CHAPTER I.

THE ENGLAND OF HENRY I.

1100–1135.

“When the green tree, cut asunder in the midst and severed by the space of three furlongs, shall be grafted in again and shall bring forth flowers and fruit,--then at last may England hope to see the end of her sorrows.”[1]

[1] _Vita Edwardi_ (Luard), p. 431.

So closed the prophecy in which the dying king Eadward the Confessor foretold the destiny in store for his country after his departure. His words, mocked at by one of the listeners, incomprehensible to all, found an easy interpretation a hundred years later. The green tree of the West-Saxon monarchy had fallen beneath Duke William’s battle-axe; three alien reigns had parted its surviving branch from the stem; the marriage of Henry I. with a princess of the old English blood-royal had grafted it in again.[2] One flower sprung from that union had indeed bloomed only to die ere it reached its prime,[3] but another had brought forth the promised fruit; and the dim ideal of national prosperity and union which English and Normans alike associated with the revered name of the Confessor was growing at last into a real and living thing beneath the sceptre of Henry Fitz-Empress.

[2] Æthelred of Rievaux, _Vita S. Edw. Regis_ (Twysden, _X. Scriptt._), col. 401.

[3] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 419 (Hardy, p. 652), notes that the fulfilment of the prophecy was looked for in William the Ætheling.

There are, at first glance, few stranger things in history than the revival thus prefigured:--a national revival growing up, as it seems, in the most adverse circumstances, under the pressure of an alien government, of a race of kings who were strangers alike to the men of old English blood and to the descendants of those who had come over with the Conqueror: at a time when, in a merely political point of view, England seemed to be not only conquered but altogether swallowed up in the vast and varied dominions of the house of Anjou. It was indeed not the first time that the island had become an appendage to a foreign empire compared with which she was but a speck in the ocean. Cnut the Dane was, like Henry of Anjou, not only king of England but also ruler of a great continental monarchy far exceeding England in extent, and forming together with her a dominion only to be equalled, if equalled at all, by that of the Emperor. But the parallel goes no farther. Cnut’s first kingdom, the prize of his youthful valour, was his centre and his home, of which his Scandinavian realms, even his native Denmark, were mere dependencies. Whatever he might be when he revisited them, in his island-kingdom he was an Englishman among Englishmen. The heir of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of Normandy, on the other hand, was virtually of no nationality, no country; but if he could be said to have a home at all, it was certainly not on this side of the sea--it was the little marchland of his fathers. In the case of his sons, the southern blood of their mother Eleanor added a yet more un-English element; and of Richard, indeed, it might almost be said that the home of his choice was not in Europe at all, but in Holy Land. Alike to him and to his father, England was simply the possession which gave them their highest title, furnished them with resources for prosecuting their schemes of continental policy, and secured to them a safe refuge on which to fall back in moments of difficulty or danger. It was not till the work of revival was completed, till it had resulted in the creation of the new England which comes to light with Edward I., that it could find a representative and a leader in the king himself. The sovereign in whose reign the chief part of the work was done stood utterly aloof from it in sympathy; yet he is in fact its central figure and its most important actor. The story of England’s developement from the break-down of the Norman system under Stephen to the consolidation of a national monarchy under Edward I. is the story of Henry of Anjou, of his work and of its results. But as the story does not end with Henry, so neither does it begin with him. It is impossible to understand Henry himself without knowing something of the race from which he sprang; of those wonderful Angevin counts who, beginning as rulers of a tiny under-fief of the duchy of France, grew into a sovereign house extending its sway from one end of Christendom to the other. It is impossible to understand his work without knowing something of what England was, and how she came to be what she was, when the young count of Anjou was called to wear her crown.

The project of an empire such as that which Henry II. actually wielded had been the last dream of William Rufus. In the summer of 1100 the duke of Aquitaine, about to join the Crusaders in Holy Land, offered his dominions in pledge to the king of England. Rufus clutched at the offer “like a lion at his prey.”[4] Five years before he had received the Norman duchy on the same terms from his brother Robert; he had bridled its restless people and brought them under control; he had won back its southern dependency, his father’s first conquest, the county of Maine. Had this new scheme been realized, nothing but the little Angevin march would have broken the continuity of a Norman dominion stretching from the Forth to the Pyrenees, and in all likelihood the story of the Angevin kings would never have had to be told. Jesting after his wont with his hunting-companions, William--so the story goes--declared that he would keep his next Christmas feast at Poitiers, if he should live so long.[5] But that same evening the Red King lay dead in the New Forest, and his territories fell asunder at once. Robert of Normandy came back from Palestine in triumph to resume possession of his duchy; while the barons of England, without waiting for his return, chose his English-born brother Henry for their king.

[4] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 780.

[5] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6296–6298 (Wright, p. 219).

