significant changes. In 1363
the Chancellor opened Parliament with a speech in English,
no doubt as a tongue intelligible to the members of the
Lower House. From a petition in 1376 that knights of
the shire may be chosen by common election of the better
folk of the shire and not merely nominated by the sheriff
without due election, as well as from an earlier demand
that the sheriffs themselves should be disqualified from
serving in Parliament during their term of office, we see
that the Crown had already begun not only to feel the
pressure of the Commons but to meet it by foisting royal
nominees on the constituencies. Such an attempt at
packing the House would hardly have been resorted to
had it not already proved too strong for direct control. A
further proof of its influence was seen in a prayer of the
Parliament that lawyers practising in the King's courts
might no longer be eligible as knights of the shire. The
petition marks the rise of a consciousness that the House
was now no mere gathering of local representatives but a
national assembly, and that a seat in it could no longer
be confined to dwellers within the bounds of this county
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
463
The
Peasant
Eevolt.
1347-
1381.
or that. Bu-t it showed also a pressure for seats, a CHAP. III.
passing away of the old dread of being returned as a
representative and a new ambition to gain a place among
the members of the Commons. Whether they would or
no indeed the Commons were driven forward to a more
direct interference with public affairs. From the memor-
able statute of 1322 their right to take equal part in all
matters brought before Parliament had been incontestable,
and their waiver of much of this right faded away before
the stress of time. Their assent was needed to the great
ecclesiastical statutes which regulated the relation of the
see of Eome to the realm. They naturally took a chief
part in the enactment and re-enactment of the Statute of
Labourers. The Statute of the Staple, with a host of
smaller commercial and economical measures, were of
their origination. But it was not till an open breach
took place between the baronage and the prelates that
their full weight was felt. In the Parliament of 1371,
on the resumption of the war, a noble taunted the
Church as an owl protected by the feathers which other
birds had contributed, and which they had a right to
resume when a hawk's approach threatened them. The
worldly goods of the Church, the metaphor hinted, had been
bestowed on it for the common weal, and could be taken
from it on the coming of a common danger. The threat
was followed by a prayer that the chief offices of state,
which had ' till now been held by the leading bishops,
might be placed in lay hands. The prayer was at once
granted: William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester
resigned the Chancellorship, another prelate the Treasury
to lay dependents of the great nobles ; and the panic of
the clergy was seen in large grants which were voted by
both Convocations.
At the moment of their triumph the assailants of the
Church found a leader in John of Gaunt. The Duke of
Lancaster now wielded the actual power of the Crown.
Edward himself was sinking into dotage. Of his sons the
John of
Gaunt.
464 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. Black Prince, who had never rallied from the hardships
^ of his Spanish campaign, was fast drawing to the grave ;
Revo*? 4 ^ e na d l st a second son by death in childhood ; the
1347. third, Lionel of Clarence, had died in 1368. It was
issi. j^g fourth son therefore, John of Gaunt, to whom the
royal power mainly fell. By his marriage with the heiress
of the house of Lancaster the Duke had acquired lands
and wealth, but he had no taste for the policy of the
Lancastrian house or for acting as leader of the barons
in any constitutional resistance to the Crown. His pride,
already quickened by the second match with Constance to
which he owed his shadowy kingship of Castille, drew him
to the throne; and the fortune which placed the royal
power practically in his hands bound him only the more
firmly to its cause. Men held that his ambition looked to
the Crown itself, for the approaching death of Edward and
the Prince of Wales left but a boy, Richard, the son of the
Black Prince, a child of but a few years old, and a girl,
the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, between John and
the throne. But the Duke's success fell short of his pride.
In the campaign of 1373 he traversed France without
finding a foe and brought back nothing save a ruined
army to English shores. The peremptory tone in which
money was demanded for the cost of this fruitless march
while the petitions of the Parliament were set aside till it
was granted roused the temper of the Commons. They
requested it is the first instance of such a practice a
conference with the lords, and while granting fresh
subsidies prayed that the grant should be spent only on
the war. The resentment of the government at this
advance towards a control over the actual management
of public affairs was seen in the calling of no Parliament
through the next two years. But the years were dis-
astrous both at home and abroad. The war went steadily
against the English arms. The long negotiations with the
Pope which went on at Bruges through 1375, and in which
Wyclif took part as one of the royal commissioners, ended
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 465
in a compromise by which Home yielded nothing. The CHAP. III.
strife over the Statute of Labourers grew fiercer and fiercer, ^
and a return of the plague heightened the public distress. Rev"? 1
Edward was now wholly swayed by Alice Ferrers, and 1347-
the Duke shared his power with the royal mistress. But 1381 '
if we gather its tenor from the complaints of the succeeding
Parliament his administration was as weak as it was
corrupt. The new lay ministers lent themselves to
gigantic frauds. The chamberlain, Lord Latimer, bought
up the royal debts and embezzled the public revenue.
With Richard Lyons, a merchant through whom the
King negotiated with the gild of the Staple, he reaped
enormous profits by raising the price of imports and
by lending to the Crown at usurious rates of interest.
"When the empty treasury forced them to call a Parliament
the ministers tampered with the elections through the
sheriffs.
But the temper of the Parliament which met in 1376, The Good
and which gained from after times the name of the Good Parlia-
Parliament, shows that these precautions had utterly failed.
Even their promise to pillage the Church had failed to
win for the Duke and his party the good will of the lesser
gentry or the wealthier burgesses who together formed
the Commons. Projects of wide constitutional and social
change, of the humiliation and impoverishment of an
estate of the realm, were profoundly distasteful to men
already struggling with a social revolution on their own
estates and in their own workshops. But it was not merely
its opposition to the projects of Lancaster and his party
among the baronage which won for this assembly the
name of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new
period in our Parliamentary history, as it marked a new
stage in the character of the national opposition to the
misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of resistance
had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out
through risings of its feudal tenantry. But the mis-
government was now that of the baronage or of a main
466
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction with the
Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any
adequate means of peaceful redress. The old reluctance
of the Lower House to meddle with matters of State was
roughly swept away therefore by the pressure of the time.
The Black Prince, anxious to secure his child's succession
by the removal of John of Gaunt, the prelates with
William of Wykehain at their head, resolute again to
take their place in the royal councils and to check the
projects of ecclesiastical spoliation put forward by their
opponents, alike found in it a body to oppose to the
Duke's administration. Backed by po\vers such as these,
the action of the Commons showed none of their
old timidity or self-distrust. The presentation of a
hundred and sixty petitions of grievances preluded a
bold attack on the royal Council. " Trusting in God,
and standing with his followers before the nobles, whereof
the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings
were ever contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare,
denounced the mismanagement of the war, the oppressive
taxation, and demanded an account of the expenditure-
" What do these base and ignoble knights attempt ? "
cried John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings
or princes of the land?" But the movement was too
strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the
charges brought against the ministers. After a strict
enquiry Latimer and Lyons were alike thrown into prison,
Alice Perrers was banished, and several of the royal
servants were driven from the Court. At this moment
the death of the Black Prince shook the power of the
Parliament. But it only heightened its resolve to secure
the succession. His son, Eichard of Bordeaux, as he was
called from the place of his birth, was now a child of
but ten years old ; and it was known that doubts were
whispered on the legitimacy of his birth and claim. Aa
early marriage of his mother Joan of Kent, a granddaughter
of Edward the First, with the Earl of Salisbury had
iv.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 467
been annulled ; but the Lancastrian party used this first CHAI-. III.
match to throw doubts on the validity of her subsequent
union with the Black Prince and on the right of Pdchard
to the throne. The dread of Lancaster's ambition is the 1347-
first indication of the approach of what was from this l3 *^'
time to grow into the great difficulty of the realm, the
question of the succession to the Crown. From the death
of Edward the Third to the deatli of Charles the First no
English sovereign felt himself secure from rival claimants
of his throne. As yet liowever the dread was a baseless
one ; the people were heartily with the Prince and his
child. The Duke's proposal that the succession should be
settled in case of Ptichard's death was rejected ; and the
boy himself was brought into Parliament and acknow-
ledged as heir of the Crown.
To secure their work the Commons ended by obtaining Wyclif
the addition of nine lords with William of Wykeham and. and John
two other prelates among them to the royal Council. But -
the Parliament was no sooner dismissed than the Duke at
once resumed his power. His anger at the blow which had
been dealt at his projects was no doubt quickened by resent-
ment at the sudden advance of the Lower House. From the
Commons who shrank even from giving counsel on matters
of state to the Commons who dealt with such matters as
their special business, who investigated royal accounts, who
impeached royal ministers, who dictated changes in the royal
advisers, was an immense step. But it was a step which
the Duke believed could be retraced. His haughty will
rlung aside all restraints of law. He dismissed the new
lords and prelates from the Council. He called back Alice
Perrers and the disgraced ministers. He declared the
Good Parliament no parliament, and did not suffer its
petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter
de la Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William
of Wykeham. His attack on this prelate was an attack
on the clergy at large, and the attack became significant
when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denuncia-
468
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381
CHAP. III. tions of Church property which formed the favourite theme
The f John Wyclif. To Wyclif such a prelate as Wykeham
^eVoit* symbolized the evil which held down the Church. His
administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and
the colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled
him to raise before his death, were all equally hateful. It
was this wealth, this intermeddling with worldly business,
which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse
that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual
authority which could alone meet the vice and suffering of
the time. Whatever baser motives might spur Lancaster
and his party, their projects of spoliation must have
seemed to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the
Church. Poor and powerless in worldly matters, he held
that she would have the wealth and might of heaven at
her command. Wyclif 's theory of Church and State had
led him long since to contend that the property of the
clergy might be seized and employed like other property
for national purposes. Such a theory might have been
left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been
left, to the disputation of the schools. But the clergy
were bitterly galled when the first among English teachers
threw himself hotly on the side of the party which
threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour
of their voluntary abandonment of all Church property
and of a return to their original poverty. They were
roused to action when Wyclif came forward as the
theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a
moment when the clergy were freshly outraged by the
overthrow of the bishops and the plunder of Wykeham.
They forced the King to cancel the sentence of banish-
ment from the precincts of the Court which had been
directed against the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any
grant of supply in Convocation till William of Wykeham
took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of Wyclif
they resolved to return blow for blow. In February
1377 he was summoned before Bishop Courtenay oi'
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 1307 H61.
469
The
Peasant
Kevolt.
134-7-
1381.
London to answer for his heretical propositions concerning CHAP. III.
the wealth of the Church.
The Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really
given to himself, and stood by Wyclif's side in the Con-
sistory Court at St. Paul's. But no trial took place.
Fierce words passed between the nobles and the prelate :
the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag
Courteriay out of the church by the hair of his head ; at
last the London populace, to whom John of Gaunt was
hateful, burst in to their Bishop's rescue, and Wyclif's
life was saved with difficulty by the aid of the soldiery.
But his boldness only grew with the danger. A Papal
bull which was procured by the bishops, directing the
University to condemn and arrest him, extorted from him
a bold defiance. In a detence circulated widely through
the kingdom and laid before Parliament, Wyclif broadly
asserted that no man could be excommunicated by the
Pope "unless he were first excommunicated by him-
self." He denied the right of the Church to exact
or defend temporal privileges by spiritual censures, de-
clared that a Church might justly be deprived by the
King or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, and
defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals.
It marks the temper of the time and the growing severance
between the Church and the nation that, bold as the
defiance was, it won the support of the people as of the
Crown. When Wyclif appeared at the close of the year
in Lambeth Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons
a message from the Court forbade the primate to proceed
and the Londoners broke in and dissolved the session.
Meanwhile the Duke's unscrupulous tampering with
elections had packed the Parliament of 1377 with his
adherents. The work of the Good Parliament was undone,
and the Commons petitioned for the restoration of all who
had been impeached by their predecessors. The needs of
the treasury were met by a novel form of taxation. To the
earlier land-tax, to the tax on personalty which dated from
' I. 31
Death of
Edward
the Third,.
470 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. the Saladin Tithe, to the customs duties which had grown
^ into importance in the last two reigns, was now added a
Rev 8 *!?.* tax which reached every person in the realm, a poll-tax of
1347- a groat a head. In this tax were sown the seeds of future
1381. trouble, but when the Parliament broke up in March the
Duke's power seemed completely secured. Hardly three
months later it was wholly undone. In June Edward the
Third died in a dishonoured old age, robbed on his death-
bed even of his rings by the mistress to whom he clung, and
the accession of his grandson, Richard the Second, changed
the whole face of affairs. The Duke withdrew from
court, and sought a reconciliation with the party opposed
to him. The men of the Good Parliament surrounded the
new King, and a Parliament which assembled in October
took vigorously up its work. Peter de la Mare was
released from prison and replaced in the chair of the
House of Commons. The action of the Lower House
indeed was as trenchant and comprehensive as that of
the Good Parliament itself. In petition after petition the
Commons demanded the confirmation of older rights and
the removal of modern abuses. They complained of ad-
ministrative wrongs such as the practice of purveyance,
of abuses of justice, of the oppressions of officers of the
exchequer and of the forest, of the ill state of the prisons,
of the custom of " maintenance " by which lords extended
their livery to shoals of disorderly persons and overawed
the courts by means of them. Amid ecclesiastical abuses
they noted the state of the Church courts, and the neglect
of the laws of Provisors. They demanded that the
annual assembly of Parliament, which had now become
customary, should be defined by law, and that bills once
sanctioned by the Crown should be forthwith turned into
statutes without further amendment or change on the part
of the royal Council. With even greater boldness they
laid hands on the administration itself. They not only
demanded that the evil counsellors of the last reign should
be removed, and that the treasurer of the subsidy on wool
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 471
should account for its expenditure to the lords, but that CHAP. III.
the royal Council should be named in Parliament, and
chosen from members of either estate of the realm,
Though a similar request for the nomination of the officers
of the royal household was refused, their main demand 1381 -
was granted. It was agreed that the great officers of
state, the chancellor, treasurer, and barons of exchequer
should be named by the lords in Parliament, and re-
moved from their offices during the king's " tender years "
only on the advice of the lords. The pressure of the
war, which rendered the existing taxes insufficient,
gave the House a fresh hold on the Crown. While
granting a new subsidy in the form of a land and
property tax, the Commons restricted its proceeds to the
war, and assigned two of their members, William Wai worth
and John Philpot, as a standing committee to regulate its
expenditure. The successor of this Parliament in the
following year demanded and obtained an account of the
way in which the subsidy had been spent.
The minority of the King, who was but eleven years Discontent
old at his accession, the weakness of the royal council of the
amidst the strife of the baronial factions, above all
the disasters of the war without and the growing anarchy
within the realm itself, alone made possible this start-
ling assumption of the executive power by the Houses.
The shame of defeat abroad was being added to the misery
and discomfort at home. The French war ran its disastrous
course. One English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a
second sunk by a storm ; and a campaign in the heart
of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment
and ruin. Meanwhile the strife between employers and
employed was kindling into civil war. The Parliament,
drawn as it was wholly from the proprietary classes,
struggled as fiercely for the mastery of the labourers as
it struggled for the mastery of the Crown. The Good
Parliament had been as strenuous in demanding the
enforcement of the Statute of Labourers as any of its
472
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
13A7-
1381.
CHAP. III. predecessors. In spite of statutes however the market
^ remained in the labourers' hands. The comfort of the
BevoTt* worker rose with his wages. Men who had " no land to
live on but their hands disdained to live on penny ale or
bacon, and called for fresh flesh or fish, fried or bake, and
that hot and hotter for chilling of their maw." But there
were dark shades in this general prosperity of the labour
class. There were seasons of the year during which em-
ployment for the floating mass of labour was hard to find.
In the long interval between harvest-tide and harvest-tide
work and food were alike scarce in every homestead of the
time. Some lines of William Longland give us the picture
of a farm of the day. " I have no penny pullets for to buy,
nor neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds
and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves of beans and
bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon nor no
cooked meat collops for to make, but I have parsley and
leeks and many cabbage plants, and eke a cow and a calf,
and a cart-mare to draw a-field my dung while the drought
lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till Lammas-
tide [August], and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft."
But it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the
new corn bade " Hunger go to sleep," and during the long
spring and summer the free labourer and the " waster that
will not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but
the finest wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest
ale," was a source of social and political danger. " He
grieveth him against God and gradgeth against Eeason,
and then curseth he the King and all his council after
such law to allow labourers to grieve." Such a smoulder-
ing mass of discontent as this needed but a spark to burst
into flame ; and the spark was found in the imposition of
fresh taxation.
If John of Gaunt was fallen from his old power he was
still the leading noble in the realm, and it is possible that
dread of the encroachments of the last Parliament on the
executive power drew after a time even the new advisers
The
Poll-tax.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 473
of the Crown closer to him. Whatever was the cause, he CHAP. Ill
again came to the front. But the supplies voted in the ^^
past year were wasted in his hands. A fresh expedition ^fv^it*
against France under the Duke himself ended in failure 1347-
before the walls of St. Malo, while at home his brutal * a j^-
household was outraging public order by the murder of a
knight who had incurred John's anger in the precincts
of Westminster. So great was the resentment of the
Londoners at this act that it became needful to summon
Parliament elsewhere than to the capital; and in 1378
the Houses met at Gloucester. The Duke succeeded in
bringing the lords to refuse those conferences with the
Commons which had given unity to the action of the
late Parliament, but he was foiled in an attack on the
clerical privilege of sanctuary and in the threats which
his party still directed against Church property, while
the Commons forced the royal Council to lay before
them the accounts of the last subsidy and to appoint
a commission to examine into the revenue of the
Crown. Unhappily the financial policy of the preceding
year was persisted in. The check before St. Malo
had been somewhat redeemed by treaties with Charles
of Evreux and the Duke of Britanuy which secured to
England the right of holding Cherbourg and Brest ; but
the cost of these treaties only swelled the expenses of
the war. The fresh supplies voted at Gloucester proved
insufficient for their purpose, and a Parliament in the
spring of 1379 renewed the Poll-tax in a graduated form.
But the proceeds of the tax proved miserably inadequate,
and when fresh debts beset the Crown in 1380 a return
was again made to the old system of subsidies. But these
failed in their turn ; and at the close of the year the
Parliament again fell back on a severer Poll-tax. One
of the attractions of the new mode of taxation seems to
have been that the clergy, who adopted it for themselves,
paid in this way a larger share of the burthens of the
state ; but the chief ground for its adoption lay, no doubt,
474
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Revolt.
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. in its bringing within the net of the tax-gatherer a class
which had hitherto escaped him, men such as the free
labourer, the village smith, the village tiler. But few courses
could have been more dangerous. The poll-tax not only
brought the pressure of the war home to every household ;
it goaded into action precisely the class which was already
seething with discontent. The strife between labour and
capital was going on as fiercely as ever in country and in
town. The landlords were claiming new services, or forcing
men who looked on themselves as free to prove they were
no villeins by law. .The free labourer was struggling
against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages.
The wandering workman was being seized and branded
as a vagrant. The abbey towns were struggling for freedom
against the abbeys. The craftsmen within boroughs were
carrying on the same strife against employer and craft-
gild. And all this mass of discontent was being height-
ened and organized by agencies with which the government
could not cope. The poorer villeins and the free labourers
had long since banded together in secret conspiracies which
the wealthier villeins supported with money. The return
of soldiers from the war threw over the land a host of
broken men, skilled in arms, and ready to take part in any
rising. The begging friars, wandering and gossiping from
village to village and street to street, shared the passions
of the class from which they sprang. Priests like Ball
openly preached the doctrines of communism. And to
these had been recently added a fresh agency which
could hardly fail to stir a new excitement. "With the
practical ability which marked his character Wyclif set on
foot about this time a body of poor preachers to supply,
as he held, the place of those wealthier clergy who had
lost their hold on the land. The coarse sermons, bare feet,
and russet dress of these " Simple Priests " moved the
laughter of rector and canon, but they proved a rapid and
effective means of diffusing Wyclif s protests against the
wealth and sluggishness of the clergy, and we can hardly
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 475
doubt that in the general turmoil their denunciation of CHAP. 111.
ecclesiastical wealth passed often into more general denun- ^^
ciations of the proprietary classes. B^voit*
As the spring went by quaint rimes passed through 1347-
the country, and served as a summons to revolt. "John 1381 -
Ball," ran one, " greeteth you all, and doth for to under- ^ ohn
stand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might,
will and skill, God speed every dele." " Help truth,"
ran another, " and truth shall help you ! Now reigneth
pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and lechery
wit-houten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy
reigneth with treason, and sloth is take in great season.
God do bote, for now is tyme ! " We recognize Ball's
hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack the
Miller " and " Jack the Carter." " Jack Miller asketh
help to turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small,
small : the King's Son of Heaven he shall pay for all.
Look thy mill go aright with the four sailes, and the post
stand with steadfastness. With right and with might,
with skill and with will ; let might help right, and skill go
before will, and right before might, so goeth our mill
aright." " Jack Carter," ran the companion missive, " prays
you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun,
and do well, and aye better and better : for at the even
men heareth the day." " Falseness and guile," sang Jack
Trewman, " have reigned too long, and truth hath been
set under a lock, and falseness and guile reigneth in every
stock. No man may come truth to, but if he sing
' si dedero.' True love is away that was so good, and clerks
for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is
time." In the rude jingle of these lines began for England
the literature of political controversy : they are the first
predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and of Burke.
Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the
mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants :
their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice ;
their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the infamy
476
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1347-
1381.
The
Peasant
Rising.
CHAP. HI. of the court ; their resentment at the perversion of the law
^ to the cause of oppression.
Bevoit* From the eastern and midland counties the restlessness
spread to all England south of the Thames. But the
grounds of discontent varied with every district. The
actual outbreak began on the 5th of June at Dartford,
where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll-tax in
vengeance for a brutal outrage on his daughter. The
county at once rose in arms. Canterbury, where " the
whole town was of their mind," threw open its gates to
the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop's palace and
dragged John Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand
Kentishmen gathered round Walter Tyler of Essex and
John Hales of Mailing to march upon London. Their
grievance was mainly a political one. Villeinage was
unknown in Kent. As the peasants poured towards Black-
heath indeed every lawyer who fell into their hands was
put to death ; " not till all these were killed would the
land enjoy its old freedom again," the Kentishmen shouted
as they fired the houses of the stewards and flung the
rolls of the manor-courts into the flames. But this action
can hardly have been due to anything more than sympathy
with the rest of the realm, the sympathy which induced the
same men when pilgrims from the north brought news
that John of Gaunt was setting free his bondmen to send
to the Duke an offer to make him Lord and King of
England. Nor was their grievance a religious one.
Lollardry can have made little way among men whose
grudge against the Archbishop of Canterbury sprang from
his discouragement of pilgrimages. Their discontent was
simply political; they demanded the suppression of the
poll-tax and better government ; their aim was to slay the
nobles and wealthier clergy, to take the King into their
own hands, and pass laws which should seem good to the
Commons of the realm. The whole population joined
the Kentishmen as they marched along, while the nobles
were paralyzed with fear. The young King he was but
rv.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 477
a boy of sixteen addressed them from a boat on the CHAP. III.
river ; but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of ^
Archbishop Sudbury to allow him to laud kindled the ^evoU. 1
peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason" the great 1347.
mass rushed on London. On the 13th of June its gates l ^^'
were flung open by the poorer artizans within the city,
and the stately palace of John of Gaunt at the Savoy,
the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of
the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the insur-
gents, as they proudly boasted, were " seekers of truth and
justice, not thieves or robbers," and a plunderer found
carrying off a silver vessel from the sack of the Savoy was
flung with his spoil into the flames. Another body of
insurgents encamped at the same time to the east of the
city. In Essex and the eastern counties the popular
discontent was more social than political. The demands
of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished,
that tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with,
that " no acre of land which is held in bondage or villeinage
be held at higher rate than fourpence a year," in other
words for a money commutation of all villein services.
Their rising had been even earlier than that of the
Kentishmen. Before Whitsuntide an attempt to levy the
poll-tax gathered crowds of peasants together, armed with
clubs, rusty swords, and bows. The royal commissioners
who were sent to repress the tumult were driven from the
field, 'and the Essex men marched upon London on one
side of the river as the Kentishmen marched on the other.
The evening of the thirteenth, the day on which Tyler
entered the city, saw them encamped without its walls at
Mile-end. At the same moment Highbury and the
northern heights were occupied by the men of Hertford-
shire and the villeins of St. Alban's, where a strife between
abbot and town had been going on since the days of
Edward the Second. . ,
The royal Council with the young King had taken //,
refuge in the Tower, and their aim seems to have been to &c<nl.
478
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. divide the forces of the insurgents. On the morning of
Xh^ the fourteenth therefore Eichard rode from the Tower
Bevott* to Mile-end to meet the Essex men. " I am your King
1347- an d Lord, good people," the boy began with a fearless-
1381 ness which marked his bearing throughout the crisis,
" what will you ? " " We will that you free us for ever,"
shouted the peasants, " us and our lands ; and that we
be never named nor held for serfs ! " "I grant it," replied
Eichard ; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at
once to issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of
joy welcomed the promise. Throughout the day more
than thirty clerks were "busied writing letters of pardon
and emancipation, and with these the mass of the Essex
men and the men of Hertfordshire withdrew quietly to
their homes. But while the King was successful at Mile-
end a terrible doom had fallen on the councillors he left
behind him. Eichard had hardly quitted the Tower when
the Kentishmen who had spent the night within the city
appeared at its gates. The general terror was shown
ludicrously enough when they burst in and taking the
panic-stricken knights of the royal household in rough
horse-play by the beard promised to be their equals and
good comrades in the days to come. But the horse-play
changed into dreadful earnest when they found that
Eichard had escaped their grasp, and the discovery of
Archbishop Sudbury and other ministers in the chapel
changed their fury into a cry for blood. The Primate
was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded. The
same vengeance was wreaked on the Treasurer and the
Chief Commissioner for the levy of the hated poll-tax, the
merchant Eichard Lyons who had been impeached by
the Good Parliament. Eichard meanwhile had ridden
round the northern wall of the city to the Wardrobe near
Blackfriars, and from this new refuge he opened his
negotiations with the Kentish insurgents. Many of these
dispersed at the news of the King's pledge to the men
of Essex, but a body of thirty thousand still surrounded
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 1307-1461.
4711
The
Peasant
Bevolt.
1347-
1381.
Wat Tyler when Richard on the morning of the fifteenth CHAP. III.
encountered that leader by a mere chance at Smithfield.
Hot words passed between his train and the peasant
chieftain who advanced to confer with the King, and
a threat from Tyler brought on a brief struggle in which
the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck him with
his dagger to the ground. " Kill ! kill ! " shouted the
crowd, " they have slain our captain ! " But Richard
faced the Kentishmen with the same cool courage with
which he faced the men of Essex. " What need ye, my
masters ! " cried the boy-king as he rode boldly up to the
front of the bowmen. "I am your Captain and your
King; Follow me !" The hopes of the peasants centred
in the young sovereign ; one aim of their rising had been
to free him from the evil counsellors who, as they believed,
abused his youth ; and at his word they followed him
with a touching loyalty and trust till he entered the
Tower. His mother welcomed him within its walls with
tears of joy. " Rejoice and praise God," Richard answered,
" for I have recovered to-day my heritage which was lost
and the realm of England ! " But he was compelled to
give the same pledge of freedom to the Kentishmen as at
Mile-end, and it was only after receiving his letters of
pardon and emancipation that the yeomen dispersed to
their homes.
The revolt indeed was far from being at an end. As
the news of the rising ran through the country the
discontent almost everywhere broke into flame. There
were outbreaks in every shire south of the Thames as far
westward as Devonshire. In the north tumults broke out
at Beverley and Scarborough, and Yorkshire and Lanca-
shire made ready to rise. The eastern counties were in
one wild turmoil of revolt. At Cambridge the townsmen
burned the charters of the University and attacked the
colleges. A body of peasants occupied St. Alban's. In
Norfolk a Norwich artizan, called John the Litster or Dyer,
took the title of King of the Commons, and marching
The
general
revolt.
480
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The
Peasant
Kevolt.
1347-
1381.
CHAP. III. through the country at the head of a mass of peasants
compelled the nobles whom he captured to act as his meat-
tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast.
The story of St. Edmundsbury shows us what was going on
in Suffolk. Ever since the accession of Edwaid the Third
the townsmen and the villeins of their lands around had
been at war with the abbot and his monks. The old and
more oppressive servitude had long passed away, but the
later abbots had set themselves against the policy of con-
cession and conciliation which had brought about this
advance towards freedom. The gates of the town were
still in the abbot's hands. He had succeeded in enforc-
ing his claim to the wardship of all orphans born within
his domain. From claims such as these the town could
never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from
Pope or King, interpreted cunningly by the wit of the new
lawyer class, lay stored in the abbey archives. But the
archives contained other and hardly less formidable docu-
ments than these. Untroubled by the waste of war, the
religious houses profited more than any other landowners
by the general growth of wealth. They had become great
proprietors, money lenders to their tenants, extortionate
as the Jew whom they had banished from their land. There
were few townsmen of St. Edmund's who had not some
bonds laid up in the abbey registry. In 1327 one baud of
debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of
five hundred marks and fifty casks of wine. Another
company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors on a
bond for ten thousand pounds. The new spirit of com-
mercial activity joined with the troubles of the time to
throw the whole community into the abbot's hands.
We can hardly wonder that riots, lawsuits, and royal
commissions marked the relation of the town and abbey
under the first two Edwards. Under the third came an
open conflict. In 1327 the townsmen burst into the great
house, drove the monks into the choir, and dragged them
thence to the town prison. The abbey itself was sacked ;
Saint
Edmunds-
bury.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 481
chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar frontals, the CHAP. III.
books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the ^
kitchen, all disappeared. The monks estimated their ^*v%\
losses at ten thousand pounds. But the townsmen aimed 1347.
at higher booty than this. The monks were brought back 1381>
from prison to their own chapter-house, and the spoil of
their registry, papal bulls and royal charters, deeds and
bonds and mortgages, were laid before them. Amidst the
wild threats of the mob they were forced to execute a
grant of perfect freedom and of a gild to the town as
well as of free release to their debtors. Then they were
left masters of the ruined house. But all control over
town or land was gone. Through spring and summer no
rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs arid other officers of the
abbey did not dare to show their faces in the streets.
News came at last that the abbot was in London, appeal-
ing for redress to the court, and the whole county was
at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the
thought of revived claims of serfage, of interminahlo
suits of law, poured into the streets of the town. From
thirty-two of the neighbouring villages the priests
marched at the head of their flocks as on a new crusade.
The wild mass of men, women, and children, twenty
thousand in all, as men guessed, rushed again on the
abbey, and for four November days the \\ork of de-
struction went on unhindered. When gate, stables,
granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry had gone up in
flames, the multitude swept away to the granges and
barns of the abbey farms. Their plunder sho^s what
vast agricultural proprietors the monks had become. A
thousand horses, a hundred and twenty plough-oxen,
two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three Hundred
hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off, and granges
and barns burned to the ground. It was judged af:er-
wards that sixty thousand pounds would hardly cover
the loss.
"Weak as was the government of Mortimer and
482
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III.
The
. Peasant
Revolt.
134-7-
1381.
St.
Edmunds-
bury in
1381.
Isabella, the appeal of the abbot against this outrage was
promptly heeded. A royal force quelled the riot, thirty
carts full of prisoners were despatched to Norwich ; twenty-
four of the chief townsmen with thirty-two of the village
priests were convicted as aiders and abettors of the attack
on the abbey, and twenty were summarily hanged. Nearly
two hundred persons remained under sentence of outlawry,
and for five weary years their case dragged on in the King's
courts. At last matters ended in a ludicrous outrage.
Irritated by repeated breaches of promise on the abbot's
part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his
manor of Chevington, robbed and bound him, and carried
him off to London. There he was hurried from street to
street lest his hiding-place should be detected till oppor-
tunity offered for shipping him off to Brabant. The
Primate and the Pope levelled their excommunications
against the abbot's captors in vain, and though he was at
last discovered and brought home it was probably with
some pledge of the arrangement which followed in 1332.
The enormous damages assessed by the royal justices were
remitted, the outlawry of the townsmen was reversed, the
prisoners were released. On the other hand the deeds
which had been stolen were again replaced in the archives
of the abbey, and the charters which had been extorted
from the monks were formally cancelled.
The spirit of townsmen and villeins remained crushed
by their failure, and throughout the reign of Edward the
Third i.he oppression against which they had risen went
on without a check. It was no longer the rough blow of
sheer force; it was the more delicate but more pitiless
tyranny of the law. At Richard's accession Prior John of
Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was in charge of
the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of
his day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred
song, his eulogists pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to
Nero, and to one yet more illustrious in the Bury cloister
though obscure to us, the Breton Belgabred. John was
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 1307-1461. 483
"industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry found CHAP. 1IL
their scope in suit after suit with the burgesses and farmers The
around him. " Faithfully he strove " says the monastic ^^fit*
chronicler " with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his 1347.
house." The townsmen he owned specially as his " ad- 1381 '
versaries," but it was the rustics who were to show what
a hate he had won. On the fifteenth of June, the day
of Wat Tyler's fall, the howl of a great multitude round
his manor house at Mildenhail broke roughly on the
chauntings of Prior John. He strove to fly, but he was
betrayed by his own servants, judged in rude mockery
of the law by villein and bondsman, condemned and
killed. The corpse lay naked in the open field while
the mob poured unresisted into Bury. Bearing the prior's
head on a lance before them through the streets, the
frenzied throng at last reached the gallows where the head
of one of the royal judges, Sir John Cavendish, was already
impaled ; and pressing the cold lips together in mockery
of their friendship set them side by side. Another head
soon joined them. The abbey gates were burst open, and
the cloister filled with a maddened crowd, howling for a
new victim, John Lackenheath, the warder of the barony.
Few knew him as he stood among the group of trembling
monks, but he courted death with a contemptuous courage.
" I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward ; and
in a minute, with a mighty roar of " Devil's son ! Monk !
Traitor ! ' he was swept to the gallows, and his head
hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd rolled back
again to the abbey gate, and summoned the monks before
them. They told them that now for a long time they had
oppressed their fellows, the burgesses of Bury ; wherefore
they willed that in the sight of the Commons they should
forthwith surrender their bonds and charters. The monks
brought the parchments to the market-place ; many which
were demanded they swore they could not find. A com-
promise was at last patched up ; and it was agreed that
the charters should be surrendered till the future abbot
484 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. III. should confirm the liberties of the town. Then, unable to
Xhe do more, the crowd ebbed away.
Bevoit* A scene less violent, but even more picturesque, went on
1347- the same day at St. Alban's. William Grindecobbe, the
}' leader of its townsmen, returned with one of the charters
Close of o f emancipation which Richard had granted after his
the rising. . .
interview at Mile-end to the men of Essex and Hert-
fordshire, and breaking into the abbey precincts at the
head of the burghers, forced the abbot to deliver up the
charters which bound the town in bondage to his house.
But a more striking proof of servitude than any charters
could give remained in the mill-stones which after a long
suit at law had been adjudged to the abbey and placed
within its cloister as a triumphant witness that no towns-
man might grind corn within the domain of the abbey
save at the abbot's mill. Bursting into the cloister, the
burghers now tore the mill-stones from the iioor, and
broke them into small pieces, "like blessed bread in
church," which each might carry off to show something
of the day when their freedom was won again. But it was
hardly won when it was lost anew. The quiet withdrawal
and dispersion of the peasant armies with their charters of
emancipation gave courage to the nobles. Their panic
passed away. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance
in hand on Litster's camp, and scattered the peasants of
Norfolk at the first shock. Richard with an army of forty
thousand men inarched in triumph through Kent and
Essex, and spread terror by the ruthlessness of his execu-
tions. At Waltham he was met by the display of his
own recent charters and a protest from the Essex men
that " they were so far as freedom went the peers of
their lords." But they were to learn the worth of a
king's word. " Villeins you were," answered Richnrd,
"and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide,
and that not your old bondage, but a worse!" The
stubborn resistance which he met showed that the temper
of the people was not easily broken. The villagers oi
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 485
Billericay threw themselves into the woods and fought CHAP. III.
two hard fights before they were reduced to submission. It j^e
was only by threats of death that verdicts of guilty could ^Voit*
be wrung from Essex jurors when the leaders of the 1347-
revolt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was offered 1 ^?'
his life if he would persuade his followers at St. Alban's
to restore the charters they had wrung from the monks.
He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade them
take no thought for his trouble. " If I die," he said, " I
shall die for the cause of the freedom we have won,
counting myself happy to end my life by such a martyrdom.
Do then to-day as you would have done had I been killed
yesterday." But repression went pitilessly on, and through
the summer and the autumn seven thousand men are said
to have Derished on the gallows or the field.
VOL. I. 32
CHAPTER IV.
RICHARD THE SECOND.
13811400.
Results of TERRIBLE as were the measures of repression which
the followed the Peasant Revolt, and violent as was the
Revolt, passion of reaction which raged among the proprietary
classes at its close, the end of the rising was in fact
secured. The words of Grindecobbe ere his death were
a prophecy which time fulfilled. Cancel charters of
manumission as the council might, serfage was henceforth
a doomed and perishing thing. The dread of another
outbreak hung round the employer. The attempts to bring
back obsolete services quietly died away. The old process
of enfranchisement went quietly on. During the century
and a half whish followed the Peasant Eevolt villeinage
died out so rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated
thing. The class of small freeholders sprang fast out of
the wreck of it into numbers and importance. In twenty
years more they were in fact recognized as the basis of our
electoral system in every English county. The Labour
Statutes proved as ineffective as of old in enchaining
labour or reducing its price. A hundred years after the
Black Death the wages of an English labourer was suf-
ficient to purchase twice the amount of the necessaries of
life which could have been obtained for the wages paid
under Edward the Third. The incidental descriptions
of the life of the working classes which we find in
Piers Ploughman show that this increase of social comfort
BOOK iv.J THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
487
had been going on even during the troubled period CHAP. IV.
which preceded the outbreak of the peasants, and it went Bichard
on faster after the revolt was over. But inevitable as such g^nd
a progress was, every step of it was taken in the teeth of ISBI-
the wealthier classes. Their temper indeed at the close of l -
the rising was that of men frenzied by panic and the
taste of blood. They scouted all notion of concession.
The .stubborn will of the conquered was met by as
stubborn a will in their conquerors. The royal Council
showed its sense of the danger of a mere policy of
resistance by submitting the question of enfranchise-
ment to the Parliament which assembled in November
1381 with words which suggested a compromise. " If
you desire to enfranchise and set at liberty the said serfs,"
ran the royal message, " by your common assent, as the
King has Wen informed that some of you desire, he will
consent to your prayer." But no thoughts of compromise
influenced the landowners in their reply. The King's
grant and letters, the Parliament answered with perfect
truth, were legally null and void : their serfs were their
goods, and the King could not take their goods from them
but by their own consent " And this consent," they
ended, " we have never given and never will give, were we
all to die in one day." Their temper indeed expressed itself
in legislation which was a fit sequel to the Statutes of
Labourers. They forbade the child of any tiller of the
soil to be apprenticed in a town. They prayed the King
to ordain " that no bondman nor bondwoman shall place
their children at school, as has been done, so as to advance
their children in the world by their going into the church."
The new colleges which were being founded at the Uni-
versities at this moment closed their gates upon villeins.
The panic which produced this frenzied reaction against Religious
all projects of social reform produced inevitably as frenzied reaction -
a panic of reaction against all plans for religious reform.
Wyclif had been supported by the Lancastrian party till
the very eve of the Peasant Revolt. But with the rising
488 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. BOOK
3AP. IV. his whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel
Richard between the baronage and the Church on which his
Second, political action had as yet been grounded was hushed in the
1381- presence of a common danger. His " poor preachers " were
IAOO. i 00 ]- ec i U pon as missionaries of socialism. The friars
charged Wyclif with being a " sower of strife, who by his
serpentlike instigation had set the serf against his lord,"
and though he tossed back the charge with disdain he had
to bear a suspicion which was justified by the conduct of
some of his followers. John Ball, who had figured in the
front rank of the revolt, was falsely named as one of his
adherents, and was alleged to have denounced in his last
hour the conspiracy of the '' Wyclifites." Wyclif 's most
prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said to have
openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury.
Whatever belief such charges might gain, it is certain
that from this moment all plans for the reorganization of
the Church were confounded in the general odium which
attached to the projects of the peasant leaders, and
that any hope of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of
the baronage and the Parliament was at an end. But
even if the Peasant Eevolt had not deprived Wyclif of
the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had
hitherto co-operated, their alliance must have been dissolved
by the new theological position which he had already taken
up. Some months before the outbreak of the insurrection
he had by one memorable step passed from the position of
a reformer of the discipline and political relations of the
Church to that of a protester against its cardinal beliefs.
If there was one doctrine upon which the supremacy of
the Mediaeval Church rested, it was the doctrine of Tran-
substantiation. It was by his exclusive right to the per-
formance of the miracle which was wrought in the mass
that the lowliest priest was raised high above princes.
With the formal denial of the doctrine of Transubstantia-
tion which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that
great movement of religious revolt which ended more than
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 489
a century after in the establishment of religious freedom CHAP. IV.
by severing the mass of the Teutonic peoples from the Diehard
general body of the Catholic Church. The act was the second
bolder that he stood utterly alone. The University of i^\.
Oxf'ord, in which his influence had been hitherto all-power- 1AO -
ful, at once condemned him. John of Gaunt enjoined
him to be silent. \Vyclif was presiding as Doctor of
Divinity over some disputations in the schools of the
Augustinian Canons when his academical condemnation
was publicly read, but though startled for the moment he
at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the
conclusions at which he had arrived. The prohibition of
the Duke of Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his
teaching, a confession which closes proudly with, the quiet
words, " I believe that in the end the truth will conquer."
For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around Ri* of
him. The University responded to his appeal, and by dis-
placing his opponents from office tacitly adopted his cause.
But Wyclif no longer looked for support to the learned or
wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He
appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such
a kind in our history, to England at large. With an
amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue
of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse
and involved argument which the great doctor had ad-
dressed to his academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside,
and by a transition which marks the wonderful genius of
the man the schoolman was transformed into the pamph-
leteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later English
poetry, Wyclif is the father of our later English prosa
The rough, clear, homely English of his tracts, the speech
of the ploughman and the trader of the day though
coloured with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible,
is in its literary use as distinctly a creaiion of his own as
the style in which he embodied it, the terse vehement
sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard antitheses which
roused the dullest mind like a whip. Once fairly freed
.*
490
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1381-
1400.
3HAP. IV. from the trammels of unquestioning belief, Wyclifs mind
Richard worked fast in its career of scepticism. Pardons, indul-
Second. gences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints,
worship of their images, worship of the saints themselves,
were successively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible as
the one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the
right of every instructed man to examine the Bible for
himself, threatened the very groundwork of the older
dogmatism with ruin. Nor were these daring denials
confined to the small circle of scholars who still clung
to him. The " Simple Priests " were active in the diffusion
of their master's doctrines, and how rapid their progress
must have been we may see from the panic-struck exaggera-
tions of their opponents. A few years later they com-
plained that the followers of Wyclif abounded everywhere
and in all classes, among the baronage, in the cities r
among the peasantry of the country-side, even in the
monastic cell itself. " Every second man one meets is a
Lollard."
" Lollard," a word which probably means " idle babbler, "
was the nickname of scorn with which the orthodox
Churchmen chose to insult their assailants. But this
rapid increase changed their scorn into vigorous action.
In 1382 Courtenay, who had now become Archbishop,
summoned a council at Blackfriars and formally submitted
twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's works. An
earthquake in the midst of the proceedings terrified every
prelate but the resolute Primate ; the expulsion of ill
humours from the earth, he said, was of good omen for the
expulsion of ill humours from the Church; and the con-
demnation was pronounced. Then the Archbishop turned
fiercely upon Oxford as the fount and centre of the new
heresies. In an English sermon at St. Frideswide's
Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of Wyclif's
doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor to silence
him and his adherents on pain of being himself treated as
a heretic. The Chancellor fell back on the liberties of the
1V.J THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 491
University, and appointed as preacher another Wyclifite, CHAP. IV.
Repyugdon, who did not hesitate to style the Lollards m^; rd
" holy priests," and to affirm that they were protected by Be cond
John ot Gauut. Party spirit meanwhile ran high among 1331.
the students. The bulk of them sided with the Lollard 14O
leaders, and a Carmelite, Peter Stokes, who had procured
the Archbishop's letters, cowered panic stricken in his
chamber while the Chancellor, protected by an escort of a
huudred townsmen, listened approvingly to Repyngdon's
defiance. " I dare go no further," wrote the poor Friar to the
Archbishop, " for fear of death ; " but he mustered courage
at last to descend into the schools where Repyngdon was
now maintaining that the clerical order was " better when
it was but nine years old than now that it has grown to a
thousand years and more." The appearance however of
scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly in despair to
Lambeth, while a new heretic in open Congregation main-
tained Wyclif's denial of Transubstantiation. "There is
no idolatry," cried William James, " save in the Sacrament
of the Altar." " You speak like a wise man," replied the
Chancellor, Robert Rygge. Courtenay however was not
the man to bear defiance tamely, and his summons to
Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge which was
only accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism of
the University. " I dare not publish them, on fear of
death," exclaimed the Chancellor when Courteuay handed
him his letters of condemnation. " Then is your Univeisity
an open fautor of heretics " retorted the Primate " if it
suffers not the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its
bounds." The royal Council supported the Archbishop's
injunction, but the publication of the decrees at once set
Oxford on fire. The scholars threatened death against
the friars, "crying that they wished to destroy the
University." The masters suspended Henry Crump from
teaching as a troubler of the public peace for calling the
Lollards " heretics." The Crown however at last stepped
in to Courtenay 's aid, and a royal writ ordered the
492
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1381
1400.
Wyclifs
Bible.
CHAP. IV. instant banishment of all favourers of Wyclif with the
Bichard seizure and destruction of all Lollard books on pain of
Second, forfeiture of the University's privileges. The threat pro-
duced its effect. Herford and Eepyrigdon appealed in
vain to John of Gaunt for protection ; the Duke himself
denounced them as heretics against the Sacrament of the
Altar, and after much evasion they were forced to make a
formal submission. Within Oxford itself the suppression
of Lollardism was complete, but with the death of religious
freedom all trace of intellectual life suddenly disappears.
The century which followed the triumph of Courtenay is
the most barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of the
University broken till the advent of the New Learning
restored to it some of the life and liberty which the
Primate had so roughly trodden out.
Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclifs
position as the last of the great schoolmen than the reluc-
tance of so bold a man as Courtenay even after his triumph
over Oxford to take extreme measures against the head
of Lollardry. Wyclif, though summoned, had made no
appearance before the "Council of the Earthquake."
" Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends to-day," was
his bitter comment on the new union which proved to
have sprung up between the prelates and the monastic
orders who had so long been at variance with each other ;
" since they have made a heretic of Christ, it is an easy
inference for them to count simple Christians heretics."
He seems indeed to have been sick at the moment,
but the announcement of the final sentence roused him
to life again. He petitioned the King and Parliament
that he might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines
he had put forth, and turning with characteristic
energy to the attack of his assailants, he asked that all
religious vows might be suppressed, that tithes might be
diverted to the maintenance of the poor and the clergy
maintained by the free alms of their flocks, that the
Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire might be enforced
iv.] THE PARLIAMENT. 1307-1461. 493
against the Papacy, that Churchmen might be declared CHAP. IV.
incapable of secular offices, and imprisonment for excorn- Bi^ r <i
municution cease. Finally in the teeth of the council's second,
condemnation he demanded that the doctrine of the issi-
Eucharist which he advocated might be freely taught. If 1 ^5 >-
he appeared in the following year before the convocation
at Oxford it was to perplex his opponents by a display of
scholastic logic which permitted him to retire without any
retractation of his sacramental heresy. For the time his
opponents seemed satisfied with his expulsion from the
University, but in his retirement at Lutterworth he was
forging during these troubled years the great weapon which,
wielded by other hands than his own, was to produce so
terrible an effect on the triumphant hierarchy. An earlier
translation of the Scriptures, in part of which he was
aided by his scholar Herford, was being revised and brought
to the second form which is better known as " Wyclif s
Bible " when death drew near. The appeal of the prelates
to Rome was answered at last by a Brief ordering him to
appear at the Papal Court. His failing strength exhausted
itself in a sarcastic i-ply which explained that his re-
fusal to comply with the summons simply sprang from
broken health. " I am always glad," ran the ironical
ans'ver, " to explain my faith to any one, and above all to
the Bishop of Borne ; for I take it for granted that if it be
orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he will
correct it. I assume too that as chief Vicar of Christ
upon earth the Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men most
bound to the law of Christ's Gospel, for among the disciples
of Christ a majority is not reckoned by simply counting
heads in the fashion of this world, but according to the
imitation of Christ on either side. Xow Christ during His
life upon earth was of all men the poorest, casting from
Him all worldly authority. I deduce from these premises
as a simple counsel of my own that the Pope should
surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and
advise his clergy to do the same." The boldness of his
494 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
OHAP. IV. words sprang perhaps from a knowledge that his end was
Richard near. The terrible strain on energies enfeebled by age and
8ecoad. study had at last brought its inevitable result, and a stroke
lain- f paralysis while Wyclif was hearing mass in his parish
i4oo. c i, nrcn of Lutterworth was followed on the next day by
his death.
The The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious
viovemeni re ^ orm * i (s more learned adherents and of the support
of the Universities. Wyclif 's death robbed it of its head
at a moment when little had been done save a work of
destruction. From that moment Lollardism ceased to be
in any sense an organized movement and crumbled into a
general spirit of revolt. All the religious and social dis-
content of the times floated instinctively to this new centre.
The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener
spirit of personal morality, the hatred ot the friars, the
jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the
fanaticism of the reforming zealot were blended together
in a common hostility to the Church and a common
resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic
and ecclesiastical system. But it was this want of organi-
zation, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement,
that made it penetrate through every class of society.
Women as well as men became the preachers of the
new sect. Lollardry had its own schools, its own
books ; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from
hand to hand ; scurrilous ballads which revived the old
attacks of " Golias" in the Angevin times upon the wealth
and luxury of the clergy were sung at every corner.
Nobles like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir
John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the head of
the cause and threw open their gates as a refuge for its
missionaries. London in its hatred of the clergy became
fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who
ventured >to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of
St. Paul's. One of its mayors, John of Northampton,
showed the influence of the new morality by the Puritan
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
495
spirit in which he dealt with the morals of the city.
Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy
who connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he
arrested the loose women, cut off their hair, and carted
them through the streets as objects of public scorn. But
the moral spirit of the new movement, though infinitely
its grander side, was less dangerous to the Church than its
open repudiation of the older doctrines and systems of
Christendom. Out of the floating mass of opinion which
bore the name of Lollardry one faith gradually evolved
itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a source
of religious truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work.
Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, " became a vul-
gar thing, and more open to lay folk and wranen that knew
how to read than it is wont to be to clerks themselves."
Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from
drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church
was declared to have become apostate, its priesthood was
denounced as no priesthood, its sacraments as idolatry.
It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the
new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The
jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every
pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts
to make persecution effective. At the moment of the
Peasant Revolt Courtenay procured the enactment of a
statute which commissioned the sheriffs to seize all persons
convicted before the bishops of preaching heresy. But the
statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons
added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that
they considered it " in nowise their interest to be more
under the jurisdiction of the prelates or more bound by
them than their ancestors had been in times past." Heresy
indeed was still a felony by the common law, and if as yet
we meet with no instances of the punishment of heretics
by the fire it was because the threat of such a death was
commonly followed by the recantation of the Lollard.
But the restriction of each bishop's jurisdiction within the
CHAP. IV.
Richard
the
Second.
1381
1400.
Lollardn,
and ths
Church.
496
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1381-
J-iOO.
CHAP. IV. limits of his own diocese made it impossible to arrest
Bichard the wandering preachers of the new doctrine, and the
Second. c ^ v ^ punishment even if it had been sanctioned by
public opinion seems to have long fallen into desuetude.
Experience proved to the prelates that few sheriffs would
arrest on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and
that no royal court would issue the writ " for the burn-
ing of a heretic " on a bishop's requisition. But powerless
as the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression,
they were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards
into a bitter fanaticism. The heretics delighted in out-
raging the religious sense of their day. One Lollard
gentleman took home the sacramental wafer and lunched
on it with wine and oysters. Another flung some images
of the saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers stirred
up riots by the virulence of their preaching against the
friars. But they directed even fiercer invectives against
the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In
a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in
3395 they mingled denunciations of the riches of the
clergy with an open profession of disbelief in transub-
stantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship,
and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of
opinions which jostled together in the new movement,
that war might be declared unchristian and that trades
such as those of the goldsmith or the armourer, which were
contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished from
the realm. They contended (and it is remarkable tshat a
Parliament of the next reign adopted the statement) that
from the superfluous revenues of the Church, if once they
were applied to purposes of general utility, the King might
maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six
thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred hospitals
for the relief of the poor.
The distress of the landowners, the general disorganization
of the country, in every part of which bands of marauders
were openly defying the law, the panic of the Church and
Disasters
of the
War.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 497
of society at large as the projects of the Lollards shaped CHAP. IV.
themselves into more daring and revolutionary forms, added Bichard
a fresh keenness to the national discontent at the languid second
and inefficient prosecution of the war. The junction of 1391.
the French and Spanish fleets had made them masters of 1 ^
the seas, and what fragments were left of Guienue lay
at their mercy. The royal Council strove to detach the
House of Luxemburg from the French alliance by winning
for Eichard the hand of Anne, a daughter of the late
Emperor Charles the Fourth who had fled at Cre9y, and
sister of King Wenzel of Bohemia who was now King
of the Eomans. But the marriage remained without poli-
tical result, save that the Lollard books which were sent
into their native country by the Bohemian servants of the
new queen stirred the preaching of John Huss and the
Hussite wars. Nor was English policy more successful in
Flanders. Under Philip van Arteveldt, the son of the
leader of 1345, the Flemish towns again sought the friend-
ship of England against France, but at the close of 1382
the towns were defeated and their leader slain in the
great French victory of Kosbecque. An expedition to
Flanders in the following year under the warlike Bishop
of Norwich turned out a mere plunder-raid and ended in
utter failure. A short truce only gave France the leisure
to prepare a counter-blow by the despatch of a small but
well-equipped force under John de Vienne to Scotland in
1385. Thirty thousand Scots joined in the advance of this
force over the border: and though northern England rose
with a desperate effort and an English army penetrated as
far as Edinburgh in the hope of bringing the foe to battle
it was forced to fall back without an encounter. Mean-
while France dealt a more terrible blow in the reduction
of Ghent. The one remaining market for English com-
merce was thus closed up, while the forces which should
have been employed in saving Ghent and in the protection
of the English shores against the threat of invasion were
squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was
498
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Bichard
the
Second.
1381-
1400.
Temper of
CHAP. IV. carrying on along the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the
visionary crown which he claimed in his wife's right.
The enterprize showed that the Duke had now abandoned
the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a
new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the
realm had been from the close of the Peasant Eevolt the
steady purpose of the councillors who now surrounded
the young King, of his favourite Robert de Vere and his
Chancellor Michael de la Pole, who was raised in 1385
to the Earldom of Suffolk. The Duke's friends were
expelled from office ; John of Northampton, the head of his
adherents among the Commons, was thrown into prison ;
the Duke himself was charged with treason and threatened
with arrest. In 1386 John of Gaunt abandoned the struggle
and sailed for Spain.
Richard himself took part in these measures against the
the Court. Duke. He was now twenty, handsome and golden-haired,
with a temper capable of great actions and sudden bursts
of energy but indolent and unequal. The conception of
kingship in which he had been reared made him regard
the constitutional advance which had gone on during the
war as an invasion of the rights of his Crown. He looked
on the nomination of the royal Council and the great
officers of state by the two Houses or the supervision of
the royal expenditure by the Commons as infringements
on the prerogative which only the pressure of the war and
the weakness of a minority had forced the Crown to bow
to. The judgement of his councillors was one with that
of the King. Vere was no mere royal favourite ; he was
a great noble and of ancient lineage. Michael de la Pole
was a man of large fortune and an old servant of the
Crown ; he had taken part in the war for thirty years, and
had been admiral and captain of Calais. But neither
were men to counsel the young King wisely in his effort
to obtain independence at once of Parliament and of the
great nobles. His first aim had been to break the pressure
of the royal house itself, and in his encounter with John
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
499
1381
1400.
of Gaunt he had proved successful. But the departure CHAP. IV.
of the Duke of Lancaster only called to the front his
brother and his son. Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of
Gloucester, had inherited much of the lands and the
influence of the old house of Bohun. Round Henry,
Earl of Derhy, the son of John of Gaunt by Blanche of
Lancaster, the old Lancastrian party of constitutional
opposition was once more forming itself. The favour
shown to the followers of Wyclif at the Court threw on
the side of this new opposition the bulk of the bishops and
Churchmen. Richard himself showed no sympathy with
the Lollards, but the action of her Bohemian servants
shows the tendencies of his Queen. Three members of the
royal Council were patrons of the Lollards, and the Earl of
Salisbury, a favourite with the King, was their avowed
head. The Commons displayed no hostility to the Lollards
nor any zeal for the Church ; but the lukewarm prosecu-
tion of the war, the profuse expenditure of the Court, and
above all the manifest will of the King to free himself
from Parliamentary control, estranged the Lower House.
Richard's haughty words told their own tale. When the
Parliament of 1385 called for an enquiry every year into
the royal household, the King replied he would enquire
when he pleased. When it prayed to know the names of
the officers of state, he answered that he would change
them at his will.
The burthen of such answers and of the policy they The Lord*
revealed fell on the royal councillors, and the departure of ppe
John of Gaunt forced the new opposition into vigorous
action. The Parliament of 1886 called for the removal of
Suffolk. Richard replied that he would not for such a
prayer dismiss a turnspit of his kitchen. The Duke of
Gloucester and Bishop Arundel of Ely were sent by
the Houses as their envoys, and warned the King that
should a ruler refuse to govern with the advice of his
lords and by mad counsels work out his private purposes
it was lawful to depose him. The threat secured Suffolk's
500
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
the
Second.
1381
1400,
CHAP. IV. removal ; he was impeached for corruption and malad-
Bichard ministration, and condemned to forfeiture and imprison-
ment. It was only by submitting to the nomination of a
Continual Council, with the Duke of Gloucester at its head,
that Richard could obtain a grant of subsidies. But the
Houses were no sooner broken up than Suffolk was released,
and in 1387 the young King rode through the country
calling on the sheriffs to raise men against the barons, and
bidding them suffer no knight of '.he shire to be returned
for the next Parliament " save one whom the King and
his Council chose." The general ill- will foiled both his
efforts : and he was forced to take refuge in an opinion of
five of the judges that the Continual Council was unlawful,
the sentence on Suffolk erroneous, and that the Lords and
Commons had no power to remove a King's servant.
Gloucester answered the challenge by taking up arms, and
a general refusal to fight for the King forced Richard once
more to yield. A terrible vengeance was taken on his
supporters in the recent schemes. In the Parliament of
1388 Gloucester, with the four Earls of Derby, Arundel,
Warwick, and Nottingham appealed on a charge of high
treason Suffolk and De Vere, the Archbishop of York, the
Chief Justice Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas Bramber. The
first two fled, Suffolk to France, De Vere after a skirmish
at Radcot Bridge to Ireland ; but the Archbishop was de-
prived of his see, Bramber beheaded, and Tresilian hanged.
The five judges were banished, and Sir Simon Burley with
three other members of the royal household sent to the
block.
At the prayer of the " "Wonderful Parliament," as some
called this assembly, or as others with more justice " The
Merciless Parliament," it was provided that all officers of
state should henceforth be named in Parliament or by the
Continual Council. Gloucester remained at the head of
the latter body, but his power lasted hardly a year. In
May 1389 Richard found himself strong enough to break
down the government by a word. Entering the Council
Richartfs
rule.
IV.]
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he suddenly asked his uncle how old he was. "Your CHAV. IV.
highness," answered Gloucester, " is in your twenty-second
year ! " "Then I am old enough to manage my own affairs,"
said Eichard coolly; " I have been longer under guardian-
ship than any ward in my realm. I thank you for your
past services, my lords, but I need them, no more." The
resolution was welcomed by the whole country ; and Eichard
justified the country's hopes by wielding his new power
with singular wisdom and success. He refused to recall
de Vere or the five judges. The intercession of John of
Gaunt on his return from Spain brought about a full
reconciliation with the Lords Appellant. A truce was
concluded with France, and its renewal year after year
enabled the King to lighten the burthen of taxation.
Eichard announced his purpose to govern by advice of
Parliament; he soon restored the Lords Appellant to
his Council, and committed the chief offices of state to
great Churchmen like Wykeham and Arundel. A series
of statutes showed the activity of the Houses. A Statute
of Prnvisors which re-enacted those of Edward the Third
was passed in 1390 ; the Statute of Prsemunire, which
punished the obtaining of bulls or other instruments from
Eorne with forfeiture, in 1393. The lords were bridled
anew by a Statute of Maintenance, which forbade their
violently supporting other men's causes in courts of justice
or giving " livery " to a host of retainers. The Statute of
Uses in 1391, which rendered illegal the devices which
had been invented to frustrate that of Mortmain, showed
the same resolve to deal firmly with the Church. A
reform of the staple and other mercantile enactments
proved the King's care for trade. Throughout the legisla-
tion of these eight years we see the same tone of coolness
and moderation. Eager as he was to win the good-will
of the Parliament and the Church, Eichard refused to
bow to the panic of the landowners or to second the
persecution of the priesthood. The demands of the
Parliament that education should be denied to the sons
YOL. I. 33
502
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOR
Richard
the
Second.
1381
14OO.
French
and
English.
CHAP. IV. of villeins was refused. Lollardry as a social danger was
held firmly at bay, and in 1387 the King ordered Lollard
books to be seized and brought before the Council. But
the royal officers showed little zeal in aiding the bishops
to seize or punish the heretical teachers.
It was in the period of peace which was won for the
country by the wisdom and decision of its young King
that England listened to the voice of her first great singer.
The work of Chaucer marks the final settlement of the
English tongue. The close of the great movement towards
national unity which had been going on ever since the
Conquest was shown in the middle of the fourteenth
century by the disuse, even amongst the nobler classes, of
the French tongue. In spite of the efforts of the gram-
mar schools and of the strength of fashion English won
its way throughout the reign of Edward the Third to
its final triumph in that of his grandson. It was ordered to
be used in courts of law in 1362 "because the French
tongue is much unknown," and in the following year
it was employed by the Chancellor in opening Parlia-
ment. Bishops began to preach in English, and the
English tracts of Wyclif made it once more a literary
tongue. We see the general advance in two passages
from writers of Edward's and Kichard's reigns. " Children
in school " says Higden, a writer of the first period, " against
the usage and manner of all other nations be compelled
for to leave their own language and for to construe their
lessons and their things in French, and so they have since
the Normans first came into England. Also gentlemen
children be taught for to speak French from the time that
they be rocked in their cradle, and know how to speak
and play with a child's toy ; and uplandish (or country)
men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and strive with
great busyness to speak French for to be more told of."
" This manner," adds John of Trevisa, Higden's translator
in Richard's time, " was much used before the first murrain
(the Black Death of 1349), and is since somewhat changed.
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For John Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore CHAP. IV.
in grammar school and construing of French into English ; Ri^ard
and liichard Pencrych learned this manner of teaching of second,
him, as other men did of Pencrych. So that now, the
year of our Lord 1385 and of the second King Richard
after the Conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of
England children leaveth French, and construeth and
learneth in English. Also gentlemen have now much left
for to teach their children French."
This drift towards a general use of the national tongue Chaucer.
told powerfully on literature. The influence of the French
romances everywhere tended to make French the OIIQ
literary language at the opening of the fourteenth century,
and in England this influence had been backed by the
French tone of the court of Henry the Third and the three
Edwards. But at the close of the reign of Edward the
Third the long French romances needed to be trans-
lated even for knightly hearers. " Let clerks indite in
Latin," says the author of the " Testament of Love," " and
let Frenchmen in their French also indite their quaint
terms, for it is kindly to their mouths ; and let us show
our fantasies in such wordes as we learned of our mother's
tongue." But the new national life afforded nobler
materials than "fantasies" now for English literature.
With the completion of the work of national unity had
come the completion of the work of national freedom.
The vigour of English life showed itself in the wide
extension of commerce, in the progress of the towns, and
the upgrowth of a free yeomanry. It gave even nobler
signs of its activity in the spirit of national independence
and moral earnestness which awoke at the call of Wyclif.
New forces of thought and feeling which were destined
to tell on every age of our later history broke their
way through the crust of feudalism in the socialist
revolt of the Lollards, and a sudden burst of military
glory threw its glamour over the age of Crecj and
Poitiers. It is this new gladness of a great people which
504
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
[BOOK
i38i-
14OO.
UHAP. IV. utters itself in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer
Richard was born about 1340, the son of a London vintner who lived
Second. i n Thames Street ; and it was in London that the bulk of
his life was spent. His family, though not noble, seems
to have been of some importance, for from the opening of
his career we find Chaucer in close connexion with the
Court. At sixteen he was made page to the wife of Lionel
of Clarence; at nineteen he first bore arms in the campaign
of 1359. But he was luckless enough to be made prisoner ;
and from the time of his release after the treaty of Bre-
tigny he took no further share in the military enterprizes
of his time. He seems again to have returned to service
about the Court, and it was now that his first poems made
their appearance, the " Compleynte to Pity" in 1368, and
in 1369 the " Death of Blanch the Duchesse," the wife of
John of Gaunt who from this time at least may be looked
upon as his patron. It may have been to John's influence
that he owed his employment in seven diplomatic missions
which were probably connected with the financial straits
of the Crown. Three of these, in 1372, 1374, and 1378,
carried him to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant
court of the Visconti at Milan ; at Florence, where the
memory of Dante, the "great master" whom he com-
memorates so reverently in his verse, was still living, he
may have met Boccaccio ; at Padua, like his own clerk of
Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from
the lips of Petrarca.
It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer
whom we know. From that hour his work stands out in
vivid contrast with the poetic literature from the heart
of which it sprang. The long French romances were the
product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent cur-
iosity, of a fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment. Of
the great passions which gave life to the Middle Ages,
that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the
conceits of Mariolatry, that of war into the extrava-
gances of Chivalry. Love indeed remained ; it was the
His Early
Poems.
IV.l
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the
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one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a CHAP.
love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic dis- m
cussions, of sensuous enjoyment a plaything rather than
a passion. Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of
man ; the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual
May-time ; the grass was ever green ; the music of the
lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket.
There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or
reflective in man's life : life was too amusing to be serious,
too piquant, too sentimental, too full of interest and gaiety
and chat. It was an age of talk : " mirth is none " says
Chaucer's host " to ride on by the way dumb as a stone ; "
and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agree-
able talker of his day. His romances, his rimes of Sir
Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and
fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idle-
ness about their very length, the minuteness of their descrip-
tion of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it
passes to the subtler inner world.
It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now
been familiar, and it was this which he followed in his
earlier work. But from the time of his visits to Milan
and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying
verse of France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of
poetry in Italy. Dante's eagle looks at him from the sun.
"Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him one
" whose rethorique sweete enluymned al Itail of poetrie."
The " Troilus " which he produced about 1382 is an
enlarged English version of Boccaccio's " Filostrato ; "
the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same
period, bears slight traces of his Teseide. It was indeed
the " Decameron " which suggested the very form of the
" Canterbury Tales," the earliest of which, such as those
of the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress,
the Franklin, and the Squire, may probably be referred
like the Parliament of Foules and the House of Fame
to this time of Chaucer's life. But even while changing,
506
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. as it were, the front of English poetry Chaucer preserves
Richard h* 8 own distinct personality. If he quizzes in the rime
Second. ^ ^ir Thopaz the wearisome idleness of the French
1381- romance he retains all that was worth retaining of the
i4oo. French temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its
lightness and brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its
gaiety and good humour, its critical coolness and self-
control. The French wit quickens in him more than in
any English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our
national disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves
its somewhat ponderous morality. If on the other hand
he echoes the joyous carelessness of the Italian tale, he
tempers it with the English seriousness. As he follows
Boccaccio all his changes are on the side of purity ; and
when the Troilus of the Florentine ends with the old
sneer at the changeableness of woman Chaucer bids us
" look Godward," and dwells on the unchangeableness of
Heaven.
The genius of Chaucer however was neither French nor
Italian, whatever element it might borrow from either
literature, but English to the core; and from the year 1384
all trace of foreign influence dies away. Chaucer had now
reached the climax of his poetic power. He was a busy,
practical worker, Comptroller of the Customs in 1374,
of the Petty Customs in 1382, a member of the Commons
in the Parliament of 1386. The fall of the Duke of Lan-
caster from power may have deprived him of employment
for a time, but from 1389 to 1391 he was Clerk of the
Royal Works, busy with repairs and building at West-
minster, Windsor, and the Tower. His air indeed was
that of a student rather than of a man of the world. A
single portrait has preserved for us his forked beard, his
dark-coloured dress, the knife and pen-case at his girdle,
and we may supplement this portrait by a few vivid
touches of his own. The sly, elvish face, the quick walk,
the plump figure and portly waist were those of a genial
and humorous man ; but men jested at his silence, his
The Can
ierbury
Tales.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 507
abstraction, his love of study. " Thou lookest as thou CHAP. IV.
wouldest find an hare," laughs the host, " and ever on the m^hard
ground I see thee stare." He heard little of his neighbours' second,
talk when office w T ork in Thames Street was over. " Thou 1331-
goest home to thy own house anon, and also dumb as a 1 ^?P*
stone thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy
look, and livest thus as an heremite, although," he adds
slyly, " thy abstinence is lite," or little. But of this seem-
ing abstraction from the world about him there is not a
trace in Chaucer's verse. We see there how keen his
observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with
nature and the men among whom he moved. " Farewell,
my book," he cried as spring came after winter and the
lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing
alone on the daisy whose beauty he sang. But field
aftd stream and flower and bird, much as he loved them,
were less to him than man. No poetry was ever more
human than Chaucer's, none ever came more frankly and
genially home to men than his " Canterbury Tales."