Thirteen years before, at his father’s death, Henry, the only child of William and Matilda who was actually born in the purple--the child of a crowned king and queen, born on English soil, and thus by birth, though not by descent, entitled to rank as an English Ætheling--had been launched into the world at the age of nineteen without a foot of land that he could call his own. The story went that he had complained bitterly to the dying Conqueror of his exclusion from all share in the family heritage. “Have patience, boy,” was William’s answer, “let thine elder brothers go before thee; the day will come when thou shalt be greater than either of them.” Henry was, however, not left a penniless adventurer dependent on the bounty of his brothers; the Conqueror gave him a legacy of ten thousand pounds as a solid provision wherewith to begin his career. A year had scarcely passed before Duke Robert, overwhelmed with troubles in Normandy, found himself at his wits’ end with an empty treasury, and besought Henry to lend him some money. The Ætheling, as cool and calculating as his brothers were impetuous, refused; the duke in desperation offered to sell him any territory he chose, and a bargain was struck whereby Henry received, for the sum of three thousand pounds, the investiture of the Cotentin, the Avranchin, and the Mont-St.-Michel--in a word, the whole western end of the Norman duchy.[6] Next summer, while the duke was planning an attempt on the English crown and vainly awaiting a fair wind to enable him to cross the Channel, the count of the Cotentin managed to get across without one, to claim the estates in Gloucestershire formerly held by his mother and destined for him by his father’s will. He was received by William Rufus only too graciously, for the consequence was that some mischief-makers, always specially plentiful at the Norman court, persuaded Duke Robert that his youngest brother was plotting against him with the second, and when Henry returned in the autumn he had no sooner landed than he was seized and cast into prison.[7] Within a year he was free again, reinstated, if not in the Cotentin, at least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel, and entrusted with the keeping of Rouen itself against the traitors stirred up by the Red King. William, while his young brother was safe in prison, had resumed the Gloucestershire estates and made them over to his favourite Robert Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment threw himself with all his energies into the cause of the duke of Normandy, acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout the war with Rufus which followed, and at the close of the year crowned his services by the promptitude and valour with which he defeated a conspiracy for betraying the Norman capital to the king of England.[8] The struggle ended in a treaty between the elder brothers, in which neither of them forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took the shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories and divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack soon brought him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the rock crowned by the abbey of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, commonly called Mont-Saint-Michel. Henry threw himself into the place with as many knights as were willing to share the adventure; the brethren of the abbey did their utmost to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison, perched on their inaccessible rock, held out against their besiegers.[9] Then hunger began to thin their ranks; nothing but the inconsistent generosity of Robert saved them from the worse agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they dropped away, till Henry saw that he must yield to fate, abide by his father’s counsel, and wait patiently for better days. He surrendered; he came down from the Mount, once again a landless and homeless man; and save for one strange momentary appearance in England as a guest at the Red King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two years in France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge to another with a lowly train of one knight, three squires, and one chaplain.[12] He was at length recalled by the townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to desperation by the oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw off his yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself the duty of defending them, their town and castle, against their former tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages of his friends,” as his admiring historian says,[13] Henry was thus placed in command of his father’s earliest conquest, the key of Normandy and Maine, a fortress scarcely less mighty and of far greater political importance than that from which he had been driven. He naturally used his opportunity for reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also upon his own brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had made himself of so much consequence in the duchy that William Rufus, again at war with the duke, thought it time to secure his alliance. The two younger brothers met in England, and when Henry returned in the spring of 1095 he came as the liegeman of the English king, sworn to fight his battles and further his interests in Normandy by every means in his power.[15]

[6] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 665.

[7] _Ib._ p. 672. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 616, 617).

[8] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 690. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 617, 618).

[9] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 697.

[10] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 310 (Hardy, pp. 491, 492).

[11] See Freeman, _William Rufus_, vol. i. pp. 293, 295, 305; vol. ii. pp. 535, 536.

[12] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 697.

[13] _Ib._ p. 698.

[14] _Ib._ pp. 698, 706, 722.

[15] Eng. Chron. a. 1095.

William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work with Robert for any political purpose was hopeless, and that their true interest was to support each other--William’s, to enlist for his own service Henry’s clear cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to secure for himself some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate ambitions could not fail to be centred. He had learned in his wanderings to adapt himself to all circumstances and all kinds of society; personally, he and Rufus can have had little in common except their passion for the chase. Lanfranc’s teaching, moral and intellectual, had been all alike thrown away upon his pupil William the Red. Henry, carefully educated according to his father’s special desire, had early shown a remarkable aptitude for study, was a scholar of very fair attainments as scholarship went among laymen in his day, and retained his literary tastes not only through all his youthful trials but also through the crowd of political and domestic cares which pressed upon his later life. Yet such tastes seem almost as strange in Henry as they would in William Rufus. The one prosaic element in the story of Henry’s youth is the personality of its hero. No man had ever less of the romantic or poetic temperament; if he had none of the follies or the faults of chivalry, he had just as little of its nobler idealism. From his first bargain with Robert for the purchase of the Cotentin to his last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage of his heir, life was to him simply a matter of business. The strongest points in his character were precisely the two qualities which both his brothers utterly lacked--self-control, and that “capacity for taking trouble” which is sometimes said to be the chief element of genius. But of the higher kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul rather than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was essentially a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense of the words. His self-control was not, like his father’s, the curb forcibly put by a noble mind upon its own natural impetuosity; it was the more easily-practised calmness of a perfectly cold nature which could always be reasonable because it had to fight with no impulse of passion, which was never tempted to “follow wandering fires” because they lit in it no responsive flame; a nature in which the head had complete mastery over the heart, and that head was one which no misfortunes could disturb, no successes turn, and no perplexities confuse.

The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every one else quite unprepared for such an emergency. Henry was never unprepared. His quickness and decision secured him the keys of the treasury and the formal election of those barons and prelates who had been members of the fatal hunting-party, or who hurried to Winchester at the tidings of its tragic issue; and before opposition had time to come to a head, it was checked by the coronation and unction which turned the king-elect into full king.[16] Henry knew well, however, that opposition there was certain to be. Robert of Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and covered with glory, was sure to assert his claim, and as sure to be upheld by a strong party among the barons, to whom a fresh severance of England and Normandy was clearly not desirable. In anticipation of the coming struggle, Henry threw himself at once on the support of his subjects. In addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath--taken almost in the words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]--he issued on the same day a charter in which he solemnly and specifically promised the abolition of his brother’s evil customs in Church and state, and a return to just government according to the law of the land. The details were drawn up so as to touch all classes. The Church, as including them all, of course stood first; its freedom was restored and all sale or farming of benefices renounced by the king. The next clause appealed specially to the feudal vassals: those who held their lands “by the hauberk”--the tenants by knight-service--were exempted from all other imposts on their demesne lands, that they might be the better able to fulfil their own particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief were exempted from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships, marriages, reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in the last reign; but the redress was not confined to them; they were distinctly required to exercise the same justice towards their own under-tenants. The last clause covered all the rest: by it Henry gave back to his people “the laws of King Eadward as amended by King William.”[18] Like Cnut’s renewal of the law of Eadgar--like Eadward’s own renewal of the law of Cnut--the charter was a proclamation of general reunion and goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity, the Red King’s minister, Ralf Flambard, in popular estimation the author of all the late misdoings, was at once cast into the Tower;[19] the exiled primate was fetched home as speedily as possible; and in November the king identified himself still more closely with the land of his birth by taking to wife a maiden of the old English blood-royal, Eadgyth of Scotland, great-granddaughter of Eadmund Ironside.[20]