It was the continuation and revision of this work which
mainly occupied him during the years from 1384 to 1390.
Its best stories, those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook,
the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun, the
Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as
well as the Prologue. The framework which Chaucer chose
that of a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury not
only enabled him to string these tales together, but lent
itself admirably to the peculiar characteristics of his
poetic temper, his dramatic versatility and the univer-
sality of his sympathy. His tales cover the whole
field of mediaeval poetry; the legend of the priest, the
knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the traveller, the
broad humour of the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all
are there. He finds a yet wider scope for his genius in
the persons who tell these stories, the thirty pilgrims who
start in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark
thirty distinct figures, representatives of every class of
508
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. English society from the noble to the ploughman. We
Kichard see the " verray perh'ght gentil knight " in cassock and
Second. coa ^ f mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him,
1381- fresh as the May morning, and behind them the brown-
i4op. f ace d yeoman in his coat and hood of green with a
mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics light
up for us the mediaeval church the brawny hunt-loving
monk, whose bridle jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-
bell the wanton friar, first among the beggars and harpers
of the country side the poor parson, threadbare, learned,
and devout (" Christ's lore and his apostles twelve he
taught, and first he followed it himself") the summoner
with his fiery face the pardoner with his wallet " bret-
full of pardons, come from Rome all hot" the lively
prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red
mouth, .and " Amor vincit omnia " graven on her broocfi.
Learning is there in the portly person of the doctor of
physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence the busy
serjeant-of-law, " that ever seemed busier than he was "
the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of books
and short sharp sentences thafc disguise a latent tenderness
which breaks out at last in the story of Griseldis. Around
them crowd types of English industry ; the merchant ; the
franklin in whose house " it snowed of meat and drink ; "
the sailor fresh from frays in the Channel ; the buxom wife
of Bath ; the broad-shouldered miller ; the haberdasher,
carpenter, weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker, each in the
livery of his craft; and last the honest ploughman who
would dyke and delve for the poor without hire. It is the
first time in English poetry that we are brought face to
face not with characters or allegories or reminiscences
of the past, but with living and breathing men, men
distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or costume
or mode of speech ; and with this distinctness of each
maintained throughout the story by a thousand shades of
expression and action. It is the first time, too, that we
meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
509
character but combines it with its fellows, which not only CHAP. IV.
adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the person who Diehard
utters it but fuses all into a poetic unity. It is life in its second,
largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us 1331-
in the " Canterbury Tales." In some of the stories indeed, 1AOO>
which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there
is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the
schoolman ; but taken as a whole the poem is the work
not of a man of letters but of a man of action. Chaucer
has received his training from war, courts, business, travel
a training not of books but of life. And it is life that
he loves the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of
its farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of its
Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of the miller
and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide
tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as
none but Shakspere has ever reflected him, and to do
this with a pathos, a shrewd sense and kindly humour, a
freshness and joyousness of feeling, that even Shakspere
has not surpassed.
The last ten years of Chaucer's life saw a few more tales The
added to the Pilgrimage and a few poems to his work : but ,/' r ^ lc
. Mamage.
his power was lessening, and in 1400 he rested from Ins
labours in his last home, a house in the garden of St. Mary's
Chapel at Westminster. His body rests within the Abbey
church. It was strange that such a voice should have
awakened no echo in the singers that follow, but the first
burst of English song died as suddenly in Chaucer as the
hope and glory of his age. He died indeed at the moment
of a revolution which was the prelude to years of national
discord and national suffering. Whatever may have been
the grounds of his action, the rule of Eichard the Second
after his assumption of power had shown his capacity for
self-restraint. Parted by I is own will from the counsellors
of his youth, calling to his service the Lords Appellant,
reconciled alike with the baronage and the Parliament, the
young King promised to be among the noblest and wisest
510
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
CHAP. IV. rulers that England had seen. But the violent and
Richard haughty temper which underlay this self-command showed
the
Second.
1381-
1400.
itself from time to time. The Earl of Arundel and his
brother the bishop stood in the front rank of the party
which had coerced Richard in his early days ; their influ-
ence was great in the new government. But a strife
between the Earl and John of Gaunt revived the King's
resentment at the past action of this house ; and at
the funeral of Anne of Bohemia in 1394 a fancied slight
roused Richard to a burst of passion. He struck the Earl
so violently that the blow drew blood. But the quarrel
was patched up, and the reconciliation was followed by
the elevation of Bishop Arundel to the vacant Primacy
in 1396. In the preceding year Richard had crossed to
Ireland and in a short autumn campaign reduced its native
chiefs again to submission. Fears of Lollard disturbances
soon recalled him, but these died at the King's presence,
and Richard was able to devote himself to the negotiation
of a marriage which was to be the turning point of his
reign. His policy throughout the recent years had been
a policy of peace. It was war which rendered the Crown
helpless before the Parliament, and peace was needful if the
work of constant progress was not to be undone. But the
short truces, renewed from time to time, which he had as
yet secured were insufficient for this purpose, for so long as
war might break out in the coming year the King's hands
were tied. The impossibility of renouncing the claim to
the French crown indeed made a formal peace impossible,
but its ends might be secured by a lengthened truce, and it
was with a view to this that Richard in 1396 wedded
Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Sixth of France.
The bride was a mere child, but she brought with her a
renewal of the truce for eight and-twenty-years.
Change of The match was hardly concluded when the veil under
Richard's which Richard had shrouded his real temper began to be
temper. d r0 pp ec i His craving for absolute power, such as he
witnessed in the Court of France, was probably intensified
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
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1381
1400.
from this moment by a mental disturbance which gathered CHAP. IV.
strength as the months went on. As if to preclude any Bichard
revival of the war Kichard had surrendered Cherbourg to second,
the King of Navarre and now gave back Brest to the Duke
of Britanny. He was said to have pledged himself at his
wedding to restore Calais to the King of France. But
once freed from all danger of such a struggle the whole
o oo
character of his rule seemed to change. His court became
as crowded and profuse as his grandfather's. Money was
recklessly borrowed and as recklessly squandered. The
King's pride became insane, and it was fed with dreams of
winning the Imperial crown through the deposition of
Wenzel of Bohemia. The councillors with whom he had
acted since his resumption of authority saw themselves
powerless. John of Gaunt indeed still retained influence
over the King. It was the support of the Duke of Lan-
caster after his return from his Spanish campaign which
had enabled Eichard to hold in check the Duke of
Gloucester and the party that he led; and the anxiety
of the young King to retain this support was seen in his
grant of Aquitame to his uncle, and in the legitimation
of the Beauforts, John's children by a mistress, Catherine
Swinford, whom he married after the death of his second
wife. The friendship of the Duke brought with it the
adhesion of one even more important, his son Henry, the
Earl of Derby. As heir through his mother, Blanche of
Lancaster, to the estates and influence of the Lancastrian
house, Henry was the natural head of a constitutional
opposition, and his weight was increased by a marriage
with the heiress of the house of Bohun. He had taken a
prominent part in the overthrow of Suffolk and De Vere,
and on the King's resumption of power he had prudently
withdrawn from the realm on a vow of Crusade, had
touched at Barbary, visited the Holy Sepulchre, and in
1390 sailed for Dantzig and taken part in a campaign
against the heathen Prussians with the Teutonic Knights.
Since his return he had silently followed in his father's
512
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1381
1400.
Richard's
tyranny.
CHAP. IV. track. But the counsels of John of Gaunt were hardly
Kichard wiser than of old ; Arundel had already denounced his
Second influence as a hurtful one ; and in the events which were
now to hurry quickly on he seems to have gone hand in
hand with the King.
A new uneasiness was seen in the Parliament of 1397,
and the Commons prayed for a redress of the profusion of
the Court. Richard at once seized on the opportunity for
a struggle. He declared himself grieved that his subjects
should " take on themselves any ordinance or governance
of the person of the King or his hostel or of any persons
of estate whom he might be pleased to have in his com-
pany." The Commons were at once overawed ; they owned
that the cognizance of such matters belonged wholly to the
King, and gave up to the Duke of Lancaster the name of
the member, Sir Thomas Haxey, who had brought forward
this article of their prayer. The lords pronounced him a
traitor, and his life \vas only saved by the fact that he was a
clergyman and by the interposition of Archbishop Arundel.
The Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Gloucester at once
withdrew from Court. They stood almost alone, for of the
royal house the Dukes of Lancaster and York with their
sons the Earls of Derby and Rutland were now with the
King, and the old coadjutor of Gloucester, the Earl of
Nottingham, was in high favour with him. The Earl of
Warwick alone joined them, and he was included in a
charge of conspiracy which was followed by the arrest of
the three. A fresh Parliament in September was packed
with royal partizans, and Richard moved boldly to his
end. The pardons of the Lords Appellant were revoked.
Archbishop Arundel was impeached and banished from
the realm, he was transferred by the Pope to the See of
St. Andrew's, and the Primacy given to Roger Walden.
The Earl of Arundel, accused before the Peers under John
of Gaunt as High Steward, was condemned and executed
in a single day. Warwick, who owned the truth of the
charge, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment The
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 513
Duke of Gloucester was saved from a trial by a sudden CHAP. IV.
death in his prison at Calais. A new Parliament at ifohiwd
Shrewsbury in the opening of 1398 completed the King's second
work. In three days it declared null the proceedings 1331-
of the Parliament of 1388, granted to the King a subsidy 14O -
on wool and leather for his life, and delegated its authority
to a standing committee of eighteen members from both
Houses with power to continue their sittings even after the
dissolution of the Parliament and to " examine and deter-
mine all matters and subjects which had been moved in the
presence of the King with all the dependencies thereof."
In a single year the whole colour of Eichard's govern- Henry of
ment had changed. He had revenged himself on the men n
who had once held him down, and his revenge was hardly
taken before he disclosed a plan of absolute government.
He had used the Parliament to strike down the Primate
as well as the greatest nobles of the realm and to give
him a revenue for life which enabled him to get rid of
Parliament itself, for the Permanent Committee which it
named were men devoted, as Eichard held, to his cause.
John of Gaunt was at its head, and the rest of its lords
were those who had backed the King in his blow at
Gloucester and the Arundels. Two however were ex-
cluded. In the general distribution of rewards which
followed Gloucester's overthrow the Earl of Derby had
been made Duke of Hereford, the Earl of Nottingham
Duke of Norfolk. But at the close of 1397 the two
Dukes charged each other with treasonable talk as they
rode between Brentford and London, and the Permanent
Committee ordered the matter to be settled by a single
combat. In September 1398 the Dukes entered the
lists ; but Eichard forbade the duel, sentenced the Duke
of Norfolk to banishment for life, and Henry of Lancaster
to exile for six years. As Henry left London the streets
were crowded with people weeping for his fate ; some fol-
lowed him even to the coast. But his withdrawal removed
the last check on Eichard's despotism. He forced from
514
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
Bichard
the
Second.
1381-
14OO.
every tenant of the Crown an oath to recognize the acts of
his Committee as valid, and to oppose any attempts to
alter or revoke them. Forced loans, the sale of charters
of pardon to Gloucester's adherents, the outlawry of seven
counties at once on the plea that they had supported
his enemies and must purchase pardon, a reckless interfer-
ence with the course of justice, roused into new life the
old discontent. Even this might have been defied had
not Richard set an able and unscrupulous leader at its
head. Leave had been given to Henry of Lancaster to
receive his father's inheritance on the death of John of
Gaunt, in February 1399. But an ordinance of the
Continual Committee annulled this permission and Richard
seized the Lancastrian estates. Archbishop Arundel at once
saw the chance of dealing blow for blow. He hastened
to Paris and pressed the Duke to return to England,
telling him how all men there looked for it, " especially
the Londoners, who loved him a hundred times more than
they did the King." For a while Henry remained buried
in thought, " leaning on a window overlooking a garden ; "
but Arundel's pressure at lash prevailed, he made his way
secretly to Britanny, and with fifteen knights set sail
from Vannes.
What had really decided him was the opportunity
offered by Richard's absence from the realm. From
the opening of his reign the King's attention had been
constantly drawn to his dependent lordship of Ireland.
More than two hundred years had passed away since
the troubles which followed the murder of Archbishop
Thomas forced Henry the Second to leave his work of
conquest unfinished, and the opportunity for a complete
reduction of the island which had been lost then had
never returned. When Henry quitted Ireland indeed
Leinster was wholly in English hands, Connaught bowed
to a nominal acknowledgement of the English over-
lordship, and for a while the work of conquest seemed
to go steadily on. John, de Courcy penetrated into
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 515
Ulster and established himself at Down-Patrick ; and CHAP. IV.
Henry planned the establishment of his youngest son, Bichard
John, as Lord of Ireland. But the levity of the young Se cond
prince, who mocked the rude dresses of the native i3si_
chieftains and plucked them in insult by the beard, 14OO
soon forced his father to recall him; and in the conti-
nental struggle which soon opened on the Angevin kings
as in the constitutional struggle within England itself
which followed it all serious purpose of completing the
conquest of Ireland was forgotten. Xothing indeed but
the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the
adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wex-
ford, Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was thence-
forth known as " the English Pale." In all _ the history of
Ireland no event has proved more disastrous than this
half-finished conquest. Had the Irish driven their in-
vaders into the sea, or the English succeeded in the
complete reduction of the island, the misery of its after
ages might have been avoided. A straggle such as that
in which Scotland drove out its conquerors might have
produced a spirit of patriotism and national union which
would have formed a people out of the mass of warring
clans. A conquest such as that in which the Normans
made England their own would have spread at any rate
the law, the order, the civilization of the conquering
country over the length and breadth of the conquered.
Unhappily Ireland, while powerless to effect its entire
deliverance, was strong enough to hold its assailants
partially at bay. The country was broken into two
halves whose conflict has never ceased. So far from
either giving elements of civilization or good government
to the other, conqueror and conquered reaped only degra-
dation from the ceaseless conflict. The native tribes lost
whatever tendency to union or social progress had sur-
vived the invasion of the Danes. Their barbarism was
intensified by their hatred of the more civilized intruders.
But these intruders themselves, penned within the narrow
516 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. IV. limits of the Pale, brutalized by a merciless conflict, cut
Bichard ^ ^ rorn contact with the refining influences of a larger
Second world, sank rapidly to the level of the barbarism about
laisi- them : and the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of
14OO. feudalism broke out unchecked in this horde of adventurers
who held the land by their sword.
English From the first the story of the English Pale was a story
and Irish. O f degradation and anarchy. It needed the stern ven-
geance of John, whose army stormed its strongholds and
drove its leading barons into exile, to preserve even their
fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale into
counties and ordered the observance of the English law ;
but the departure of his army was the signal for a return
of the disorder he had trampled under foot. Between
Englishmen and Irishmen went on a ceaseless and pitiless
war. Every Irishman without the Pale was counted by
the English settlers an enemy and a robber whose murder
found no cognizance or punishment at the hands of the
law. Half the subsistence of the English barons was
drawn from forays across the border, and these forays were
avenged by incursions of native marauders which carried
havoc at times to the very walls of Dublin. Within
the Pale itself the misery was hardly less. The English
settlers were harried and oppressed by their own baronage
as much as by the Irish marauders, while the feuds of
the English lords wasted their strength and prevented any
effective combination either for common conquest or
common defence. So utter seemed their weakness that
Robert Bruce saw in it an opportunity for a counter-blow
at his English assailants, and his victory at Bannockburn
was followed up by the despatch of a Scotch force to
Ireland with his brother Edward at its head. A general
rising of the Irish welcomed this deliverer ; but the danger
drove the barons of the Pale to a momentary union, and
in 1316 their valour was proved on the bloody field of
Athenree by the slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes
and the almost complete annihilation of the sept of the
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
517
the
Second.
1381-
14OO.
Richard
in
Ireland.
O'Connors. But with victory returned the old anarchy CHAP. IV.
and degradation. The barons of the Pale sank more and Eichard
more into Irish chieftains. The Fitz-Maurices, who be-
came Earls of Desmond and whose vast territory in
Munster was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the
dress and manners of the natives around them. The rapid
growth of this evil was seen m the ruthless provisions by
which Edward the Third strove to check it in his Statute
of Kilkenny. The Statute forbade the adoption of the
Irish language or name or dress by any man of English
blood: it enforced within the Pale the exclusive use of
English law, and made the use of the native or Brehon
law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason ; it made
treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons of
Irish race, or any adoption of English children by Irish
foster-fathers.
But stern as they were these provisions proved fruitless
to check the fusion of the two races, while the growing
independence of the Lords of the Pale threw off all but
the semblance of obedience to the English government. It
was this which stirred Eichard to a serious effort for the
conquest and organization of the island. In 1386 he
granted the " entire dominion " of Ireland with the title of
its Duke to Eobert de Vere on condition of his carrying out
its utter reduction. But the troubles of the reign soon
recalled De Vere, and it was not till the truce with France
had freed his hands that the King again took up his
projects of conquest. In 1394 he landed with an army
at Waterford, and received the general submission of the
native chieftains. But the Lords of the Pale held sullenly
aloof; and Eichard had no sooner quitted the island
than the Irish in turn refused to carry out their pro-
mise of quitting Leinster, and engaged in a fresh
contest with the Earl of March, whom the King had
proclaimed as his heir and left behind him as his
lieutenant in Ireland. In the summer of 1398 March
was beaten and slain in battle : and Eichard resolved to
VOL. L 34
518
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1381
1400.
Landing
of Henry
CHAP. IV. avenge his cousin's death and complete the work he had
Richard begun by a fresh invasion. He felt no apprehension of
Second, danger. At home his triumph seemed complete. The
death of Norfolk, the exile of Henry of Lancaster, left
the baronage without heads for any rising. He ensured, as
he believed, the loyalty of the great houses by the host-
ages of their blood whom he carried with him, at whose
head was Henry of Lancaster's son, the future Henry the
Fifth. The refusal of the Percies, the Earl of Northum-
berland and his sou Henry Percy or Hotspur, to obey
his summons might have warned him that danger was
brewing in the north. Richard however took little
heed. He banished the Percies, who withdrew into Scot-
and ; and sailed for Ireland at the end of May, leaving
his uncle the Duke of York regent in his stead.
The opening of his campaign was indecisive, and it
was not till fresh reinforcements arrived at Dublin that
the King could prepare for a march into the heart of the
island. But while he planned the conquest of Ireland
the news came that England was lost. Little more than
a month had passed after his departure when Henry of
Lancaster entered the Humber and landed at Ravenspnr.
He came, he said, to claim his heritage ; and three of his
Yorkshire castles at once threw open their gates. The
two great houses of the north joined him at once. Ralph
Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, had married his half-
sister ; the Percies came from their exile over the Scottish
border. As he pushed quickly to the south all resistance
broke down. The army which the Regent gathered refused
to do hurt to the Duke ; London called him to her gates ;
and the royal Council could only march hastily on Bristol
in the hope of securing that port for the King's return. But
the town at once yielded to Henry's summons, the Regent
submitted to him, and with an army which grew at every
step the Duke marched upon Cheshire, where Richard's
adherents were gathering in arms to meet the King.
Contrary winds had for a while kept Richard ignorant
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 519
of his cousin's progress, and even when the news reached CHAP. IV.
him he was in a web of treachery. The Duke of Albemarle, Bi ^ rd
the son of the Regent Duke of York, was beside him, and c the ^
. t Second,
at his persuasion the King abandoned his first purpose of j^^
returning at once, and sent the Earl of Salisbury to 14O -
Con way while he himself waited to gather his army
and fleet. The six days he proposed to gather them
in became sixteen, and the delay proved fatal to his cause.
As no news came of Eichard the Welshmen who flocked
to Salisbury's camp dispersed on Henry's advance to
Chester. Henry was in fact master of the realm at tho
opening of August when Eichard at last sailed from
Waterford and landed at Milford Haven.
Every road was blocked, and the news that all was lost Richards
told on the thirty thousand men he brought with him. In ca P tur -
a single day but six thousand remained, and even these dis-
persed when it was found that the King had ridden off
disguised as a friar to join the force which he believed
to be awaiting him in North Wales with Salisbury at its
head. He reached Caernarvon only to find this force
already disbanded, and throwing himself into the castle
despatched his kinsmen, the Dukes of Exeter and
Surrey, to Chester to negotiate with Henry of Lan-
caster. But they were detained there while the Earl
of Northumberland pushed forward with a picked body
of men, and securing the castles of the coast at last
sought an interview with Eichard at Conway. The
King's confidence was still unbroken. He threatened to
raise a force of Welshmen and to put Lancaster to death.
Deserted as he was indeed, a King was in himself a power,
and only the treacherous pledges of the Earl induced him
to set aside his plans for a reconciliation to be brought
about in Parliament and to move from Conway on the
promise of a conference with Henry at Flint. But he had
no sooner reached the town than he found himself sur-
rounded by Lancaster's forces. " I am betrayed," he cried,
as the view of his enemies burst on him from the hill;
520
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK iv.
1381-
1400.
CHAP. IV. " there are pennons and banners in the valley." But it
Richard was * ^ a ^ e ^ or re treat. Richard was seized and brought
Second before his cousin. " I am come before iny time," said
Lancaster, " but I will show you the reason. Your people,
my lord, complain that for the space of twenty years you
have ruled them harshly : however, if it please God, I will
help you to rule them better." " Fair cousin," replied the
King, " since it pleases you, it pleases me well." Then,
breaking in private into passionate regrets that he had
ever spared his cousin's life, he suffered himself to be
carried a prisoner along the road to London.
CHAPTER V.
THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER.
13991422.
ONCE safe in the Tower, it was easy to wrest from Richard Henry the
a resignation of his crown; and this resignation was
solemnly accepted by the Parliament which met at the close
of September 1399. But the resignation was confirmed
by a solemn Act of Deposition. The coronation oath was
read, and a long impeachment which stated the breach
of the promises made in it was followed by a solemn vote
of both Houses which removed Richard from the state and
authority of King. According to the strict rules of here-
ditary descent as construed by the feudal lawyers by an
assumed analogy with the rules which governed descent of
ordinary estates the crown would now have passed to a
house which had at an earlier period played a leading
part in the revolutions of the Edwards. The great-grandson
of the Mortimer who brought about the deposition of
Edward the Second had married the daughter and heiress
of Lionel of Clarence, the third son of Edward the Third.
The childlessness of Richard and the death of Edward's
second son without issue placed Edmund Mortimer, the
son of the Earl who had fallen in Ireland, first among
the claimants of the crown ; but he was now a child of six
years old, the strict rule of hereditary descent had never
received any formal recognition in the case of the Crown,
and precedent suggested a right of Parliament to choose
in such a case a successor among any other members of
522 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. the Koyal House. Only one such successor was in fact
Xhe possible. Eising from his seat and crossing himself,
Lancaster Henry of Lancaster solemnly challenged the crown, "as
1399- that I am descended by right line of blood coming from
1422. ^g g 00 d lord King Henry the Third, and through that
right that God of his grace hath sent me with help of my
kin and of my friends to recover it : the which realm was
in point to be undone by default of governance and
undoing of good laws." Whatever defects such a claim
might present were more than covered by the solemn
recognition of Parliament. The two Archbishops, taking
the new sovereign by the hand, seated him upon the
throne, and Henry in emphatic words ratified the compact
between himself and his people. " Sirs," he said to the
prelates, lords, knights, and burgesses gathered round him,
" I thank God and you, spiritual and temporal, and all
estates of the land; and do you to wit it is not my
will that any man think that by way of conquest I
would disinherit any of his heritage, franchises, or other
rights that he ought to have, nor put him out of the
good that he has and has had by the good laws and
customs of the realm, except those persons that have
been against the good purpose and the common profit
of the realm."
Statute of The deposition of a king, the setting aside of one
Heresy, claimant and the elevation of another to the throne,
marked the triumph of the English Parliament over the
monarchy. The struggle of the Edwards against its
gradual advance had culminated in the bold effort of
Eichard the Second to supersede it by a commission
dependent on the Crown. But the House of Lancaster
was precluded by its very position from any renewal
of the struggle. It was not merely that the exhaustion
of the treasury by the war and revolt which followed
Henry's accession left him even more than the kings
who had gone before in the hands of the Estates; it
was that his very right to the Crown lay in an acknow-
iv.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 523
lodgement of tlieir highest pretensions. He had been CHAP. V.
raised to the throne by a Parliamentary revolution. His ^
claim to obedience had throughout to rest on a Parlia- Lancaster
mentary title. During no period of our early history 1399-
therefore were the powers of the two Houses so frankly x ^??*
recognized. The tone of Henry the Fourth till the very
close of his reign is that of humble compliance in all but
ecclesiastical matters with the prayers of the Parliament,
and even his imperious successor shrank almost with
timidity from any conflict with it. But the Crown had
been bought by pledges less noble than this. Arundel
was not only the representative of constitutional rule ; he
was also the representative of religious persecution. No
prelate had been so bitter a foe of the Lollards, and the
support which the Churcli had given to the recent
revolution had no doubt sprung from its belief that a
sovereign whom Arundel placed on the throne would deal
pitilessly with the growing heresy. The expectations of
the clergy were soon realized. In the first Convocation of
his reign Henry declared himself the protector of the
Church and ordered the prelates to take measures for the
suppression of heresy and of the wandering preachers.
His declaration was but a prelude to the Statute of
Heresy which was passed at the opening of 1401. By
the provisions of this infamous Act the hindrances which
had till now neutralized the efforts of the bishops to
enforce the common law were utterly taken away. Not
only were they permitted to arrest all preachers of heresy,
all schoolmasters infected with heretical teaching, all
owners and writers of heretical books, and to imprison
them even if they recanted at the King's pleasure, but a
refusal to abjure or a relapse after abjuration enabled them
to hand over the heretic to the civil officers, and by these
so ran the first legal enactment of religious bloodshed
which defiled our Statute-book he was to be burned on
a high place before the people. The statute was hardly
passed when William Sautre became its first victim.
524
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V.
1399
1422.
England
and
France.
Sautre, while a parish priest at Lynn, had been cited
before the Bishop of Norwich two years before for heresy
and forced to recant. But he still continued to preach
against the worship of images, against pilgrimages, and
against traiisubstantiation till the Statute of Heresy
strengthened Arundel's hands. In February, 1401, Sautre
was brought before the Primate as a relapsed heretic, and
on refusing to recant a second time was degraded from hia
orders. He was handed to the secular power, and on the
issue of a royal writ publicly burned.
The support of the nobles had been partly won by a
hope hardly less fatal to the peace of the realm, the hope
of a renewal of the strife with France. The peace of
Richard's later years had sprung not merely from the policy
of the English King, but from the madness of Charles
the Sixth of France. France fell into the hands of its
king's uncle, the Duke of Burgundy, and as the Duke was
ruler of Flanders and peace with England was a necessity
for Flemish industry, his policy went hand in hand with
that of Eichard. His rival, the King's brother, Lewis,
Duke of Orleans, was the head of the French war-party ;
and it was with the view of bringing about war that he
supported Henry of Lancaster in his exile at the French
court. Burgundy on the other hand listened to Eichard's
denunciation of Henry as a traitor, and strove to prevent
his departure. But his efforts were in vain, and he had to
witness a revolution which hurled Eichard from the throne,
deprived Isabella of her crown, and restored to power the
baronial party of which Gloucester, the advocate of war,
had long been the head. The dread of war was increased
by a pledge which Henry was said to have given at his
coronation that he would not only head an army in its
march into France but that he would march further into
France than ever his grandfather had done. The French
Court retorted by refusing to acknowledge Henry as King,
while the truce concluded with Eichard came at his
death legally to an end. In spite of this defiance however
iv.j THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 525
Burgundy remained true to the interests of Flanders, and CHAP. V.
Henry clung to a truce which gave him time to estab- T^
lish his throne. But the influence of the baronial party j^ncaster
in England made peace hard to keep ; the Duke of Orleans 1399-
urged on France to war ; and the hatred of the two 14aa '
peoples broke through the policy of the two governments.
Count Waleran of St. Pol, who had married Eichard's
half-sister, put out to sea with a fleet which swept the
east coast and entered the Channel. Pirates from
Britanny and Navarre soon swarmed in the narrow seas,
and their ravages were paid back by those of pirates from
the Cinque Ports. A more formidable trouble broke out
in the north. The enmity of France roused as of old the
enmity of Scotland; the Scotch King Eobert the Third
refused to acknowledge Henry, and Scotch freebooters
cruized along the northern coast.
Attack from without woke attack from within the Richardt
realm. Henry had shown little taste for bloodshed deat ' 1 '
in his conduct of the revolution. Save those of the
royal councillors whom he found at Bristol no one had
been put to death. Though a deputation of lords with
Archbishop Arundel at its head pressed him to take
Eichard's life, he steadily refused, and kept him a prisoner
at Pomfret. The judgements against Gloucester, Warwick,
and Arundel were reversed, but the lords who had appealed
the Duke were only punished by the loss of the dignities
which they had received as their reward. Eichard's brother
and nephew by the half-blood, the Dukes of Surrey and
Exeter, became again Earls of Kent and Huntingdon.
York's son, the Duke of Albemarle, sank once more into
Earl of Eutland. Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, lost his
new Marquisate of Dorset ; Spenser lost his Earldom of
Gloucester. But in spite of a stormy scene among the
lords in Parliament Henry refused to exact further punish-
ment; and his real temper was seen in a statute which
forbade all such appeals and left treason to be dealt with
by ordinary process of law. But the times were too rough
526 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. for mercy such as this. Clouds no sooner gathered round
^ the new King than the degraded lords leagued with the
Lancaster. Earl ^ Salisbury and the deposed Bishop of Carlisle to
1399- release Eichard and to murder Henry. Betrayed by Eut-
1422. j an( j j u th e spring of 1401, and threatened by the King's
march from London, they fled to Cirencester ; but the town
was against them, its burghers killed Kent and Salisbury,
and drove out the rest. A terrible retribution followed.
Lord Spenser and the Earl of Huntingdon were taken and
summarily beheaded ; thirty more conspirators fell into
the King's hands to meet the same fate. They drew with
them in their doom the wretched prisoner in whose name
they had risen. A great council held after the suppression
of the revolt prayed "that if Eichard, the late King, be
alive, as some suppose he is, it be ordained that he be well
and securely guarded for the safety of the states of the
King and kingdom ; but if he be dead, then that he be
openly showed to the people that they may have knowledge
thereof." The ominous words were soon followed by news
of Eichard's death in prison. His body was brought to
St. Paul's, Henry himself with the princes of the blood
royal bearing the pall: and the face was left uncovered
to meet rumours that the prisoner had been assassinated
by his keeper, Sir Piers Exton.
Revolt rf In June Henry marched northward to end the trouble
Wales. f rom tne g cotg Wit h tne i r ugual p ii C y the Scottish
army under the Duke of Albany withdrew as the English
crossed the border, and looked coolly on while Henry
invested the castle of Edinburgh. The wants of his army
forced him in fact to raise the siege ; but even success
would have been fruitless, for he was recalled by trouble
nearer home. Wales was in full revolt. The country had been
devoted to Eichard ; and so notorious was its disaffection
to the new line that when Henry's son knelt at his father's
feet to receive a grant of the Principality a shrewd bystander
murmured, " he must conquer it if he will have it." The
death of the fallen King only added to the Welsh disquiet,
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 527
for in spite of the public exhibition of his body he was be- CHAP. V.
lieved to be still alive. Some held that he had escaped to ^
Scotland, and an impostor who took his name was long main- Lancaster,
tained at the Scottish Court. In Wales it was believed that 1399-
he was still a prisoner in Chester Castle. But the trouble 1Aaa -
would have died away had it not been raised into revolt by
the energy of Owen Glyndwr or Glendower. Owen was
a descendant of one of the last native Princes, Llewelyn-ap-
Jorwerth, and the lord of considerable estates in Merioneth.
He had been squire of the body to Eichard the Second,
and had clung to him till he was seized at Flint. It was
probably his known aversion from the revolution which had
deposed his master that brought on him the hostility of
Lord Grey of Kuthin, the stay of the Lancastrian cause in
North Wales ; and the same political ground may have
existed for the refusal of the Parliament to listen to his
prayer for redress and for the restoration of the lands
which Grey had seized. But the refusal was embittered by
words of insult ; when the Bishop of St. Asaph warned
them of Owen's power the lords retorted that " they cared
not for barefoot knaves." They were soon to be made to
care. At the close of 1400 Owen rose in revolt, burned
the town of Kuthin, and took the title of Prince of
Wales.
His action at once changed the disaffection into a national Owen
revolt. His raids on the Marches and his capture of Glyndwr.
Eadnor marked its importance, and Henry marched against
him in the summer of 1401. But Glyndwr's post at
Corwen defied attack, and the pressure in the north forced
the King to march away into Scotland. Henry Percy,
who held the castles of North Wales as Constable, was left
to suppress the rebellion, but Owen met Percy's arrival
by the capture of Conway and the King was forced to
hurry fresh forces under his son Henry to the west.
The boy was too young as yet to show the military and
political ability which was to find its first field in these
Welsh campaigns, and his presence did little to stay the
528 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. growth of revolt. While Owen's lands were being harried
^ Owen was stirring the people of Caermarthen into rebellion
Lancaster. an( ^ pressing the siege of Abergavenny; nor could the
1399- presence of English troops save Shropshire from pillage.
1422. Everywhere the Welshmen rose for their "Prince;" the
Bards declared his victories to have been foretold by
Merlin ; even the Welsh scholars at Oxford left the Uni-
versity in a body and joined his standard. The castles of
Euthin, Hawarden, and Flint fell into his hands, and with
his capture of Con way gave him command of North Wales.
The arrival of help from Scotland and the hope of help
from France gave fresh vigour to Owen's action, and though
Percy held his ground stubbornly on the coast and
even recovered Conway he at last threw up his com-
mand in disgust. A fresh inroad of Henry on his
return from Scotland again failed to bring Owen to
battle, and the negotiations which he carried on during
the following winter were a mere blind to cover prepara-
tions for a new attack. So strong had Glyndwr become
in 1402 that in June he was able to face an English army
in the open field at Brynglas and to defeat it with a loss
of a thousand men. The King again marched to the
border to revenge this blow. But the storms which met
him as he entered the hills, storms which his archers
ascribed to the magic powers of Owen, ruined his army,
and he was forced to withdraw as of old. A raid over
the northern border distracted the English forces. A
Scottish army entered England with the impostor who
bore Eichard's name, and though it was utterly defeated
by Henry Percy in September at Homildon Hill the re-
spite had served Owen well. He sallied out from the
inaccessible fastnesses in which he had held Henry at bay
to win victories which were followed by the adhesion of
all North Wales and of great part of South Wales to his
cause.
The What gave life to these attacks and conspiracies was
Perdes the hostility of France. The influence of the Duke of
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 529
Burgundy was still strong enough to prevent any formal CHAP. V.
hostilities, but the war party was gaining more and more ^
the ascendant. Its head, the Duke of Orleans, had fanned j^ncaster,
the growing flame by sending a formal defiance to Henry 1399-
the Fourth as the murderer of Eichard. French knights 1 ^? 2 '
were among the prisoners whom the Percies took at
Homildon Hill ; and it may have been through their inter-
vention that the Percies themselves were now brought into
correspondence with the court of France. No house had
played a greater part in the overthrow of Eichard, or had
been more richly rewarded by the new King. But old
grudges existed between the house of Percy and the house
of Lancaster. The Earl of Northumberland had been at
bitter variance with John of Gaunt ; and though a common
dread of Eichard's enmity had thrown the Percies and
Henry together the new King and his powerful subjects
were soon parted again. Henry had ground indeed for
distrust. The death of Eichard left the young Mortimer,
Earl of March, next claimant in blood of the crown,
and the King had shown his sense of this danger by
imprisoning the earl and his sisters in the Tower. But this
imprisonment made their uncle, Sir Edmund Mortimer, the
representative of their house ; and Edmund withdrew to
the Welsh Marches, refusing to own Henry for king. The
danger was averted by the luck which threw Sir Edmund
as a captive into the hands of Owen Glyndwr in the
battle of Brynglas. It was natural that Henry should
refuse to allow Mortimer's kinsmen to ransom so formidable
an enemy ; but among these kinsmen Henry Percy ranked
himself through his marriage with Sir Edmund's sister,
and the refusal served as a pretext for a final breach with
the King.
Percy had withdrawn from the Welsh war in wrath at Overthrow
the inadequate support which Henry gave him ; and his anger p ^? fc
had been increased by a delay in repayment of the sums
spent by his house in the contest with Scotland, as well as
by the King's demand that he should surrender the Earl
530
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. of Douglas
The Hill. He
whom he had taken prisoner at
became the centre of a reat
1399-
1422.
Homildon
now became the centre of a great conspiracy
Lancaster to place the Earl of March upon the throne. His father,
the Earl of Northumberland, his uncle, Thomas Percy, the
- ar j Q f Worcester, joined in the plot. Sir Edmund Mor-
timer negotiated for aid from Owen Glyndwr ; the Earl
of Douglas threw in his fortunes with the confederates ;
and Henry Percy himself crossed to France and ob-
tained promises of support. The war party had now
gained the upper hand at the French court; in 1403
preparations were made to attack Calais, and a Breton
fleet put to sea. At the news of its presence in the
Channel Henry Percy and the Earl of Worcester at once
rose iu the north and struck across England to join Owen
Glyndwr in Wales, while the Earl of Northumberland
gathered a second army and advanced more slowly to their
support. But Glyndwr was still busy with the siege of
Caermarthen, and the King by a hasty march flung himself
across the road of the Percies as they reached Shrewsbury.
On the twenty-third of July a fierce fight ended in the
defeat of the rebel force. Henry Percy was slain in battle,
the Earl of Worcester taken and beheaded ; while North-
umberland, who had been delayed by an army under his
rival in the north, Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, was
thrown into prison, and only pardoned on his protesta-
tions of innocence. The quick, hard blow did its work.
The young Earl of March betrayed the plans of his par-
tizans to purchase pardon. The Breton fleet, which had
defeated an English fleet in the Channel and made a
descent upon Plymouth, withdrew to its harbours; and
though the Duke of Burgundy was on the point of com-
mencing the siege of Calais the plans of an attack on
that town were no more heard of.
But the difficulty of Wales remained as great as ever.
The discouragement of Owen at the failure of the con-
spiracy of the Percies was removed by the open aid of
the French Court. In July 1404 the French King in a
Henry's
diffi-
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 1307-1461.
531
formal treaty owned Glyndwr as Prince of Wales, and his
promises of aid gave fresh heart to the insurgents. What
hampered Henry's efforts most in meeting this danger
was the want of money. At the opening of 1404 the
Parliament grudgingly gave a subsidy of a twentieth, but
the treasury called for fresh supplies in October, and the
wearied Commons fell back on their old proposal of a
confiscation of Church property. Under the influence of
Archbishop Arundel the Lords succeeded in quashing
the project, and a new subsidy was voted ; but the
treasury was soon as empty as before. Treason was still
rife ; the Duke of York, who had played so conspicuous
a part in Richard's day as Earl of Rutland, was sent for
a while to the Tower on suspicion of complicity in an
attempt of his sister to release the Earl of March; and
Glyndwr remained unconquerable.
But fortune was now beginning to turn. The danger
from Scotland was suddenly removed. King Kobert
resolved to send his son James for training to the court of
France, but the boy was driven to the English coast by a
storm and Henry refused to release him. Had the Scots
been friends, the King jested, they would have sent James
to him for education, as he knew the French tongue quite
as well as King Charles. Robert died of grief at the news ;
and Scotland fell into the hands of his brother, the Duke of
Albany, whose one aim was that his nephew should remain
a prisoner. James grew up at the English Court; and
prisoner though he was, the excellence of his training
was seen in the poetry and intelligence of his later life.
But with its King as a hostage Scotland was no longer to
be dreaded as a foe. France too was weakened at this
moment ; for in 1405 the long smouldering jealousy be-
tween the Dukes of Orleans and of Burgundy broke out at
last into open strife. The break did little indeed to check
the desultory hostilities which were going on. A Breton
fleet made descents on Portland and Dartmouth. The
Count of Armagnac, the strongest supporter of Orleans
CHAP. V.
1A2a -
Turn of
i
532 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. and the war party, led troops against the frontier of
The Guienne. But the weakness of France and the exhaus-
L^ncaster. tion f its treasury prevented any formal denunciation
1399- of the truce or declaration of war. Though Henry could
J ^?' spare not a soldier for Guienne Armagnac did little hurt.
An English fleet repaid the ravages of the Bretons by
harrying the coast of Britanny ; and the turn of French
politics soon gave Frenchmen too much work at home to
spare men for work abroad. At the close of 1407 the
murder of the Duke of Orleans by the order of the Duke
of Burgundy changed the weak and fitful strife which
had been going on into a struggle of the bitterest hate.
The Count of Armagnac placed himself at the head of
the murdered duke's partizans ; and in their furious
antagonism Armagnac and Burgundian alike sought aid
from the English King.
Prince But the fortune which favoured Henry elsewhere was
Henry. ^^ ^ Qw ^ tum J Q the Wegt J Q ^ O p en ing of 1405
the King's son, Henry Prince of "Wales, had taken the
field against Glyndwr. Young as he was, Henry was
already a tried soldier. As a boy of thirteen he had
headed an incursion into Scotland in the year of his
father's accession to the throne. At fifteen he fought
in the front of the royal army in the desperate fight at
Shrewsbury. Slight and tall in stature as he seemed, he
had outgrown the weakness of his earlier years and was
vigorous and swift of foot ; his manners were courteous,
his air grave and reserved; and though wild tales ran of
revels and riots among his friends, the poets whom he
favoured and Lydgate whom he set to translate " the drery
piteous tale of him of Troy" saw in him a youth "both
manful and vertuous." There was little time indeed for
mere riot in a life so busy as Henry's, nor were many
opportunities for self-indulgence to be found in campaigns
against Glyndwr. What fitted the young general of seven-
teen for the thankless work in Wales was his stern, im-
moveable will. But fortune as yet had few smiles for the
.TV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 533
King in this quarter, and his constant ill-success con- CHAP. V.
tinued to wake fresh troubles within England itself. The ^
repulse of the young prince in a spring campaign in 1405 j^caster
was at once followed by a revolt in the north. The 1^9.
pardon of Northumberland had left him still a foe ; the 14aa -
Earl of Nottingham was son of Henry's opponent, the
banished Duke of Norfolk; Scrope, Archbishop of York,
was brother of Richard's counsellor, the Earl of Wiltshire,
who had been beheaded on the surrender of Bristol. Their
rising in May might have proved a serious danger had
not the treachery of Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmore-
land, who still remained steady to the Lancastrian cause,
secured the arrest of some of its leaders. Scrope and Lord
Nottingham were beheaded, while Northumberland and
his partizan Lord Bardolf fled into Scotland and from
thence to Wales. Succours from France stirred the King
to a renewed attack on Gly ndwr in November ; but with the
same ill-success. Storms and want of food wrecked the
English army and forced it to retreat ; a year of rest raised
Glyndwr to new strength ; and when the long promised
body of eight thousand Frenchmen joined him in 1407
he ventured even to cross the border and to threaten
Worcester. The threat was a vaiii one and the Welsh
army soon withdrew ; but the insult gave fresh heart to
Henry's foes, and in 1408 Northumberland and Bardolf
again appeared in the north. Their overthrow at
Bramliam Moor put an end to the danger from the Percies;
for Northumberland and Bardolf alike fell on the field.
But Wales remained as defiant as ever. In 1409 a body of
Welshmen poured ravaging into Shropshire ; many of the
English towns had fallen into Glyndwr's hands ; and some
of the marcher-lords made private truces with him.
The weakness which was produced by this ill-success in Oldcastle.
the West as well as these constant battlings with dis-
affection within the realm was seen in the attitude of the
Lollards. Lollardry was far from having been crushed by
the Statute of Heresy. The death of the Earl of Salisbury
YOL. I. 35
534 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V. in the first of the revolts against Henry's throne, though
x^ his gory head was welcomed into London by a procession
Lancaster. f abbots and bishops who went out singing psalms of
1399- thanksgiving to meet it, only transferred the leadership
1 . " of the party to one of the foremost warriors of the time,
Sir John Oldcastle. If we believe his opponents, and we
have no information about him save from hostile sources,
he was of lowly origin, and his rise must have been due
to his own capacity and services to the Crown. In his
youth he had listened to the preaching of Wyclif, and his
Lollardry if we may judge from, its tone in later years
was a violent fanaticism. But this formed no obstacle to
his rise in Eichard's reign ; his marriage with the heiress
of that house made him Lord Cobham ; and the accession
of Henry of Lancaster, to whose cause he seems to have
clung in these younger days, brought him fairly to the
front. His skill in arms found recognition in his appoint-
ment as sheriff of Herefordshire and as castellan of
Brecknock; and he was among the leaders who were
chosen in later years for service in France. His warlike
renown endeared him to the King, and Prince Henry
counted him among the most illustrious of his servants.
The favour of the royal house was the more noteable that
Oldcastle was known as "leader and captain" of the
Lollards. His Kentish castle of Cowling served as the
headquarters of the sect, and their preachers were openly
entertained at his houses in London or on the Welsh
border. The Convocation of 1413 charged him Avith being
" the principal receiver, favourer, protector, and defender
of them ; and that, especially in the dioceses of London,
Eochester, and Hereford, he hath sent out the said Lollards
to preach .... and hath been present at their wicked
sermons, grievously punishing with threatenings, terror,
and the power of the secular sword such as did withstand
them, alleging and affirming among other matters that we,
the bishops, had no power to make any such Constitutions "
as the Provincial Constitutions in which they had for-
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
535
bidden the preaching of unlicensed preachers. The bold CHAP. V.
stand of Lord Cobham drew fresh influence from the ^
sanctity of his life. Though the clergy charged him with ^caster.
the foulest heresy, they owned that he shrouded it " under 1399-
a veil of holiness." What chiefly moved their wrath was 1A23 '
that he " armed the hands of laymen for the spoil of the
Church." The phrase seems to hint that Oldcastle was the
mover in the repeated attempts of the Commons to supply
the needs of the state by a confiscation of Church pro-
perty. In 1404 they prayed that the needs of the kingdom
might be defrayed by a confiscation of Church lands,
and though this prayer was fiercely met by Archbishop
Arundel it was renewed in 1410. The Commons declared
as before that by devoting the revenues of the prelates
to the service of the state maintenance could be made for
fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand
squires, while a hundred hospitals might be established for
the sick and infirm. Such proposals had been commonly
made by the baronial party with which the house of Lancaster
had in former days been connected, and hostile as they were
to the Church as an establishment they had no necessary
connexion with any hostility to its doctrines. But a
direct sympathy with Lollardism was seen in the further
proposals of the Commons. They prayed for the abolition
of episcopal jurisdiction over the clergy and for a mitiga-
tion of the Statute of Heresy.