[16] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

[17] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 99 (3d ed.).

[18] Charter of Henry I., _ib._ pp. 100–102.

[19] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

[20] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused the thorny crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England had far other charms; and his movements were quickened by Ralf Flambard, who early in the spring made his escape to Normandy.[21] It was probably through Ralf’s management that the duke won over some of the sailors who guarded the English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly at Portsmouth while the king was keeping watch for him at the old landing-place, Pevensey.[22] At the first tidings of the intended invasion Henry, like Rufus in the same case thirteen years before, had appealed to Witan and people, and by a renewal of his charter gained a renewal of their fealty. No sooner, however, was Robert actually in England than the great majority of the barons prepared to go over to him in a body. But the king born on English soil, married to a lady of the old kingly house, had a stronger hold than ever Rufus could have had upon the English people; and they, headed by their natural leader and representative, the restored archbishop of Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving loyalty.[23] The two armies met near Alton;[24] at the last moment, the wisdom either of Anselm, of the few loyal barons, or of Henry himself, turned the meeting into a peaceful one. The brothers came to terms: Robert renounced his claim to the crown in consideration of a yearly pension from England; Henry gave up all his Norman possessions except Domfront, whose people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in the treaty made at Caen ten years before between Robert and William, it was arranged that whichever brother lived longest should inherit the other’s dominions, if the deceased left no lawful heirs.[26]

[21] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), pp. 786, 787.

[22] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

[23] Eadmer, _Hist. Novorum_ (Rule), p. 127.

[24] See Freeman, _William Rufus_, vol. ii. p. 408.

[25] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 788.

[26] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of August;[27] and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red King’s death, ended the last Norman invasion of England. But the treaty of Winchester, like that of Caen, failed to settle the real difficulty. That difficulty was, how to control the barons. According to one version of the treaty, it was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in England by their adherence to Robert and those who had done the same in Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike go unpunished;[28] according to another, perhaps a more probable account, the brothers agreed to co-operate in punishing traitors on both sides.[29] Henry set to work to do his part methodically. One after another, at different times, in various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were brought to justice in England: some heavily fined, some deprived of their honours and exiled. It was treason not so much against himself as against the peace and order of the realm that Henry was bent upon avenging; Ivo of Grantmesnil was fined to the verge of ruin for the crime of making war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but upon his own neighbours for his own personal gratification--a crime which was part of the daily life of every baron in Normandy, but which had never been seen in England before,[30] and never was seen there again as long as King Henry lived. The most formidable of all the troublers of the land was Henry’s old enemy at Domfront--Robert, lord of Bellême in the border-land of Perche, earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in England, count of Alençon and lord of Montgomery in Normandy, and now by his marriage count of Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles of Bridgenorth and Arundel in preparation for open revolt when he was summoned to take his trial on forty-five charges of treason against the king of England and the duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer, Henry led his troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it surrendered; Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and Robert of Bellême was glad to purchase safety for life and limb at the cost of all his English possessions.[31]

[27] Sim. Durh. _Gesta Reg._ a. 1101.

[28] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.

[29] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 788.

[30] _Ib._ p. 805.

[31] _Ib._ pp. 807, 808. Eng. Chron. a. 1102.

From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil his part of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from England only carried their treason over sea to a more congenial climate, and the helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême, William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see that his personal intervention alone could re-establish order in the duchy. On his appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the more reasonable among the barons. For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise had become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of making himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias count of Maine and his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was they who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35] Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise failed through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties at home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert at the head of all his forces approached and summoned him to raise the siege. He refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a more than civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers, fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to deprive Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule of one who was duke only in name. Here then was his last proposition: “Give up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles and the administration of justice and government throughout the whole, and receive the value of the other half annually from my treasury in England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge, if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have been not unequally matched, but they differed greatly in character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the issue proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there is no account, but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host as English in contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of England fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of Normandy followed his example.[40]

[32] Eng. Chron. a. 1104. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 397 (Hardy, p. 623).

[33] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 814.

[34] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p. 30).

[35] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 818. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, _Eglises d’Anjou_, p. 30).

[36] “Helias a Normannis rogatus discessit,” says Orderic (as above). What can this mean?

[37] Eng. Chron. a. 1106.

[38] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 820.

[39] _Ib._ p. 820. Hen. Huntingdon, l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).

[40] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).

The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut down two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian swords which William the Conqueror was so proud to have overcome now carried the day for his youngest son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine Mercy gave into my hands, without much slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain, William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot--and the duchy of Normandy.”[42]

[41] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 821. Eng. Chron. a. 1106. Hen. Hunt., as above.

[42] Letter of Henry to S. Anselm in Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 184.

Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death--“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]--was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom.

[43] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 625).

[44] Will. Malm. _Hist. Nov._, l. i. c. 9 (Hardy, p. 702).