But formidable as the movement seemed it found a Action of
formidable opponent. The steady fighting of Prince Henry jj
had at last met the danger from Wales, and Glyndwr,
though still un conquered, saw district after district submit
again to English rule. From Wales the Prince returned
to bring his will to bear on England itself. It was through
his strenuous opposition that the proposals of the Commons
in 1410 were rejected by the Lords. He gave at the same
moment a more terrible proof of his loyalty to the Church
in personally assisting at the burning of a layman, Thomas
Badby, for a denial of transubstantiation. The prayers of
536
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V.
The
House of
Lancaster.
1399-
1422.
Death of
Henry the
Fourth.
the sufferer were taken for a recantation, and the Prince
ordered the fire to be plucked away. But when the offer
of life and a pension failed to break the spirit of the
Lollard Henry pitilessly bade him be hurled back to his
doom. The Prince was now the virtual ruler of the realm.
His father's earlier popularity had disappeared amidst
the troubles and heavy taxation of his reign. He was
already a victim to the attack of epilepsy which brought
him to the grave; and in the opening of 1410 the Par-
liament called for the appointment of a Continual CounciL
The Council was appointed, and the Prince placed at its
head. His energy was soon seen in a more active inter-
position in the affairs of France. So bitter had the hatred
grown between the Burgundian and Armagnac parties that
both in turn appealed again to England for help. The
Burgundian alliance found favour with the Council. In
August, 1411, the Duke of Burgundy offered his daughter
in marriage to the Prince as the price of English aid,
and four thousand men with Lord Cobham among their
leaders were sent to join his forces at Paris. Their help
enabled Duke John to bring his opponents to battle at St.
Cloud, and to win a decisive victory in November. But
already the King was showing himself impatient of the
Council's control ; and the Parliament significantly prayed
that " as there had been a great murmur among your people
that you have had in your heart a heavy load against some
of your lieges come to this present Parliament," they might
be formally declared to be " faithful lieges and servants."
The prayer was granted, but in spite of the support which
the Houses gave to the Prince, Henry the Eourth was
resolute to assert his power. At the close of 1411 he
declared his will to stand in as great freedom, prerogative,
and franchise as any of his predecessors had done, and
annulled on that ground the appointment of the Continual
Council.
The King's blow had been dealt at the instigation of his
Queen, and it seems to have been prompted as much by
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 537
a resolve to change the outer policy which the Prince CHAP. V.
had adopted as to free himself from the Council. The ^e
dismissal of the English troops by John of Burgundy after Lancaster.
his victory at St. Cloud had irritated the English Court ; 1399-
and the Duke of Orleans took advantage of this turn of 14aa *
feeling to offer Catharine, the French King's daughter, in
marriage to the Prince, and to promise the restoration of
all that England claimed in Guienne and Poitou. In spite
of the efforts of the Prince and the Duke of Burgundy a
treaty of alliance with Orleans was signed on these terms
in May, 1412, and a force under the King's second son, the
Duke of Clarence, disembarked at La Hogue. But the
very profusion of the Orleanist offers threw doubt on their
sincerity. The Duke was only using the English aid to put
a pressure on his antagonist, and its landing in August at
once brought John of Burgundy to a seeming submission.
While Clarence penetrated by Normandy and Maine into
the Orleauois and a second English force sailed for Calais,
both the French parties joined in pledging their services to
King Charles " against his adversary of England." Before
this union Clarence was forced in November to accept
promise of payment for his men from the Duke of Orleans
and to fall back on Bordeaux. The failure no doubt gave
fresh strength to Prince Henry. In the opening of 1412 he
had been discharged from the Council and Clarence set in
his place at its head ; he had been defeated in his attempts
to renew the Burgundian alliance, and had striven in vain
to hinder Clarence from sailing. The break grew into an
open quarrel. Letters were sent into various counties
refuting the charges of the Prince's detractors, and in
September Henry himself appeared before his father with
a crowd of his friends and supporters demanding the
punishment of those who accused him. The charges
made against him were that he sought to bring about the
King's removal from the throne ; and " the great recourse
of people unto him, of which his court was at all times
more abundant than his father's," gave colour to the
538 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
accusation. Henry the Fourth owned his belief in these
charges, but promised to call a Parliament for his son's
iSncaster vindication ; and the Parliament met in the February of
1399- 1413. But a new attack of epilepsy had weakened the
1422. j^ing'g strength ; and though galleys were gathered for a
Crusade which he had vowed he was too weak to meet
the Houses on their assembly. If we may trust a charge
which was afterwards denied, the King's half-brother,
Bishop Henry of Winchester, one of the Beaufort children
of John of Gaunt, acting in secret co-operation with the
Prince, now brought the peers to pray Henry to suffer his
son to be crowned in his stead. The King's refusal was
the last act of a dying man. Before the end of March he
breathed his last in the " Jerusalem Chamber " within the
Abbot's house at "Westminster ; and the Prince obtained
the crown which he had sought.
Suppres- The removal of Archbishop Arundel from the Chancellor-
sionofthe ship, which was given to Henry Beaufort of Winchester,
s ' was among the first acts of Henry the Fifth ; and it is pro-
bable that this blow at the great foe of the Lollards gave
encouragement to the hopes of Oldcastle. He seized the
opportunity of the coronation in April to press his opinions
on the young King, though probably rather with a view to
the plunder of the Church than to any directly religious end.
From the words of the clerical chroniclers it is plain that
Henry had no mind as yet for any open strife with either
party, and that he quietly put the matter aside. He was
in fact busy with foreign affairs. The Duke of Clarence
was recalled from Bordeaux, and a new truce concluded
with France. The policy of Henry was clearly to look on
for awhile at the shifting politics of the distracted kingdom.
Soon after his accession another revolution in Paris gave
the charge of the mad King Charles, and with it the
nominal government of the realm, to the Duke of Orleans;
and his cause derived fresh strength from the support of
the young Dauphin, who was afterwards to play so great a
part in the history of France as Charles the Seventh. John
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 539
of Burgundy withdrew to Flanders, and both parties again CHAP. V.
sought Henry's aid. But his hands were tied as yet by T^
trouble at home. Oldcastle was far from having abandoned Lancaster
his projects, discouraged as they had been by his master; 1399-
while the suspicions of Henry's favour to the Lollard cause
which could hardly fail to be roused by his favour to the
Lollard leader only spurred the bold spirit of Arundel to
energetic action. A council of bishops gathered in the
summer to denounce Lollardry and at once called on
Henry to suffer Oldcastle to be brought to justice. The
King pleaded for delay in the case of one who was so close
a friend, and strove personally to convince Lord Cobhani
of his errors. All however was in vain, and Oldcastle
withdrew to his castle of Cowling, while Arundel summoned
him before his court ana convicted him as a heretic. His
open defiance at last forced the King to act. In September
a body of royal troops arrested Lord Cobham and carried
him to the Tower ; but his life was still spared, and after
a month's confinement his imprisonment was relaxed on his
promise of recantation. Cobham however had now resolved
on open resistance. He broke from the Tower in November,
and from his hiding-place organized a vast revolt. At the
opening of 1414 a secret order summoned the Lollards to
assemble in St. Giles's Fields outside London. We gather,
if not the real aims of the rising, at least the terror
it caused, from Henry's statement that its purpose was " to
destroy himself, his brothers, and several of the spiritual
and temporal lords;" from Cobham's later declarations it
is probable that the pretext of the rising was to release
Richard, whom he asserted to be still alive, and to set him
again on the throne. But the vigilance of the young King
prevented the junction of the Lollards within the city with
their confederates without, and these as they appeared at
the place of meeting were dispersed by the royal troops.
The failure of the rising only increased the rigour of the
law. Magistrates were directed to arrest all heretics and
hand them over to the bishops ; a conviction of heresy was
540
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1399-
1422,
Renewal
of the
French
War.
CHAP. V. made to entail forfeiture of blood and estate ; and the
execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards as traitors
gave terrible earnest of the King's resolve to suppress their
sect. Oldcastle escaped, and for four years longer strove to
rouse revolt after revolt. He was at last captured on
the Welsh border and burned as a heretic ; but from the
moment when his attempt at revolt was crushed in St.
Giles's Fields the dread of Lollardry was broken and
Henry was free to take a more energetic course of policy
on the other side the sea. He had already been silently
preparing for action by conciliatory measures, by restoring
Henry Percy's son to the Earldom of Northumberland, by
the release of the Earl of March, and by the solemn burial
of Eichard the Second at Westminster. The suppression
of the Lollard revolt was followed by a demand for the
restoration of the English possessions in France, and by
alliances and preparations for war. Burgundy stood aloof
in a sullen neutrality, and the Duke of Orleans, who was
now virtually ruler of the French kingdom, in vain pro-
posed concession after concession. All negotiation indeed
broke down when Henry formally put forward his claim
on the crown of France. No claim could have been more
utterly baseless, for the Parliamentary title by which the
House of Lancaster held England could give it no right
over France, and the strict law of hereditary succession
which Edward asserted could be pleaded, if pleaded at all,
only by the House of Mortimer. Not only the claim
indeed, but the very nature of the war itself was wholly
different from that of Edward the Third. Edward had
been forced into the struggle against his will by the ceaseless
attacks of France, and his claim of the crown was little but
an afterthought to secure the alliance of Flanders. The
war of Henry on the other hand, though in form a mere
renewal of the earlier struggle on the close of the
truce made by Richard the Second, was in fact an aggres-
sion on the part of a nation tempted by the helplessness
of its opponent and galled by the memory of former defeat.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 541
, 1
Its one excuse lay in the attacks which France for the past CHAP. V.
fifteen years had directed against the Lancastrian throne,
its encouragement of every enemy without and of every
traitor within. Henry may fairly have regarded such
a ceaseless hostility, continued even through years of weak-
ness, as forcing him in sheer self-defence to secure his
realm against the weightier attack which might be looked
for, should France recover her strength.
In the summer of 1415 the King prepared to sail from Agincourt.
Southampton, when a plot reminded him of the insecurity
of his throne. The Earl of March was faithful : but he
was childless, and his claim would pass at his death through
a sister who had wedded the Earl of Cambridge, a son
of the Duke of York, to her child Pachard, the Duke who
was to play so great a part in the War of the Eoses. It
was to secure his boy's claims that the Earl of Cambridge
seized on the King's departure to conspire with Lord Scrope
and Sir Thomas Grey to proclaim the Earl of March King.
The plot however was discovered and the plotters beheaded
before the King sailed in August for the Norman coast.
His first exploit was the capture of Harfleur. Dysentery
made havoc in his ranks during the siege, and it was with
a mere handful of men that he resolved to insult the
enemy by a daring march like that of Edward upon
Calais. The discord however on which he probably
reckoned for security vanished before the actual appear-
ance of the invaders in the heart of France; and when
his weary and half-starved force succeeded in crossing the
Somme it found sixty thousand Frenchmen encamped on
the field of Agincourt right across its line of march. Their
position, flanked on either side by woods, but with a front
so narrow that the dense masses were drawn up thirty
men deep, though strong for purposes of defence was ill
suited for attack; and the French leaders, warned by
the experience of Creqy and Poitiers, resolved to await
the English advance. Henry on the other hand had no
choice between attack and unconditional surrender. His
542
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [BOOK
The
House of
Lancaster.
1399
1422.
CHAP. V. troops were starving, and the way to Calais lay across the
French army. But the King's courage rose with the peril.
A knight in his train wished that the thousands of stout
warriors lying idle that night in England had been stand-
ing in his ranks. Henry answered with a burst of scorn.
" I would not have a single man more," he replied. " If
God give us the victory, it will be plain we owe it to His
grace. If not, the fewer we are, the less loss for England."
Starving and sick as they were, the handful of men whom
he led shared the spirit of their king. As the chill
rainy night passed away he drew up his army on the
twenty-fifth of October and boldly gave battle. The
English archers bared their arms and breasts to give
fair play to " the crooked stick and the grey goose wing,"
but for which as the rime ran " England were but a
fling," and with a great shout sprang forward to the attack.
The sight of their advance roused the fiery pride of the
French ; the wise resolve of their leaders was forgotten,
and the dense mass of men-at-arms plunged heavily for-
ward through miry ground on the English front. But
at the first sign of movement Henry had halted his line,
and fixing in the ground the sharpened stakes with which
each man was furnished his archers poured their fatal
arrow flights into the hostile ranks. The carnage w r as ter-
rible, for though the desperate charges of the French knight-
hood at last drove the English archers to the neighbouring
woods, from the skirt of these woods they were still
able to pour their shot into the enemy's flanks, while
Henry with the men-at-arms around him flung himself on
the French line. In the terrible struggle which followed
the King bore off the palm of bravery : he was felled once
by a blow from a French mace and the crown of his helmet
was cleft by the sword of the Duke of Alenc,on ; but the
enemy was at last broken, and the defeat of the main body
of the French was followed by the rout of their reserve.
The triumph was more complete, as the odds were even
greater, than at Cre9y. Eleven thousand Frenchmen lay
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 543
dead on the field, and more than a hundred princes and CHAP. V.
great lords were among the fallen. The
The immediate result of the battle of Agincourt was ^caster
small, for the English army was too exhausted for pursuit, 1399-
and it made its way to Calais only to return to England. 1 '^?-
Through 1416 the war was limited to a contest for the
command of the Channel, till the increasing bitterness of Conquer
of J\or-
the strife between the Burgundians and Armagnacs and mandij.
the consent of John of Burgundy to conclude an alliance
encouraged Henry to resume his attempt to recover Nor-
mandy. Whatever may have been his aim in this enter-
prize whether it were, as has been suggested, to provide
a refuge for his house, should its power be broken in
England, or simply to acquire a command of the seas
the patience and skill with which his object was accom-
plished raise him high in the rank of military leaders.
Disembarking in July 1417 with an army of forty thousand
men near the mouth of the Touque, he stormed Caen,
received the surrender of Bayeux, reduced Alen9on and
Falaise, and detaching his brother the Duke of Gloucester
in the spring of 1418 to occupy the Cotentin made himself
master of Avranches and Domfront. With Lower Nor-
mandy wholly in his hands, he advanced upon Evreux,
captured Louviers, and seizing Pont de 1'Arche, threw his
troops across the Seine. The end of these masterly move-
ments was now revealed. Rouen was at this time the
largest and wealthiest of the towns of France ; its walls
were defended by a powerful artillery ; Alan Blanchard, a
brave and resolute patriot, infused the fire of his own
temper into the vast population ; and the garrison, already
strong, was backed by fifteen thousand citizens in arms.
But the genius of Henry was more than equal to the diffi-
culties with which he had to deal. He had secured
himself from an attack on his rear by the reduction of
Lower Normandy, his earlier occupation of Harfleur
severed the town from the sea, and his conquest of Pont
de 1'Ajche cut it off from relief on the side of Paris.
544
HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. V.
The
.House of
Lancaster.
1399-
1422.
Death of
Henry the
Fifth.
Slowly but steadily the King drew his lines of investment
round the doomed city ; a flotilla was brought up from
Harfleur, a bridge of boats thrown over the Seine above
the town, the deep trenches of the besiegers protected by
posts, and the desperate sallies of the garrison stubbornly
b'eaten back. For six months Eouen held resolutely out,
but famine told fast on the vast throng of country folk
who had taken refuge within its walls. Twelve thousand
of these were at last thrust out of the city gates, but the
cold policy of the conqueror refused them passage, and
they perished between the trenches and the walls. In
the hour of their agony women gave birth to infants, but
even the new-born babes which were drawn up in baskets
to receive baptism were lowered again to die on their
mothers' breasts. It was little better within the town
itself. As winter drew on one-half of the population
wasted away. " War," said the terrible King, " has three
handmaidens ever waiting on her, Fire, Blood, and Famine,
and I have chosen the meekest maid of the three." But
his demand of unconditional surrender nerved the citizens
to a resolve of despair ; they determined to fire the city
and fling themselves in a mass on the English lines ; and
Henry, fearful lest his prize should escape him at the last,
was driven to offer terms. Those who rejected a foreign
yoke were suffered to leave the city, but his vengeance
reserved its victim in Alan Blanchard, and the brave
patriot was at Henry's orders put to death in cold blood.
A few sieges completed the reduction of Normandy.
The King's designs were still limited to the acquisition of
that province ; and pausing in his career of conquest, he
strove to win its loyalty by a remission of taxation and a
redress of grievances, and to seal its possession by a formal
peace with the French Crown. The conferences however
which were held for this purpose at Pontoise in 1419 failed
through the temporary reconciliation of the French factions,
while the length and expense of the war began to rouse
remonstrance and discontent at home. The King's diffi-
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 545
culties were at their height when the assassination of John CHAV. V.
of Burgundy at Montereau in the very presence of the <n^
Dauphin with whom he had come to hold conference Lancaster
rekindled the fires of civil strife. The whole Burgundian 1399-
party with the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, 1 ^? 2
at its head flung itself in a wild thirst for revenge into
Henry's hands. The mad King, Charles the Sixth, with
his Queen and daughters were in Philip's power ; and in
his resolve to exclude the Dauphin from the throne the
Duke stooped to buy English aid by giving Catharine, the
eldest of the French princesses, in marriage to Henry, by
conferring on him the Eegency during the life of Charles,
and recognizing his succession to the crown at that sove-
reign's death. A treaty which embodied these terms was
solemnly ratified by Charles himself in a conference at
Troyes in May 1420 ; and Henry, who in his new capacity
of Eegent undertook to conquer in the name of his father-
in-law the territory held by the Dauphin, reduced the
towns of the Upper Seine and at Christmas entered Paris
in triumph side by side with the King. The States-General
of the realm were solemnly convened to the capital ; and
strange as the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes must
have seemed they were confirmed without a murmur.
Henry was formally recognized as the future sovereign of
France. A defeat of his brother Clarence at Bauge in
Aivjou in the spring of 1421 called him back to the war.
His re-appearance in the field was marked by the capture
of Dreux, and a repulse before Orleans was redeemed in
the summer of 1422 by his success in the long and obstinate
siege of Meaux. At no time had the fortunes of Henry
reached a higher pitch than at the moment when he felt
the touch of death. In the month which followed the
surrender of Meaux he fell ill at Corbeuil ; the rapidity of
his disease baffled the skill of the physicians ; and at the
close of August, with a strangely characteristic regret that
he had not lived to achieve the conquest of Jerusalem, tho
great Conqueror passed away.
CHAPTEE VI.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES.
14221461.
Plans of AT the moment when death so suddenly stayed his
j-J- TT-
wry v. course the greatness of Henry the Fifth had reached its
highest point. In England his victories had hushed the
last murmurs of disaffection. The death of the Earl of
Cambridge, the childhood of his son, removed all danger
from the claims of the house of York. The ruin of
Lord Cobhain, the formal condemnation of Wyclif's doc-
trines in the Council of Constance, broke the political and
the religious strength of Lollardry. Henry had won the
Church by his orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike prowess,
the whole people by his revival of the glories of Cregy
and Poitiers. In France his cool policy had transformed
him from a foreign conqueror into a legal heir to the crown.
The King was in his hands, the Queen devoted to his
cause, the Duke of Burgundy was his ally, his title of
Regent and of successor to the throne rested on the formal
recognition of the estates of the realm. Although south-
ern France still clung to the Dauphin, the progress of
Henry to the very moment of his death promised a speedy
mastery of the whole country. His European position was
a commanding one. Lord of the two great western king-
doms, he was linked by close ties of blood with the royal
lines of Portugal and Castille; and his restless activity
showed itself in his efforts to procure the adoption of his
BOOK IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
547
John of
Bedford.
brother John as her successor by the Queen of Naples and CHAP. VI.
in the marriage of a younger brother, Humphrey, with TheWars
Jacqueline, the Countess of Holland and Hainault. Dreams Roses 6
of a vaster enterprize filled the soul of the great conqueror 1422-
himself ; he loved to read the story of Godfrey of Bouillon 1 ^f}-
and cherished the hope of a crusade which should beat
back the Ottoman and again rescue the Holy Land from
heathen hands. Such a crusade might still have saved
Constantinople, and averted from Europe the danger which
threatened it through the century that followed the fall of
the imperial city. Nor was the enterprize a dream in the
hands of the cool, practical warrior and ruler of whom a
contemporary could say " he transacts all his affairs him-
self, he considers well before he undertakes them, he
never does anything fruitlessly."
But the hopes of far off conquests found a sudden close
in Henry's death. His son, Henry the Sixth of England,
was a child of but nine months old : and though he was
peacefully recognized as King in his English realm and as
heir to the throne in the realm of France his position
was a very different one from his father's. The death of
King Charles indeed, two months after that of his son-
in-law, did little to weaken it ; and at first nothing seemed
lost. The Dauphin at once proclaimed himself Charles
the Seventh of France : but Henry was owned as Sove-
reign over the whole of the territory which Charles had
actually ruled; and the incursions which the partizans
of Charles, now reinforced by Lombard soldiers from
the Milanese and by four thousand Scots under the Earl
of Douglas, made with fresh vigour across the Loire were
easily repulsed by Duke John of Bedford, the late King's
brother, who had been named in his will Regent of
France. In genius for war as in political capacity John
was hardly inferior to Henry himself. Drawing closer his
alliance with the Duke of Burgundy by marriage with
that prince's sister, and holding that of Brittany by a
patient diplomacy, he completed the conquest of Northern
548 HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI. France, secured his communications with Normandy by
ThtTwars the capture of Meulan, and made himself master of
Roses! the li ne f the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre. In
1422- 1424 the Constable of Buchan pushed from the Loire to
l ^}' the very borders of Normandy to arrest his progress,
and attacked the English army at Verneuil. But a
repulse hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left
a third of the French knighthood on the field : and the
Kegent was preparing to cross the Loire for a final struggle
with " the King of Bourges " as the English in mockery
called Charles the Seventh when his career of victory was
broken by troubles at home.
Humphrey In England the Lancastrian throne was still too newly
of Glou- established to remain unshaken by the succession of a
ccster.
child of nine months old. Nor was the younger brother of
Henry the Fifth, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whom
the late King's will named as Eegent of the realm, a man
of the same noble temper as the Duke of Bedford. In-
tellectually the figure of Humphrey is one of extreme
interest, for he is the first Englishman in whom we can
trace the faint influence of that revival of knowledge
which was to bring about the coming renascence of the
western world. Humphrey was not merely a patron of poets
and men of letters, of Lydgate and William of Worcester
and Abbot Whethamstede of St. Alban's, as his brother
and other princes of the day had been, but his patronage
seems to have sprung from a genuine interest in learning
itself. He was a zealous collector of books and was able
to bequeath to the University of Oxford a library of a
hundred and thirty volumes. A gift of books indeed was
a passport to his favour, and before the title of each
volume he possessed the Duke wrote words which ex-
pressed his love of them, " moun bien mondain," " my
worldly goods ! " Lydgate tells us how " notwithstanding
his state and dignyte his corage never doth appalle to
studie in books of antiquitie." His studies drew him to
the revival of classic learning which was becoming a
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
549
passion across the Alps. One wandering scholar from
Forli, who took the pompous name of Titus Livius and
who wrote at his request the biography of Henry the Fifth,
Humphrey made his court poet and orator. The Duke
probably aided Poggio Bracciolini in his search for classical
manuscripts when he visited England in 1420. Leonardo
Aretino, one of the scholars who gathered about Cosmo de
Medici, dedicated to him a translation of the Politics of
Aristotle, and when another Italian scholar sent him a fra^-
7 O
ment of a translation of Plato's Republic the Duke wrote to
beg him to send the rest. But with its love of learning
o o
Humphrey combined the restlessness, the immorality, the
selfish, boundless ambition which characterized the age of
the Renascence. His life was sullied by sensual excesses,
his greed of power shook his nephew's throne. So utterly
was he already distrusted that the late King's nomination
of him as Regent was set aside by the royal Council and
he was suffered only to preside at its deliberations with the
nominal title of Protector during Bedford's absence. The
real direction of affairs fell into the hands of his uncle,
Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, a legitimated
son of John of Gaunt by his mistress Catharine Swynford.
Two years of useless opposition disgusted the Duke with
this nominal Protectorship, and in 1424 he left the realm
to push his fortunes in the Netherlands. Jacqueline, the
daughter and heiress of William, Count of Holland and
Hainault, had originally wedded John, Duke of Brabant;
but after a few years of strife she had procured a divorce
from one of the three claimants who now disputed the
Papacy, and at the close of Henry the Fifth's reign she
had sought shelter in England. At his brother's death the
Duke of Gloucester avowed his marriage with her and
adopted her claims as his own. To support them in arms
however was to alienate Philip of Burgundy, who was
already looking forward to the inheritance of his childless
nephew, the Duke of Brabant ; and as the alliance with
Burgundy was the main strength of the English cause in
YOL. I. 36
The Wars
of the
hoses.
1422-
1461.
550
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1422-
1461.
CHAP. VI. France, neither Bedford, who had shown his sense of its
The~Wars value by a marriage with the Duke's sister, nor the Eng-
Koses 5 . lish council were likely to support measures which would
imperil or weaken it. Such considerations however had
little weight with Humphrey ; and in October 1424 he
set sail for Calais without their knowledge with a body
of five thousand men. In a few months he succeeded
in restoring Hainault to Jacqueline, and Philip at once
grew lukewarm in his adherence to the English cause.
Though Bedford's efforts prevented any final break, the
Duke withdrew his forces from France to aid John of
Brabant in the recovery of Hainault and Holland.
Gloucester challenged Philip to decide their claims by
single combat. But the enterprize was abandoned as
hastily as it had been begun. The Duke of Gloucester
was already disgusted with Jacqueline and enamoured of
a lady in her suite, Eleanor, the daughter of Lord
Cobhani; and in the summer of 1425 he suddenly returned
with her to England and left his wife to defend herself as
she might.
What really called him back was more than his passion
for Eleanor Cobham or the natural versatility of his
temper; it was the advance of a rival in England to
further power over the realm. This was his uncle. Henry
Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. The bishop had already
played a leading political part. He was charged with having
spurred Henry the Fifth to the ambitious demands of power
which he made during his father's lifetime ; he became
chancellor on his accession ; and at his death the king left
him guardian of the person of his boy. He looked on
Gloucester's ambition as a danger to his charge, withstood
his recognition as Eegent, and remained at the head of the
Council that reduced his office of Protector to a name.
The Duke's absence in Hainault gave fresh strength to his
opponent : and the nomination of the Bishop to the
Chancellorship marked him out as the virtual ruler of
the realm. On the news of this appointment Gloucester
Henry
Beaufort.
IV/j
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
551
1422-
1461
Siege of
Orleans.
hurried back to accept what he looked on as a challenge
to open strife. The Londoners rose in his name to attack
Beaufort's palace in Southwark, and at the close of 1425
Bedford had to quit his work in France to appease the
strife. In the following year Gloucester laid a formal
bill of accusation against the bishop before the Parliament,
but its rejection forced him to a show of reconciliation,
and Bedford was able to return to France. Hardly was
he gone however when the quarrel began anew. Hum-
phrey found a fresh weapon against Beaufort in his
acceptance of the dignity of a Cardinal and of a Papal
Legate in England ; and the jealousy which this step
aroused drove the Bishop to withdraw for a while from
the Council and to give place to his unscrupulous opponent.
Beaufort possessed an administrative ability, the loss of
which was a heavy blow to the struggling Regent over sea,
where Humphrey's restless ambition had already paralyzed
Bedford's efforts. Much of his strength rested on his Bur-
gundian ally, and the force of Burgundy was drawn to other
quarters. Though Hainault had been easily won back on
Gloucester's retreat and Jacqueline taken prisoner, her
escape from prison enabled her to hold Holland for three
years against the forces of the Duke of Brabant and after
his death against those of the Duke of Burgundy to whom
he bequeathed his dominions. The political strife in England
itself was still more fatal in diverting the supplies of men
and money which were needful for a vigorous prosecution
of the war. To maintain even the handful of forces left to
him Bedford was driven to have recourse to mere forays
which did little but increase the general miseiy. The
north of France indeed was being fast reduced to a desert
by the bands of marauders which traversed it. The hus-
bandmen fled for refuge to the towns till these in fear
of famine shut their gates against them. Then in their
despair they threw themselves into the woods and became
brigands in their turn. So terrible was the devastation
that two hostile bodies of troops failed at one time even to
552
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. BOOK
CHAP. VI. find one another in the desolate Beauce. Misery and dis-
TheWars ease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone. At
of the
Hoses.
1422
1461.
Jeanne
Dare.
last the cessation of the war in Holland and the temporary
lull of strife in England enabled the Begent to take up
again his long interrupted advance upon the South.
Orleans was the key to the Loire ; and its reduction would
throw open Bourges where Charles held his court. Bedford's
resources indeed were still inadequate for such a siege ;
and though the arrival of reinforcements from England
under the Earl of Salisbury enabled him to invest it in
October 1428 with ten thousand men, the fact that so small
a force could undertake the siege of such a town as Orleans
shows at once the exhaustion of England and the terror
which still hung over France. As the siege went on how-
ever even these numbers were reduced. A new fit of
jealousy on the part of the Duke of Burgundy brought
about a recall of his soldiers from the siege, and after their
withdrawal only three thousand Englishmen remained in
the trenches. But the long series of English victories had
so demoralized the French soldiery that in February 1429
a mere detachment of archers under Sir John Fastolfe
repulsed a whole army in what was called ' the Battle of
the Herrings' from the convoy of provisions which the
victors brought in triumph into the camp before Orleans.
Though the town swarmed with men-at-arms not a single
sally was ventured on through the six months' siege, and
Charles the Seventh did nothing for its aid but shut him-
self up in Chinon and weep helplessly.
But the success of this handful of besiegers rested
wholly on the spell of terror which had been cast over
France, and at this moment the appearance of a peasant
maiden broke the spell. Jeanne Dare was the child of a
labourer of Domremy, a little village in the neighbourhood
of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne.
Just without the cottage where she was born began
the great woods of the Vosges where the children of
Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 553
haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the sacred CHAP. VI.
trees, and sang songs to the " good people " who might not The~Wars
drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne loved Roses 6
the forest ; its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her i^ a _
childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but 14gl -
" a good girl, simple and pleasant in her ways," spinning
and sewing by her mother's side while the other girls went
to the fields, tender to the poor and sick, fond of church,
and listening to the church-bell with a dreamy passion of
delight which never left her. This quiet life was broken
by the storm of war as it at last came home to Domremy.
As the outcasts and wounded passed by the little village.
the young peasant girl gave them her bed and nursed
them in their sickness. Her whole nature summed itself
up in one absorbing passion : she " had pity," to use the
phrase for ever on her lip, " on the fair realm of Trance."
As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid
from the Lorraine border should save the land ; she saw
visions ; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding
light, and bade her go to the help of the King and restore
to him his realm. " Messire," answered the girl, "I am
but a poor maiden ; I know not how to ride to the wars, or
to lead men-at-arms." The archangel returned to give her
courage, and to tell her of " the pity " that there was in
heaven for the fair realm of France. The girl wept and
longed that the angels who appeared to her would carry
her away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain that
her father when he heard her purpose swore to drown her
ere she should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in
vain that the priest, the wise people of the village, the
captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and refused to aid her.
" I must go to the King," persisted the peasant girl, " even
if I wear my limbs to the very knees." " I had far rather
rest and spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a
touching pathos, "for this is no work of my choosing,
but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it." " And
who," they asked, " is your Lord ? " " He is God." Words
554
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1422-
1461.
Belief of
Orleans.
such as these touched the rough captain at last : he took
Jeanne by the hand and swore to lead her to the King.
She reached Chinon in the opening of March, but here too
she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved
from their books that they ought not to believe her. " There
is more in God's book than in yours," Jeanne answered
simply. At last Charles himself received her in the
midst of a throng of nobles and soldiers. " Gentle Dauphin,"
said the girl, " my name is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly
King sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and
crowned in the town of Eheirns, and you shall be lieu-
tenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of France."
Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of
surrender when Jeanne appeared in the French court, and
a force was gathering under the Count of Duuois at Blois
for a final effort at its relief. It was at the head of this
force that Jeanne placed herself. The girl was in her
eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the vigour and
activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn to
nightfall on horseback without meat or drink. As she
mounted her charger, clad in white armour from, head to
foot, with a great white banner studded with fleur-de-lys
waving over her head, she seemed " a thing wholly divine,
whether to see or hear." The ten thousand men-at-arms
who followed her from Blois, rough plunderers whose only
prayer was that of La Hire, " Sire Dieu, I pray you to do
for La Hire what La Hire would do for you, were you
captain-at-arms and he God," left off their oaths and foul
living at her word and gathered round the altars on their
march. Her shrewd peasant humour helped her to manage
the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their
camp-fires at an old warrior who had been so puzzled by
her prohibition of oaths that she suffered him still to
swear by his baton. For in the midst of her enthusiasm her
good sense never left her. The people crowded round her
as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bring-
ing crosses and chaplets to be blest by her touch. " Touch
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
555
them yourself," she
"your touch will be
an
good
old Dame Margaret ; CHAP. VI.
as mine." But her TheWars
said to
just as
faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. " The
Maid prays and requires you," she wrote to Bedford,
" to work no more distraction in France but to come in
her company to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk."
" I bring you," she told Dunois when he sallied out of
Orleans to meet her after her two days' march from Blois,
" 1 bring you the best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of
the King of Heaven." The besiegers looked on overawed
as she entered Orleans and, riding round the walls, bade
the people shake off their fear of the forts which sur-
rounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating
generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the enor-
mous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt.
Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest remained,
and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack.
" You have taken your counsel," replied Jeanne, " and I
take mine." Placing herself at the head ot the men-at-
arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led them
agninst the fort. Fow as they were, the English fought
desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen wounded while
endeavouring to scale its" walls, was borne into a vineyard,
while Dunois sounded the retreat. " Wait a while ! ' the
girl imperiously pleaded, " eat and drink ) so soon as my
standard touches the wall you shall enter the fort." It
touched, and the assailants burst in. On the next day the
siege was abandoned, and on the eighth of May the force
which had conducted it withdrew in good order to the
north.
In the midst of her triumph Jeanne still remained the
pure, tender-hearted peasant girl of the Yosges. Her first
visit as she entered Orleans was to the great church, and
there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a passion of
devotion that " all the people wept with her." Her tears
burst forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the
corpses strewn over the battle-field. She grew frightened
of the
Hoses.
1422-
1461.
Corona-
tion of
Charles
556
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI.
The Wars
of the
Hoses.
1422-
1461,
Capture
of Jeanne.
at her first wound, and only threw off the touch of
womanly fear when she heard the signal for retreat. Yet
more womanly was the purity with which she passed
through the brutal warriors of a medieval camp. It was
her care for her honour that led her to clothe herself in a
soldier's dress. She wept hot tears when told of the foul
taunts of the English, and called passionately on God to
witness her chastity. " Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale,"
she cried to the English warrior whose insults had been
foulest as he fell wounded at her feet, " you called me
harlot ! I have great pity on your soul." But all thought
of herself was lost in the thought of her mission. It was
in vain that the French generals strove to remain on the
Loire. Jeanne was resolute to complete her task, and
while the English remained panic-stricken around Paris she
brought Charles to march upon Eheims, the old crowning-
place of the Kings of France. Troyes and Chalons sub-
mitted as she reached them, Eheims drove out the English
garrison and threw open her gates to the king.
With his coronation the Maid felt her errand to be over.
" gentle King, the pleasure of God is done," she cried,
as she flung herself at the feet of Charles and asked leave
to go home. " Would it were His good will," she pleaded
with the Archbishop as he forced her to remain, " that I
might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters and
my brothers : they would be so glad to see me again ! "
But the policy of the French Court detained her while
the cities of the North of France opened their gates to the
newly-consecrated King. Bedford however, who had been
left without money or men, had now received reinforce-
ments. Excluded as Cardinal Beaufort had been from the
Council by Gloucester's intrigues, he poured his wealth
without stint into the exhausted treasury till his loans to
the Crown reached the sum of half-a-million ; and at this
crisis he unscrupulously diverted an army which he had
levied at his own cost for a crusade against the Hussites in
Bohemia to his nephew's aid. The tide of success turned
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
557
1422-
1461.
again. Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, CHAP. VI.
fell back behind the Loire ; while the towns on the Oise TheWars
submitted anew to the Duke of . Burgundy, whose more loses 6
active aid Bedford had bought by the cession of Champagne.
In the struggle against Duke Philip Jeanne fought %vith
her usual bravery but with the fatal consciousness that her
mission was at an end, and during the defence of Compiegne
in the May of 1430 she fell into the power of the Bastard
of Yendorne, to be sold by her captor into the hands of the
Duke of Burgundy and by the Duke into the hands of the
English. To the English her triumphs were victories of
sorcery, and after a year's imprisonment she was brought to
trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court
with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head.
Throughout the long process whiclf followed every art
was used to entangle 'her in her talk. But the simple
shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the efforts of her
judges. " Do you believe," they asked, " that you are in a
state of grace ? " " If I am not," she replied, " God will
put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it." Her
capture, they argued, showed that God had for-
saken her. " Since it has pleased God that I should be
taken," she answered meekly, " it is for the best." " Will
you submit," they demanded at last, " to the judgement of
the Church Militant?" "I have come to the King of
France," Jeanne replied, "by commission from God and
from the Church Triumphant above : to that Church I
submit." " I had far rather die," she ended passionately,
" than renounce what I have done by my Lord's command."
They deprived her of mass. " Our Lord can make me
hear it without your aid," she said, weeping. " Do your
voices," asked the judges, " forbid you to submit to the
Church and the Pope ? " " Ah, no ! our Lord first served."
Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no wonder
that as the long trial dragged on and question followed
question Jeanne's firmness wavered. On the charge of
sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed firmly
558
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1422
1461.
to God. " I hold to my Judge," she said, as her earthly
judges gave sentence against her, " to the King of Heaven
and Earth. God has always been my Lord in all that I
have done. The devil has never had power over me." It
was only with a view to be delivered from the military
prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that
she consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared
in fact among the soldiery 'those outrages to her honour, to
guard against which she had from the first assumed the
dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was
a crime and she abandoned it ; but a renewed affront forced
her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to
it was treated as a relapse into heresy which doomed her
to death. At the close of May, 1431, a great pile was
raised in the market-place of Eouen where her statue
stands now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the
hated " witch " from the hands of the clergy and hurried
her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake.
One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a
stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. As her
eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold she was
heard to murmur, " Oh Eouen, Rouen, I have great fear lest
you suffer for my death." " Yes ! my voices were of God ! "
she suddenly cried as the last moment came ; " they have
never deceived me ! " Soon the flames reached her, the
girl's head sank on her breast, there was one cry of " Jesus!"
" We are lost," an English soldier muttered as the
crowd broke up ; " we have burned a Saint."
The English cause was indeed irretrievablv lost. In
O v
spite of a pompous coronation of the boy-king Henry at
Paris at the close of 1431, Bedford with the cool wisdom
of his temper seems to have abandoned from this time all
hope of permanently retaining France and to have fallen
back on his brother's original plan of securing Normandy.
Henry's Court was established for a year at Eouen, a uni-
versity founded at Caen, and whatever rapine and disorder
might be permitted elsewhere, justice, good government,
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
559
The Wars
of the
.tvoses.
1422-
1461.
and security for trade were steadily maintained through the CHAP. VI.
favoured provinces. At home Bedford was resolutely backed
by Cardinal Beaufort, whose services to the state as well
as his real powers had at last succeeded in outweighing
Duke Humphrey's opposition arid in restoring him to the
head of the royal Council. Beaufort's diplomatic ability
was seen in the truces he wrung from Scotland, and in his
personal efforts to prevent the impending reconciliation of
the Duke of Burgundy with the French King. But the
death of the duke's sister, who was the wife of Bedford,
severed the last link which bound Philip to the English
cause. He pressed for peace : and conferences for this
purpose were held at Arras in 1435. Their failure only
served him as a pretext for concluding a formal treaty
with Charles ; and his desertion was followed by a yet
more fatal blow to the English cause in the death of
Bedford. The loss of the Regent was the signal for the
loss of Paris. In the spring of 1436 the city rose sud-
denly against its English garrison and declared for King
Charles. Henry's dominion shrank at once to Xormandy
and the outlying fortresses of Picardy and Maine. But
reduced as they were to a mere handful, and fronted by a
whole nation in arms, the English soldiers struggled on
with as desperate a bravery as in their days of triumph.
Lord Talbot, the most daring of their leaders, forded the
Somme with the water up to his chin to relieve Crotoy,
and threw his men across the Oise in the face of a French
army to relieve Pontoise.
Bedford found for the moment an able and vigorous
successor in the Duke of York. Richard of York was the
son of the Earl of Cambridge who had been beheaded by
Henry the Fifth ; his mother was Anne, the heiress of the
Mortimers and of their claim to the English crown as
representatives of the third son of Edward the Third,
Lionel of Clarence. It was to assert this claim on his son's
behalf that the Earl embarked in the fatal plot which cost
him his head. But his death left Richard a mere boy
Richard
of York.
560
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The Wars
of the
Roses.
1422-
1461.
CHAP. VI. in the wardship of the Crown, and for years to come all
danger from his pretensions were at an end. Nor did the
young Duke give any sign of a desire to assert them
as he grew to manhood. He appeared content with a
lineage and wealth which placed him at the head of the
English baronage ; for he had inherited from his uncle
the Dukedom of York, his wide possessions embraced
the estates of the families which united in him, the
houses of York, of Clarence, and of Mortimer, and his
double descent from Edward the Third, if it did no more,
set him near to the Crown. The nobles looked up to him
as the head of their order, and his political position recalled
that of the Lancastrian Earls at an earlier time. But the
position of Kiclmrd was as yet that of a faithful servant of
the Crown ; and as Regent of France he displayed the
abilities both of a statesman and of a general. During the
brief space of his regency the tide of ill fortune was
stemmed ; and towns aiid castles were recovered along
the border.
His recall after a twelvemonth's success is the first in-
dication of the jealousy which the ruling house felt of
triumphs gained by one who might some day assert his
claim to the throne. Two years later, in 1440, the Duke
was restored to his post, but it was now too late to do
more than stand on the defensive, and all York's ability
was required to preserve Normandy and Maine. Men and
money alike came scantily from England where the Duke
of Gloucester, freed from the check which Bedford had
laid on him while he lived, was again stirring against
Beaufort and the Council. But his influence had been
weakened by a marriage with his mistress, Eleanor Cob-
ham, and in 1441 it was all but destroyed by an incident
which paints the temper of the time. The restless love
of knowledge which was the one redeeming feature in
Duke Humphrey's character drew to him not only scholars
but a horde of the astrologers and claimants of magical
powers who were the natural product of an age in which
Eleanor
Cobham.
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 561
the faith of the Middle Ages was dying out before the CHAP. VI.
double attack of scepticism and heresy. Amongst these TheWars
was a priest named Eoger Bolinbroke. Bolinbroke was
seized on a charge of compassing the King's death by
sorcery ; and the sudden night of Eleanor Cobham to the 1A61 '
sanctuary at Westminster was soon explained by a like
accusation. Her judges found that she had made a waxen
image of the King and slowly melted it at a fire, a process
which was held to account for Henry's growing weakness
both of body and mind. The Duchess was doomed to
penance for her crime ; she was led bareheaded and bare-
footed in a white penance-sheet through the streets of
London, and then thrown into prison for life. Humphrey
never rallied from the blow. But his retirement from
public affairs was soon followed by that of his rival,
Cardinal Beaufort. Age forced Beaufort to withdraw to
"Winchester ; and the Council was from that time swayed
mainly by the Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, a grand-
son of the minister of Eichard the Second.
Few houses had served the Crown more faithfully than The
that of De la Pole. His father fell at the siege of Har- Bei
fleur ; his brother had been slain at Agincourt ; William
himself had served and been taken prisoner in the war
with France. But as a statesman he was powerless in the
hands of the Beauforts, and from this moment the policy
of the Beauforts drew England nearer and nearer to the
chaos of civil war. John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and
his brother, Edmund, Earl of Dorset, were now the repre-
sentatives of this house. They were grandsons of John of
Gaunt by his mistress, Catharine Swynford. In later days
Catharine became John's wife, and his uncle's influence over
Eichard at the close of that King's reign was shown in a royal
ordinance which legitimated those of his children by her
who had been born before marriage. The ordinance was con-
firmed by an Act of Parliament, which as it passed the
Houses was expressed in the widest and most general terms ;
but before issuing this as a statute Henry the Fourth inserted
562
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
1422-
1461.
CHAP. VI. provisions which left the Beauforts illegitimate in blood
TheWars so far as regarded the inheritance of the crown. Such
Koses. royal alterations of statutes however had been illegal since
the time of Edward the Third ; and the Beauforts never
recognized the force of this provision. But whether they
stood in the line of succession or no, the favour which was
shown them alike by Henry the Fifth and his son drew
them close to the throne, and the weakness of Henry the
Sixth left them at this moment the mainstay of the House
of Lancaster. Edmund Beaufort had taken an active
part in the French wars, and had distinguished himself by
the capture of Harfleur and the relief of Calais. But ho
was hated for his pride and avarice, and the popular hate
grew as he showed his jealousy of the Duke of York.
Loyal indeed as Eichard had proved himself as yet, the
pretensions of his house were the most formidable danger
which fronted the throne ; and with a weak and imbecile
King we can hardly wonder that the Beauforts deemed it
madness to leave in the Duke's hands the wide po\ver of a
Regent in France and the command of the armies across
the sea. In 1444 York was recalled, and his post was
taken by Edmund Beaufort himself.
But the claim which York drew from the house of
Mortimer was not his only claim to the crown ; as the
descendant of Edward the Third's fifth son the crown
would naturally devolve upon him on the extinction of
the House of Lancaster, and of the direct line of that
house Henry the Sixth was the one survivor. It was
to check these hopes by continuing the Lancastrian
succession that Suffolk in 1445 brought about the mar-
riage of the young King with Margaret, the daughter
of Duke Rene of Anjou. But the marriage had another
end. The English ministers were anxious for the close
of the war; and in the kinship between Margaret and
King Charles of France they saw a chance of bring-
ing it about. A truce was concluded as a prelude to a
future peace, and the marriage treaty paved the way for
Loss of
Nor-
mandy.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
56*3
of the
Roses.