From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the other side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects joyfully told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained, hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures, with which the rest of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched England at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored in practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on this and all other matters of Church policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of fealty: William would do what the English kings who went before him had done, neither more nor less.[46] But the king and the primate were not without perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own acts, the English Church had entered upon a new and more complicated relation both to the state and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must shortly come when she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy which William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than himself:--that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no letter from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;--that no Church council should put forth decrees without his permission and approval;--and that no baron or servant of the crown should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns under the name of “paternal customs,” were never put to the test of practice as long as William and Lanfranc lived. The Red King’s abuse of the two first, by precipitating the crisis and driving S. Anselm to throw himself into the arms of Rome, showed not so much their inadequacy as the justice of the misgivings from which they had sprung. Henry at his accession took his stand upon them in the true spirit of their author; but the time was gone by; Anselm too had taken his stand upon ground whence in honour and conscience he could not recede, and the very first interview between king and primate threw open the whole question of the investitures. But in England and in the Empire the question wore two very different aspects. In England it never became a matter of active interest or violent partisanship in the Church and the nation at large. Only a few deep thinkers on either side--men such as Count Robert of Meulan among the advisers of the king, perhaps such as the devoted English secretary Eadmer among the intimate associates of Anselm--ever understood or considered the principles involved in the case, or its bearing upon the general system of Church and state. Anselm himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness of lay investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience to the decree of the Lateran Council; he strove not for the privileges of his order, but for the duties of his conscience. The bishops who refused investiture at Henry’s hands clearly acted in the same spirit; what held them back was not so much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own metropolitan. The great mass of both clergy and laity cared nothing at all how the investitures were given, and very little for papal decrees; all they cared about was that they should not be again deprived of their archbishop, and left, as they had already been left too long, like sheep without a shepherd. In their eyes the dispute was a personal one between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to keep the English Church in misery.

[45] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 808.

[46] Lanfranc. Ep. x. (Giles, vol. i. p. 32).

[47] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 10.

In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with the later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for which, in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though that model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence; and the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and soul of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable, he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was provoked by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the obnoxious “paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the temporalities of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian retreat, continued in active and unrestrained correspondence with his chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself. And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on his knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication threatened to put forth that very sentence against William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his most terrible weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that the time for a settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives enabled him to strike out a line of compromise which both parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or the principles for which they were contending. The English king and primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation, without disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church or crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who “loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile” like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry ceased to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of old in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too, had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great victory for freedom by bringing Henry to admit that there were departments of national life which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly despotism. It had, moreover, gained a distinct practical acknowledgement of the right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the supreme court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia Regis in secular matters. In a word, the settlement indicated plainly that the system of William and Lanfranc was doomed to break down before long. It broke down utterly when Anselm and Henry were gone; the complications of legatine intervention, avoided only by careful management in Henry’s later years, led to the most important results in the next reign; and when the slumbering feud of sceptre and crozier broke out again, the difference between the cool Norman temper and the fiery blood of Anjou, between the saintly self-effacement of Anselm and the lofty self-assertion of Thomas, was only one of the causes which gave it such an increase of virulence as brought to nought the endeavours of king and primate to tread in the steps of those whom they professed to have taken for their examples.

Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less easy to trace, is the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal government of England. Like his Church policy, with which it was in strict accord, it was grounded upon definite and consistent principles. At the outset of his reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to throw himself upon the support of his English subjects and enabled him to find in them his surest source of strength. Personally, his sympathies were not a whit more English or less despotic than those of his predecessor; but, unlike Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all its consequences so far as he understood them, and throughout his reign he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he had taken at its beginning. That standpoint, as expressed in his coronation-charter, was “the law of King Eadward as amended by King William.” In other words, Henry pledged himself to carry out his father’s system of compromise and amalgamation, to take up and continue his father’s work; and as soon as his hands were free he set himself to fulfil the pledge. But the scheme whose first outlines had been sketched by the Conqueror’s master-hand had to be wrought out under conditions which had changed considerably since his death and were changing yet farther every day. The great ecclesiastical question was only the first and most prominent among a crowd of social and political problems whose shadows William had at the utmost only seen dimly looming in the future, but which confronted Henry as present facts that he must grapple with as best he could. At their theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no attempt; the time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such work. He was neither a great legislator nor an original political thinker, but a clear-headed, sagacious, practical man of business. Such a man was precisely the ruler needed at the moment. His reign is not one of the marked eras of English history; compared with the age which had gone before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I. looks almost like a “day of small things.” That very phrase, which seems so aptly to describe its outward aspect, warns us not to despise or pass it over lightly. It is just one of those periods of transition without which the marked eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare the way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his father.

The work was no longer where his father had left it. When the secular side of the Norman government in England, somewhat obscured for a while by the ecclesiastical conflict, comes into distinct view again after the settlement of 1107, one is almost startled at the amount of developement which has taken place in the twenty years since the Conqueror’s death--a developement whose steps lie hidden beneath the shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of Henry’s early struggles. The power of the crown had outgrown even the nominal restraints preserved from the older system: the king’s authority was almost unlimited, even in theory; the Great Council, the successor and representative of the Witenagemot, had lost all share in the real work of legislation and government; of the old formula--“counsel and consent”--the first half had become an empty phrase and the second a mere matter of course. The assembly was a court rather than a council, the qualification of its members, whether earls, barons, or knights, being all alike dependent on their position as tenants-in-chief of the crown; the bishops alone kept their unaltered dignity as lineal successors of the older spiritual Witan; but even the bishops had been compelled by the compromise of 1107 to hold their temporalities on the baronial tenure of homage and fealty to the king, a step which involved the strict application of the same rule to the lay members of the assembly. Moreover, the Witenagemot was being gradually supplanted in all its more important functions by an inner circle of counsellors, forming a permanent ministerial body which gathered into its own hands the entire management of the financial and judicial administration of the state. In one aspect it was the “Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the supreme court of judicature which appropriated alike the judicial powers of the Witenagemot, of the old court of the king’s thegns or _theningmanna-gemot_, and of the feudal court of the Norman tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it was the Exchequer, the court which received the royal revenues from the sheriffs of the counties, arranged and reviewed the taxation, transacted the whole fiscal business of the crown, and in short had the supreme control and management of the “ways and means” of the realm. The judicial, military and social organization under the Norman kings rests so completely on a fiscal basis that the working of the Exchequer furnishes the principal means of studying that of the whole system; while the connexion between the functions of the Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis is so close that it is often difficult to draw a line accurately between them, and all the more so, that they were made up of nearly the same constituent elements. These were the great officers of the royal household:--the justiciar, the treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal, and their subordinates:--titles of various origin, some, as for example the chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin, while others seem to have existed almost from time immemorial;--but all titles whose holders, from being mere personal attendants upon the sovereign, had now become important officials of the state. Like a crowd of other matters which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the system seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the reign of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf Flambard. At its head stood the justiciar;--second in authority to the king in his presence, his representative and vicegerent in his absence, officially as well as actually his chief minister and the unquestioned executor of his will. This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as far back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius” under his brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from that which Æthelred II. had instituted under the title of high-thegn or high-reeve, and which grew into a permanent vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine and Harold under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under William Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who from the position of an obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s household had made his way by the intriguing, pushing, unscrupulous temper which had earned him his nickname of the “Firebrand,” was an upstart whom the barons of the Conquest may well have despised as much as the native English feared and hated him. After an interval during which his office was held by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln--a former chancellor of the Red King--it passed to a man who from beginnings almost as lowly as those of Ralf rose to yet loftier and, it is but fair to add, purer fame. Henry in his wandering youth, as he rode out from Caen one morning with a few young companions, stopped to hear mass at a little wayside chapel. The poor priest who served it, guessing by their looks the temper of his unexpected congregation, rattled through the office with a speed which delighted them; they all pronounced him just the man for a soldier’s chaplain; Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that he had picked up a treasure. Roger became his steward, and discharged his functions with such care, fidelity and good management as earned him the entire confidence of his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s accession he was appointed chancellor, a post whose duties involved, besides the official custody of the royal seal, the superintendence of the clerks of the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged with the keeping of the royal accounts, the conducting of the royal correspondence, the drawing up of writs and other legal documents and records, and who were now formed into a trained and organized body serving as secretaries for all departments of state business. From 1101 to 1106 this office seems to have been held successively by Roger, William Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it in 1106 on Waldric’s elevation to the bishopric of Laon, but if so he resigned it again next year, to become bishop of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]

[48] Will. Newburgh, l. i. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 36).

[49] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 56.

Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the old English administrative system, had by this time become self-evident. The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity and given him the justification for superseding them in all the more important functions of government, by carrying out, with a free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated under less favourable circumstances--the organization of a distinct ministerial body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all upstarts--_novi homines_, “new men” in the phrase of the time--compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming a sort of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility and from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious to both, but very much better fitted than any instruments which either could have furnished for managing the business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and above the obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there was, however, another cause for the jealousy with which they were generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing, more especially in his later years, a preference for foreigners which was equally galling to all his native subjects, whatever their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest. The sons and grandsons of the men who had come over with Duke William never lost one spark of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no longer their home; most of them were born in England, some had English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife--though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to the world under the name of _Orderic the Englishman_. This last was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”--men born beyond sea--over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were equally aliens from both.

[50] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 224.

[51] Suger, _Vita Ludovici Grossi_, c. 1 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 12).

Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of the Exchequer. Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer met under his presidency around the chequered table whence they derived their name, and settled accounts with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs were answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from their respective shires, the settlement amounted to a thorough review of the financial condition of the realm. The profits of the demesne lands and of the judicial proceedings in the shire-court, now commuted at a fixed sum under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a definite rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of the towns seem to have corresponded to the Danegeld in the rural districts; the feudal sources of income, reliefs, wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits arising out of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of his predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning refused to redress; all these and many other items found their places in the exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s court of Exchequer. Hand in hand with its financial work went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a court in theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief, but in practice limited to the great officers of the household and others specially appointed by the king, and acting under him, or under the chief justiciar as his representative, as a supreme tribunal of appeal, and also of first resort in suits between tenants-in-chief and in a variety of other cases called up by special writ for its immediate cognisance. It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still based upon the Domesday survey; but transfers of land, changes in cultivation, the reclaiming of wastes on the one hand and the creation of new forests on the other, necessarily raised questions which called for an occasional revision and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending the judges of the King’s Court--who were only the barons of the Exchequer in another capacity--on judicial circuits throughout the country, to hold the pleas of the crown and settle disputed points of assessment and tenure in the several shires. As the justices thus employed held their sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature were thus brought into immediate connexion with each other, and the first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging over the gap which severed the lower from the higher organization.