14-22
1461.
it by ceding not only Anjou, of which England possessed CHAP. VL
nothing, but Maine, the bulwark of Normandy, to Duke
Rene. For his part in this negotiation Suffolk was raised
to the rank of marquis ; but the terms of the treaty and
the delays which still averted a final peace gave new
strength to the war-party with Gloucester at its head, and
troubles were looked for in the Parliament which met at
the opening of 1447. The danger was roughly met. Glou-
cester was arrested as he rode to Parliament on a charge of
O
secret conspiracy ; and a few days later he was found dead
in his lodging. Suspicions of murder were added to the
hatred against Suffolk ; and his voluntary submission to
an enquiry by the Council into his conduct in the marriage
treaty, which was followed by his acquittal of all blame,
did little to counteract this. '\Vhat was yet more fatal to
Suffolk was the renewal of the war. In the face of the
agitation against it the English ministers had never dared
to execute the provisions of the marriage-treaty ; and in
1448 Charles the Seventh sent an army to enforce the
cession of Le Mans. Its surrender averted the struggle
for a moment. But in the spring of 1449 a body of Eng-
lish soldiers from Normandy, mutinous at their want of
pay, crossed the border and sacked the rich town of
Fougeres in Brittany. Edmund Beaufort, who had now
succeeded to the dukedom of Somerset, protested his inno-
cence of this breach of truce, but he either could not or
would not make restitution, and the war was renewed.
From this moment it was a mere series of French suc-
cesses. In two months half Normandy was in the hands
of Dunois ; Eouen rose against her feeble garrison and
threw open her gates to Charles ; and the defeat at Four-
niigny of an English force which was sent to Somerset's
aid was a signal for revolt throughout the rest of the
provinces. The surrender of Cherbourg in August, 1450,
left Henry not a foot of Xorman ground.
The loss of Normandy was generally laid to the charge National
of Somerset. He was charged with a miserly hoarding of discontent.
564 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI. supplies as well as planning in conjunction with Suffolk
The^Wars ^ ne f^al sack of Fougeres. His incapacity as a general
Boses 6 added to the resentment at his recall of the Duke of York,
1422- a recall which had been marked as a disgrace by the
1461. despatch of Richard into an honourable banishment as
lieutenant of Ireland. But it was this very recall
which proved most helpful to York. Had he remained in
France he could hardly have averted the loss of Kormandy,
though he might have delayed it. As it was the shame of
its loss fell upon Somerset, while the general hatred of the
Beauforts and the growing contempt of the King whom
they ruled expressed itself in a sudden rush of popular
favour towards the man whom his disgrace had marked
out as the object of their ill-will. From this moment the
hopes of a better and a stronger government centred them-
selves in the Duke of York. The news of the French suc-
cesses was at once followed by an outbreak of national
wrath. Political ballads denounced Suffolk as the ape
with his clog that had tied Talbot, the good " dog " who
was longing to grip the Frenchmen. When the Bishop of
Chichester, who had been sent to pay the sailors at Ports-
mouth, strove to put off the men with less than their due,
they fell on him and slew him. Suffolk was impeached,
and only saved from condemnation by submitting himself
to the King's mercy. He was sent into exile, but as he
crossed the sea he was intercepted by a ship of Kentishmen,
beheaded, and his body thrown on the sands at Dover.
Revolt of Kent was the centre of the national resentment. It
; " ' was the great manufacturing district of the day, seeth-
ing with a busy population, and especially concerned with
the French contest through the piracy of the Cinque Ports.
Every house along its coast showed some spoil from the wars.
Here more than anywhere the loss of the great province
whose cliffs could be seen from its shores was felt as a crown-
ing disgrace, and as we shall see from the after complaints
of its insurgents political wrongs added their fire to the
national shame. Justice was ill administered ; taxation was
rv.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 565
unequal and extortionate. Redress for such evils would now CHAP. VI.
naturally have been sought from Parliament ; but the TheWars
weakness of the Crown gave the great nobles power to rob Roses 6
the freeholders of their franchise and return the knights IASZ-
of the shire. Nor could redress be looked for from the 1 * 61 '
Court. The murder of Suffolk was the act of Kentish-
men, and Suffolk's friends still held control over the royal
councils. The one hope of reform lay in arms ; and in
the summer of 1450, while the last of the Norman
fortresses were throwing open their gates, the discontent
broke into open revolt. The rising spread from Kent over
Surrey and Sussex. Everywhere it was general and or-
ganized a military levy of the yeomen of the three shires.
The parishes sent their due contingent of armed men ; we
know that in many hundreds the constables formally sum-
moned their legal force to war. The insurgents were
joined by more than a hundred esquires and gentlemen ;
and two great landholders of Sussex, the Abbot of Battle
and the Prior of Lewes, openly favoured their cause. John
Cade, a soldier of some experience in the French wars,
took at this crisis the significant name of Mortimer and
placed himself at their head. The army, now twenty thou-
sand men strong, marched in the beginning of June on
Blackheath. On the advance of the King with an equal
force however they determined to lay their complaint before
the royal Council and withdraw to their homes. The
" Complaint of the Commons of Kent," is of high value in
the light which it throws on the condition of the people.
Not one of the demands touches on religious reform. The
question of villeinage and serfage finds no place in it. In
the seventy years which had intervened since the last
peasant rising, villeinage had died naturally away before the
progress of social change. The Statutes of Apparel, which
from this time encumber the Statute-book, show in their
anxiety to curtail the dress of the labourer and the faimer
the progress of these classes in comfort and wealth ; and
from the language of the statutes themselves it is plain
VOL.!. 3T
566 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI. that as wages rose both farmer and labourer went on
TheWars clothing themselves better in spite of sumptuary pro-
poses visions. With the exception of a demand for the repeal
14^22- f the Statute of Labourers, the programme of the
IASI, Commons was not social but political. The "Com-
plaint " calls for administrative and economical reforms ;
it denounces the exclusion of the Duke of York and other
nobles from the royal councils ; it calls for a change of
ministry, a more careful expenditure of the royal revenue,
and for the restoration of freedom of election which had
been broken in upon by the interference both of the Crown
and the great landowners.
Suppres- The Council refused to receive the "Complaint," and
8i { lt ihe a body of troops under Sir Humphrey Stafford fell on the
Kentishmen as they reached Sevenoaks. This attack how-
ever was roughly beaten off, and Cade's host turned back
to encounter the royal army. But the royal army itself
was already calling for justice on the traitors who misled
the King ; and at the approach of the Kentishmen it broke
up in disorder. Its dispersion was followed by Henry's
flight to Kenilworth and the entry of the Kentishmen
into London, where the execution of Lord Say, the most
unpopular of the royal ministers, broke the obstinacy of
his colleagues. For three days the peasants entered the
city freely, retiring at nightfall to their camp across the
river : but on the fifth of July the men of London, goaded
by the outrages of the rabble whom their presence roused
to plunder, closed the bridge against them, and beat back
an attack with great slaughter. The Kentishmen still
however lay unbroken in Southwark, while Bishop "Wayn-
flete conferred with Cade on beha]f of the Council. Their
" Complaint " was received, pardons were granted to all
who had joined in the rising, and the insurgents dis-
persed quietly to their homes. Cade had striven in vain
to retain them in arms ; on their dispersion he formed
a new force by throwing open the gaols, and carried off
the booty he had won to Rochester. Here however his
IV.] THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461. 567
men quarrelled over the plunder ; his force brokemprand CHAP. VI.
Cade himself was slain by Iden, the Sheriff of Kent, as xhfTwarg
he fled into Sussex. | f g
Kent remained restless through the year, and a rising in 1^22-
"VYilt shire showed the growing and wide-spread trouble of 1A61 '
the time. The "Complaint" indeed had only been received
to be laid aside. No attempt was made to redress the York and
grievances which it stated or to reform the government. f^^
On the contrary the main object of popular hate, the Duke
of Somerset, was at once recalled from Normandy to take
his place at the head of the royal Council. York on the
other hand, whose recall had been pressed in the " Com-
plaint," was looked upon as an open foe. "Strange
language " indeed had long before the Kentish rising been
uttered about the Duke. Men had threatened that he
"should be fetched with many thousands," and the expecta-
tion of his coming to reform the government became so
general that orders were given to close the western ports
against his landing. If we believe the Duke himself, he
was forced to move at last by efforts to indict him as a
traitor in Ireland itself. Crossing at Michaelmas to "Wales
in spite of the efforts to arrest him, he gathered four
thousand men on his estates and marched upon London.
No serious effort was made to prevent his approach to the
King; and Henry found himself helpless to resist his
demand of a Parliament and of the admission of new
councillors to the royal council-board. Parliament met in
November, and a bitter strife between York and Somerset
ended in the arrest of the latter. A demand which at
once followed shows the importance of his fall. Henry
the Sixth still remained childless ; and Young, a member
for Bristol, proposed in the Commons that the Duke of
York should be declared heir to the throne. But the blow
was averted by repeated prorogations, and Henry's sym-
pathies were shown by the committal of Young to the Tower,
by the release of Somerset, and by his promotion to the
captaincy of Calais, the most important military post
568 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI. under the Crown. The Commons indeed still remained
TheTWars resolute. When they again met in the summer of 1451
Soses 6 they called for the removal of Somerset and his creatures
1422- from the King's presence. But Henry evaded the demand ;
1 15^' and the dissolution of the Houses announced the royal
resolve to govern in defiance of the national will.
Failureof The contest between the Houses and the Crown had cost
England her last possessions across the Channel. As York
marched upon London Charles closed on the fragment of
the duchy of Guienne which still remained to the descend-
ants of Eleanor. In a few months all was won. Bourg
and Blaye surrendered in the spring of 1451, Bordeaux
in the summer ; two months later the loss of Bayonne
ended the war in the south. Of all the English posses-
sions in France only Calais remained ; and in 1452 Calais
was threatened with attack. The news of this crowning
danger again called York to the front. On the declaration
of Henry's will to resist all change in the government
the Duke had retired to his castle of Ludlow, arresting the
whispers of his enemies with a solemn protest that he was
true liegeman to the King. But after events show that he
was planning a more decisive course of action than that
which had broken down with the dissolution of the Parlia-
ment, and the news of the approaching siege gave ground
for taking such a course at once. Somerset had been
appointed Captain of Calais, and as his incapacity had
lost England Normandy, it would cost her so England
believed her last fortress in France. It was said indeed
that the Duke was negotiating with Burgundy for its sur-
render. In the spring of 1452 therefore York again
inarched on London, but this time with a large body of ord-
nance and an army which the arrival of reinforcements
under Lord Cobham and the Earl of Devonshire raised to
over twenty thousand men. Eluding the host which
gathered round the King and Somerset he passed by the
capital, whose gates had been closed by Henry's orders, and
entering Kent took post at Dartford. His army was soon
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
569
1422-
1461.
fronted by the superior force of the King, but the inter-
position of the more moderate lords of the Council averted
open conflict. Henry promised that Somerset should be
put on his trial on the charges advanced by the Duke, and
York on this pledge disbanded his men. But the pledge
was at once broken. Somerset remained in power. York
found himself practically a prisoner, and only won his release
by an oath to refrain from further " routs " or assemblies.
Two such decisive failures seemed for the time to have
utterly broken Eichard's power. Weakened as the crown
had been by losses abroad, it was clearly strong enough
as yet to hold its own against the chief of the baronage.
A general amnesty indeed sheltered York's adherents
and enabled the Duke himself to retire safely to Ludlow,
but for more than a year his rival Somerset wielded
without opposition the power Eichard had striven to
wrest from him. A favourable turn in the progress of the
war gave fresh vigour to the Government. The French
forces were abruptly called from their march against Calais
to the recovery of the south. The towns of Guienne had
opened their gates to Charles on his pledge to respect their
franchises, but the need of the French treasury was too
great to respect the royal word, and heavy taxation turned
the hopes of Gascony to its old masters. On the landing
of an English force under Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, a
general revolt restored to the English their possessions
on the Garonne. Somerset used this break of better for-
tune to obtain heavy subsidies from Parliament in 1453 ;
but ere the twenty thousand men whose levy was voted
could cross the Channel a terrible blow had again ruined
the English cause. In a march to relieve Castillon on the
Dordogne Shrewsbury suddenly found himself face to face
with the whole French army. His men were mown down
by its guns, and the Earl himself left dead on the field.
His fall was the signal for a general submission. Town
after town a^ain threw open its gates to Charles, and
Bordeaux capitulated in October.
570
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI.
The Wars
of the
Roses.
1422
1461.
Madness
of the
King.
York's
revolt.
The final loss of Gascony fell upon England at a moment
when two events at home changed the whole face of
affairs. After eight years of childlessness the King
became in October the father of a son. AVith the birth
of this boy the rivalry of York and the Beauforts for the
right of succession ceased to be the mainspring of English
politics ; and the crown seemed again to rise out of the
turmoil of warring factions. But with the birth of the
son came the madness of the father. Henry the Sixth
sank into a state of idiotcy which made his rule impos-
sible, and his ministers were forced to call a great Council
of peers to devise means for the government of the realm.
York took his seat at this council, and the mood of the
nobles was seen in the charges of misgovernment which
were at once made against Somerset, and in his committal
to the Tower. But Somerset was no longer at the head
of the royal party. With the birth of her son the Queen,
Margaret of Anjou, came to the front. Her restless
despotic temper was quickened to action by the dangers
which she saw threatening her boy's heritage of the
crown ; and the demand to be invested with the full royal
power which she made after a vain effort to rouse her
husband from his lethargy aimed directly at the exclusion
of the Duke of York. The demand however was roughly
set aside ; the Lords gave permission to York to summon
a Parliament as the King's lieutenant; and on the assembly
of the Houses in the spring of 1454, as the mental aliena-
tion of the King continued, the Lords chose Eichard Pro-
tector of the Realm. With Somerset in prison little
opposition could be made to the Protectorate, and that
little was soon put down. But the nation had hardly
time to feel the guidance of Eichard's steady hand when
it was removed. At the opening of 1455 the King
recovered his senses, and York's Protectorate came at once
to an end.
Henry had no sooner grasped power again than he fell
back on his old policy. The Queen became his chief adviser.
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
571
The Wars
of the
Roses.
1422-
1461.
The Duke of Somerset was released from the Tower and CHAP. VI.
owned by Henry in formal court as his true and faithful
liegeman. York on the other hand was deprived of the
government of Calais, and summoned with his friends to a
council at Leicester, whose object was to provide for the
surety of the King's person. Prominent among these friends
were two Earls of the house of Neville. We have seen
how great a part the Nevilles played after the accession of
the house of Lancaster ; it was mainly to their efforts that
Henry the Fourth owed the overthrow of the Percies, their
rivals in the mastery of the north ; and from that moment
their wealth and power had been steadily growing. Pdchard
Neville, Earl of Salisbury, was one of the mightiest barons
of the realm; but his power was all but equalled by
that of his son, a second Richard, who had won the
Earldom of Warwick by his marriage with the heiress of
the Beauchamps. The marriage of York to Salisbury's
sister, Cecily Neville, had bound both the earls to his
cause, and under his Protectorate Salisbury had been
created Chancellor. But he was stripped of this office on
the Duke's fall ; and their summons to the council of
Leicester was held by the Nevilles to threaten ruin to
themselves as to York. The three nobles at once took
arms to secure, as they alleged, safe access to the King's
person. Henry at the news of their approach mustered
two thousand men, and with Somerset, the Earl of North-
umberland, and other nobles in his train, advanced to
St. Albans.
On the 23rd of May York and the two Earls encamped
without the town, and called on Henry " to deliver such
as we will accuse, and they to have like as they have
deserved and done." The King's reply was as bold as the
demand. " Ptather than they shall have any lord here with
me at this time," he replied, " I shall this day for their sake
and in this quarrel myself live and die." A summons to dis-
perse as traitors left York and his fellow nobles no hope but
in an attack. At eventide three assaults were made on the
The
civil war.
572
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
CHAP. VI. town. Warwick was the first to break in, and the sound
TheWara of his trumpets in the streets turned the fight into a rout.
Roses. Death had answered the prayer which Henry rejected, for
1422- the Duke of Somerset with Lord Clifford and the Earl of
x ^^' Northumberland were among the fallen. The King himself
fell into the victors' hands. The three lords kneeling be-
O
fore him prayed him to take them for his true liegemen,
and then rode by his side in triumph into London, where
a parliament was at once summoned which confirmed the
acts of the Duke ; and on a return of the King's malady
again nominated York as Protector. But in the spring of
1456 Henry's recovery again ended the Duke's rule ; and
for two years the warring parties sullenly watched one
another. A temporary reconciliation between them was
brought about by the misery of the realm, but an attempt
of the Queen to arrest the Nevilles in 1458 caused a fresh
outbreak of war. Salisbury defeated Lord Audley in a
fight at Bloreheath in Staffordshire, and York with the two
Earls raised his standard at Ludlow. But the crown was
still stronger than any force of the baronage. The King
marched rapidly on the insurgents, and a decisive battle
was only averted by the desertion of a part of the Yorkist
army and the disbanding of the rest. The Duke him-
self fled to Ireland, the Earls to Calais, while the Queen,
summoning a Parliament at Coventry in November pressed
on their attainder. But the check, whatever its cause, had
been merely a temporary one. York and Warwick planned
a fresh attempt from their secure retreats in Ireland and
Calais ; and in the midsummer of 1460 the Earls of
Salisbury and Warwick, with-Eichard's son Edward, the
young Earl of March, again landed in Kent. Backed by
a general rising of the county they entered London amidst
the acclamations of its citizens. The royal army was
defeated in a hard- fought action at Northampton in July.
Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was left a prisoner
in the hands of the Duke of York.
The position of York as heir presumptive to the crown
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
573
Richard
by his descent from Edmund of Langley had ceased with CHAP. VI.
the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth : but the victory of TheWars
Northampton no sooner raised him to the supreme control Roses!
of affairs than he ventured to assert the far more dangerous 1423.
claims which he had secretly cherished as the representative J ^V
of Lionel of Clarence, and to their consciousness of which
was owing the hostility of Henry and his Queen. Such a
claim was in direct opposition to that power of the two
Houses whose growth had been the work of the past hun-
dred years. There was no constitutional ground for any
limitation of the right of Parliament to set aside an elder
branch in favour of a younger, and in the Parliamentary Act
which placed the House of Lancaster on the throne the claim
of the House of Mortimer had been deliberately set aside.
Possession, too, told against the Yorkist pretensions. To
modern minds the best reply to Pdchard's claim lay in
the words used at a later time by Henry himself. " My
father was King ; his father also was King ; I myself have
worn the crown forty years from my cradle : you have all
sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers
have done the like to mine. How then can my right be
disputed ? " Long and undisturbed possession as well as
a distinctly legal title by free vote of Parliament was in
favour of the House of Lancaster. But the persecution
of the Lollards, the interference with elections, the odium
of the war, the shame of the long misgovernment, told
fatally against the weak and imbecile King whose reign
had been a long battle of contending factious. That the
misrule had been serious was shown by the attitude of the
commercial class. It was the rising of Kent, the great
manufacturing district of the realm, which brought about
the victory of Northampton. Throughout the struggle
which followed London and the great merchant towns
were steady for the House of York. Zeal for the Lancas-
trian cause was found only in Wales, in northern England,
and in the south-western shires. It is absurd to suppose
that the shrewd traders of Cheapside were moved by ail
574
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK
The Wars
of the
Roses,
1422
1461.
CHAP. VI. abstract question of hereditary right, or that the wild
Welshmen believed themselves to be supporting the right of
Parliament to regulate the succession. But it marks the
power which Parliament had gained that, directly as his
claims ran in the teeth of a succession established by it, the
Duke of York felt himself compelled to convene the two
Houses in October and to lay his claim before the Lords
as a petition of right. Neither oaths nor the numerous
Acts which had settled and confirmed the right to the
crown in the House of Lancaster could destroy, he pleaded,
his hereditary claim. The bulk of the Lords refrained
from attendance, and those who were present received the
petition with hardly concealed reluctance. They solved
the question, as they hoped, by a compromise. They
refused to dethrone the King, but they had sworn no fealty
to his child, and at Henry's death they agreed to receive
the Duke as successor to the crown.
But the open display of York's pretensions at once
united the partizans of the royal House in a vigorous
resistance ; and the deadly struggle which received the
name of the Wars of the Eoses from the white rose
which formed the badge of the House of York and the
red rose which was the cognizance of the House of Lan-
caster began in a gathering of the North round Lord
Clifford and of the West round Henry, Duke of Somerset,
the son of the Duke who had fallen at St. Albans. York,
who hurried in December to meet the first with a far
inferior force, was defeated and slain at Wakefield. The
passion of civil war broke fiercely out on the field. The
Earl of Salisbury who had been taken prisoner was
hurried to the block. The head of Duke Richard, crowned
in mockery with a diadem of paper, is said to have
been impaled on the walls of York. His second son,
Lord Rutland, fell crying for mercy on his knees
before Clifford. But Clifford's father had been the first to
fall in the battle of St. Alban's which opened the struggle.
" As your father killed mine," cried the savage Baron,
War of
the Roses.
Greenes Eisttrr\
THE WARS
of the
ROSES
Harper ScBrothers tf
IV.]
THE PARLIAMENT. 13071461.
575
while he plunged his dagger in the young noble's breast, " I CHAP. VI.
will kill you ! " The brutal deed was soon to be avenged. iheWars
Eichard's eldest son, Edward, the Earl of March, was busy Jioses 5
gathering a force on the Welsh border in support of his 1422-
father at the moment when the Duke was defeated and slain. 1 *JL 1>
Young as he was Edward showed in this hour of apparent
ruin the quickness and vigour of his temper, and routing
on his march a body of Lancastrians at Mortimer's Cross
struck boldly upon London. It was on London that the
Lancastrian army had moved after its victory at Wakefield.
A desperate struggle took place at St. Albans where a force
of Kentish men with the Earl of Warwick strove to bar its
march on the capital, but Warwick's force broke under
cover of night and an immediate advance of the conquerors
might have decided the contest. Margaret however
paused to sully her victory by a series of bloody execu-
tions, and the rough northerners who formed the bulk of
her army scattered to pillage while Edward, hurrying
from the west, appeared before the capital The citizens
rallied at his call, and cries of " Long live King Edward "
rang round the handsome young leader as he rode through
the streets. A council of Yorkist lords, hastily summoned,
resolved that the compromise agreed on in Parliament was
at an end and that Henry of Lancaster had forfeited the
throne. The final issue however now lay not with
Parliament, but -with the sword. Disappointed of
London, the Lancastrian army fell rapidly back on the
North, and Edward hurried as rapidly in pursuit. On
the 29th of March, 1461, the two armies encountered
one another at Towton Field, near Tadcaster. In the
numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy of
the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England
since the fight of Senlac. The two armies together
numbered nearly 120,000 men. The day had just broken
when the Yorkists advanced through a thick snowfall,
and for six hours the battle raged with desperate bravery
on either side. At one critical moment Warwick saw his
576
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [BOOK I
CHAP. VI.
The Wars
of the
Hoses.
1422
1461.
men falter, and stabbing his horse before them, swore on
the cross of his sword to win or die on the field. The
battle was turned at last by the arrival of the Duke of
Norfolk with a fresh force from the Eastern Counties, and
at noon the Lancastrians gave way. A river in their rear
turned the retreat into a rout, and the flight and carnage,
for no quarter was given on either side, went on through
the night and the morrow. Edward's herald counted more
than 20,000 Lancastrian corpses on the field. The losses
of the conquerors were hardly less heavy than those of
the conquered. But their triumph was complete. The
Earl of Northumberland was slain ; the Earls of Devon-
shire and Wiltshire were taken and beheaded ; the Duke
of Somerset fled into exile. Henry himself with his
Queen was forced to fly over the border and to find a
refuge in Scotland. The cause of the House of Lancaster
was lost ; and with the victory of Towton the crown of
England passed to Edward of York.
END OF VOL I.
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