By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative routine Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding together all branches of public business and all classes of society in intimate connexion with and entire dependence on the crown, through the medium of the Curia Regis and the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full length in the _Dialogue_ in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew expounded the constitution and functions of the fully developed Court of Exchequer; its working in Roger’s own day is vividly illustrated in the one surviving record which has come down to us from that time, the earliest extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in which the annual statement of accounts was embodied by the treasurer. The value of this solitary roll of Henry I.--that of the year 1130--lies less in the dry bones of the actual financial statement than in the mass of personal detail with which they are clothed, and through which we get such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social condition of the time. The first impression likely to be produced by the document is that under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury--“the Lion of Justice” and “the Sword of Righteousness”--every possible contingency of human life was somehow turned into a matter of money for the benefit of the royal treasury. It must, however, be remembered that except the Danegeld, there was no direct taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up a budget at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents; and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments of unlimited extortion, but were calculated according to a regular and fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent modification under special circumstances. Still the items look strange enough. We see men paying to get into office and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the right to enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying that they may administer the estates of minors; suitors paying for leave to marry heiresses or dowered widows; heiresses and widows paying for freedom to wed the man of their own choice. The remittances are not always in money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there are some amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52] There is an endless string of land-owners, great and small, paying for all sorts of privileges connected with their property; some for leave to make an exchange of land with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit with a rival claimant of their estates, some on the contrary to delay or avoid answering such a claim, and some for having themselves put forth claims which they were unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the loser for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both ways. Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering their debts from his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens of Gloucester promise thirty marks of silver if the king’s justice can get back for them a sum of money “which was taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted entry brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most interesting of all; those which relate to the growing liberties of the towns.

[52] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 111.

[53] _Ib._ pp. 147, 148, 149.

[54] _Ib._ p. 77.

The English towns differed completely in their origin and history from those of the states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy and Gaul were daughters of Rome; they were the abiding depositaries of her social, municipal and political traditions; as such, they had a vitality and a character which, like their great mistress and model, they were able to preserve through all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal reorganization. The English towns had no such imperial past; in their origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable from the general crowd of little rural settlements throughout the country. Here and there, for one reason or another, some particular spot attracted an unusually large concourse of inhabitants; but whether sheltered within the walls of a Roman military encampment like Winchester and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round some fortress raised for defence against the Welsh or the Danes like Taunton or Warwick, or round some venerated shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury or Oxford, still the settlement differed in nothing but its size from the most insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which sent its reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually large township, generally provided with a dyke and palisade, or sometimes even a wall, instead of the ordinary quickset hedge; or it was a cluster of townships which had somehow coalesced, but without in any way forming an organic whole. Each unit of the group had its own parish church and parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes, its own assembly for transacting its own internal affairs; while the general borough-moot, in a town of this kind, answered roughly to the hundred-court of the rural districts, and the character of the borough-constitution itself resembled that of the hundred rather than that of the single township. The earlier and greater towns must have been originally free; a few still retain in their common lands a vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great and wealthy monastery, were dependent from the first upon the lord of the soil on which they stood; their inhabitants owed suit and service to the earl, the bishop, or the abbot, whichever he might chance to be, and their reeve was appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became a recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and that all folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a natural inference that all towns which had no other lord were counted as royal demesnes, and their chief magistrate was an officer of the crown. In the great cities he usually bore the title of _port-reeve_, a word whose first syllable, though here used to represent the town in general, refers in strict etymology to the _porta_, or place where the market was held, and thus at once points to the element in the life of the towns which gave them their chief consequence and their most distinctive character. The Norman conquest had led to a great increase of their trading importance; a sense of corporate life and unity grew up within them; their political position became more clearly defined; they began to recognize themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands of the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state. The distinction was definitely marked by the severance of their financial interests from those of the shires in which they stood; a fixed “aid,” varying according to their size and wealth, was substituted in their case for the theoretically even, but practically very unfair pressure of the Danegeld; and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the sheriff, their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for as a separate item, under the name of _firma burgi_, either by the sheriff or, in some cases where the privilege had been specially conferred, by the towns themselves. At the same time the voluntary institution of the gilds, which had long acted as a supplement to the loose territorial and legal constitution of the boroughs, forced its way into greater prominence; the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer as mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies endowed with authority over all matters connected with trade in the great mercantile cities; the recognition of their legal status--generally expressed by the confirmation of the right to possess a “gild-hall” (or, as it was called in the north, a “hans-house”)--became a main point in the struggles of the towns for privileges and charters. The handicraftsmen, fired with the same spirit of association, banded themselves together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford, bought of the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the customs of their respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed, as well as they could, the example of the great cities; they too won from their lords a formal assurance of their privileges; Archbishop Thurstan’s charter to Beverley was expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to York.[56]

[55] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), Oxford, pp. 2 and 5; Huntingdon, p. 48; Lincoln, pp. 109, 114; London, p. 144.

[56] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).

We may glance at some of the towns of southern England in company with some travellers from Gaul who visited them in the later years of Henry’s reign. The cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down and its bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric had once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports which he and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and prosperity of the island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating northern Gaul to collect donations for the restoration of their church, to venture beyond sea for the same object. They set sail from Wissant--seemingly in an English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name of Coldistan--in company with some Flemish merchants who were going to buy wool in England, and they landed at Dover after a narrow escape from some pirates who chased their vessel in the hope of seizing the money which it was known to contain.[59] They naturally made their way to Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy and powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently proceeded to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon capital had lost its ancient rank; London, which had long surpassed it in commercial and political importance, had now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of kings. But its connexion with the crown was far from being broken. Its proximity to the New Forest made it a favourite residence of the Conqueror and his sons; William himself had built not only a castle on the high ground at the western end of the city, just below the west gate of the Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was here that he usually held his Easter court, and his successors continued the practice. One very important department of the royal administration, moreover, was still permanently centred at Winchester--the Treasury, which under its English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there by Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been finally transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of Henry II.[62] Of the two great religious foundations, one, the “Old Minster,” or cathedral church of S. Swithun, the crowning-place and burial-place of our native kings, assumed under the hands of its first Norman bishop the aspect which, outwardly at least, it still retains. The other, the “New Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot and some of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to punish the brotherhood, he planted his palace close against the west front of their church; and they found their position so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s leave, they migrated outside the northern boundary of Winchester to a new abode which grew into a wealthy and flourishing house under the name of Hyde Abbey, leaving their old home to fall into decay and to be represented in modern days by a quiet graveyard.[63] As a trading centre Winchester ranked in Henry’s day, and long after, second to London alone; the yearly fair which within living memory was held on S. Giles’s day upon the great hill to the east of the city[64] preserved a faint reminiscence of the vast crowds of buyers and sellers who flocked thither from all parts of the country throughout the middle ages.

[57] On Waldric (or Gualdric) and Laon see Guibert of Nogent, _De Vitâ suâ_, l. iii. c. 4, _et seq._ (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 498, _et seq._). Cf. above, p. 22.

[58] “Quæ [sc. Anglia] tunc temporis magnâ divitiarum florebat opulentiâ pro pace et justitiâ quam rex ejus Henricus ... in eâ faciebat.” Herman. Mon. _De Mirac. S. Mariæ_, l. ii. c. 1 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 534).

[59] _Ib._ c. 4 (pp. 535, 536).

[60] _Ib._ c. 6 (p. 536).

[61] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 7 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 536).

[62] At the date of the _Dialogus de Scaccario_ (A.D. 1178) its headquarters seem to have fluctuated between London and Winchester, and to have been quite recently, if they were not even yet, most frequently at the latter place. See the payments to the accountants: “Quisque iii denarios si Londoniæ fuerint; si Wintoniæ, quia inde solent assumi, duos quisque habet.”--_Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 3 (Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 175, 3d ed.).

[63] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe) vol. ii. p. 64. Ann. Waverl. a. 1111. The king’s charter confirming the removal is dated 1114; Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. p. 444.

[64] It is mentioned in Henry’s charter to Hyde; Dugdale, as above.

At the opposite end of the New Forest the little town of Twinham, or Christchurch as it was beginning to be called from its great ecclesiastical establishment, whose church had been rebuilt on a grand scale by Ralf Flambard, had, on the octave of Pentecost, a fair which the travellers took care to attend, much to the disgust of the dean, who was anxious to secure all the offerings of the assembled crowd for the improvement of his own church, and had no mind to share them with our Lady of Laon.[65] They met with a warmer welcome at Exeter at the hands of its archdeacon and future bishop Robert.[66] In the next reign Exeter was counted as the fourth city in the kingdom.[67] Natural wealth of its own it had none; the bare rocky soil of the south coast of Devon produced nothing but a few oats, and those of the poorest quality;[68] but the mouth of the Exe furnished a safe and convenient anchorage for small merchant vessels either from Gaul or from Ireland, and though Bristol was fast drawing away this latter branch of her trade, Exeter could still boast of “such an abundance of merchandise that nothing required for the use of man could ever be asked for there in vain.”[69] It was far otherwise with Salisbury, to which the travellers were probably drawn chiefly by the fame of its bishop;[70] the Salisbury of those days was not the city in the plain which now spreads itself around the most perfect of English Gothic minsters, but the city whose traces, in a very dry summer, may still now and then be seen in the fields which cover the hill of Old Sarum. Crowded as it was into that narrow circle--narrow, and without possibility of enlargement--Bishop Roger’s Salisbury was an excellent post for military security, but it had no chance of attaining industrial or commercial importance, although he did not disdain to accept the grant of its market tolls, which till 1130 formed part of the ferm of Wilton.[71] Wilton was apparently still the chief town of the shire to which it had originally given its name; like Christchurch it had its fair, but, like Christchurch too, its importance was mainly derived from its abbey, where the memory of S. Eadgyth or Edith, a daughter of Eadgar, was venerated by English and Normans alike, by none more than the queen who shared Eadgyth’s royal blood and had once borne her name.[72] The visitors from Laon, however, seem to have been more impressed by another name which one is somewhat startled to meet in this southern region--that of Bæda, whose tomb was shown them in the abbey church of Wilton, and was believed to be the scene of miraculous cures.[73] They retraced their steps into Devonshire, where they found the legends of Arthur as rife among the people as they were among the Bretons of Gaul; they were shown the chair and oven of the “blameless king,” and a tumult nearly arose at Bodmin out of a dispute between one of their party and a man who persisted in asserting that Arthur was still alive.[74] After visiting Barnstaple and Totnes[75] they turned northward towards the greatest seaport of the west, and indeed, with one exception, of all England: Bristol.

[65] Herman. Mon., l. ii. cc. 10, 11 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, pp. 537, 538).

[66] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 12 (p. 539).

[67] _Gesta Stephani_ (Sewell), p. 21.

[68] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 94 (Hamilton, p. 201).

[69] _Ibid._

[70] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 13 (p. 539).

[71] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 13.

[72] _Ibid._

[73] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 14 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 539).

[74] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 15, 16 (pp. 539, 540).

[75] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 17–19 (p. 540).

To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the Bristol of to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the enormous growth of the town, but from the changes which have taken place in the physical conformation of its site. Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula formed by the junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the earlier aspect of the place is very hard to realize. The original Bristol stood wholly upon the high ground which now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a small tongue of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round it almost in the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon on the southern side of the town, just below the present Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the Norman conquest, it seems, the lower course of the Frome had already been diverted from its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug till the middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and flooded every day by the tide which came rushing up the estuary of Severn almost to the walls of the town, and made it seem like an island in the sea.[78] Within its comparatively narrow limits Bristol must have been in general character and aspect not unlike what it is to-day--a busy, bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the “Higra,” the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the sea-god of their forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81] surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in full career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the experiences of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on board some of the vessels in the harbour to buy some clothes, and to inspect the strange wares brought from lands which can have had little or no intercourse with the inland cities of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they would most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and themselves sold into bondage in a foreign land.[82]

[76] See the description of Bristol in _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.

[77] Seyer, _Memoirs of Bristol_, vol. ii. pp. 18–27.

[78] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.

[79] See the description of the “Higra,” and of Bristol, in Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. cc. 153, 154 (Hamilton, p. 292).

[80] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.

[81] In _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 21, Exeter is called the fourth city in the realm. As London and Winchester are always counted first and second, the third can only be Bristol.

[82] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 21 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 541).

No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their reception there by the bishop[83]--whom the healing virtues of its waters had induced first to remove his bishopstool thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and then to buy the whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred pounds[84]--their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they penetrated no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they turned back from the gates of a region which was then reckoned the fairest and wealthiest in England. The vale of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly paradise, where the soil brought forth of its own accord the most abundant and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another the trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of the traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;--above all, where the fruit of the vine, which in other parts of England was mostly sour, yielded a juice scarcely inferior to the wines of Gaul. Another source of wealth was supplied by the fisheries of the great river, the fertilizer as well as the highway of this favoured district. Religion and industry, abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85] Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political rank it had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower down the river, Gloucester was more accessible for trade, while its special importance as the key of the South-Welsh border had made it one of the recognized places for assemblies of the court from the time of the Danish kings. The chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford, had once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but despite its castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of no great size,” whose broken-down ramparts told the story of a greatness which had passed away.[86]

[83] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 22 (p. 541).

[84] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. ii. c. 90 (Hamilton, p. 194). The grant of the city is in Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 8; date, August 1111.

[85] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 153 (Hamilton, pp. 291, 292).

[86] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 163 (Hamilton, p. 298).

Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary of the Severn was to the southern part of western England, that of the Dee was to its northern part; Chester was at once the Bristol and the Gloucester of the north-west coast--the centre of its trade and its bulwark against the Welsh. Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial life. Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland and forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern half had not yet recovered from the harrying with which the Conqueror had avenged its revolt in 1068. For more than sixty miles around York the ground still lay perfectly bare. “Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven--tracts that were once well watered, smiling meadows--if a stranger sees them now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them, he would not recognize his home.” The one thing which had survived this ruin was, as ever, the work of the Roman.[87] York still kept its unbroken life, its ecclesiastical primacy, its commercial greatness; the privileges of its merchants were secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the making of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business; and they were freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89] Far to the north-west, on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after more than two centuries of ruin, had been restored and repeopled by William Rufus. The city had been destroyed by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly desolate till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and reunited it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some material relics of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman walls were still there, to be used up again in the new fortifications with which the Red King encircled his conquest; and some years later the _triclinium_ of one of its Roman houses called forth the admiring wonder of a southern visitor, William of Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding country lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in the land and till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life. Yet before the end of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so vigorous that the archbishop of York found himself unable to make adequate provision for its spiritual needs, and was glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and its district into a separate diocese.

[87] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, pp. 208, 209).

[88] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 34.

[89] Charter of Beverley, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).

[90] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

[91] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p. 208).

[92] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military character, as an outpost of defence against the Scots. On the opposite coast we see springing up, around a fortress originally built for the same purpose, the beginning of an industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The “customs” of the town contain provisions for the regulation of both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in at the mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they will; if a dispute arise between one of them and a foreign merchant, it must be settled before the tide has ebbed thrice; the foreign trader may carry his wares ashore for sale, except salt and herrings, which must be sold on board the ship. No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides, or any other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make, or cut cloth for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of Beverley, on the marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown up a town of sufficient consequence to win from the lord of the soil, Archbishop Thurstan of York, a charter whose privileges were copied from those of the metropolitan city itself. As a whole, however, the north was still a wild region, speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury complained, “we southrons could make nothing,” and living a life so unconnected with that of southern England that even King Henry still thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary body-guard with a troop of auxiliaries whenever he crossed the Humber.[94]

[93] Customs of Newcastle, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 111, 112.

[94] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p. 209).

This isolation was in great part due to physical causes. What is now the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast tract of moor and woodland, stretching from Wakefield to the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills to the sources of the Don; while further east, the district between the lower course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide morass. Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder, though not to bar, the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England. The only safe line of communication was the Foss Way, which struck across the central plain and along the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round between forest and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the chief station on the highway between York and the south. Under the Norman rule the city had risen to a new importance. Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed; the south-western was now covered by a castle, and the south-eastern by a cathedral church. Neither building was the first of its kind which had occupied the spot. Few sites in England could have been more attractive to a soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone ridge descending abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin, watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping gradually down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far as the bank of the Trent. The hundred and sixty-six houses which the Conqueror swept away to make room for his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier fortification, a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual old English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls of stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church, on the other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well seem to cry out for a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary was already in existence[97] on the site where Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly home in the valley of the Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the foundations of that great minster of our Lady whose noble group of towers now rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the country round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation of the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste. Of the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the Thames to the Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison the most important town. Even in Roman times the original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum Colonia had been found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread down to the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace which lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William, the needs of an increasing population, as we have seen, covered the site of the older fortress with dwellings: when these were cleared away at William’s bidding, their exiled inhabitants found a new home on a plot of hitherto waste ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled by the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the city on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S. Mary-le-Wigford and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years later Lincoln was counted one of the most populous and flourishing cities in England.[100] The roads which met on the crest of its hill to branch off again in all directions formed only one of the ways by which trade poured into its market. Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the day quite up to the bridge: it was connected with the Trent at Torksey by a canal, probably of Roman origin, known as the Foss Dyke; this after centuries of neglect was cleared out and again made navigable by order of Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still more extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the Humber. The “men of the city and the merchants of the shire” were already banded together in a merchant-gild;[102] and it is doubtless this gild which is represented by the “citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of holding their city in chief of the king.[103]

[95] Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b.

[96] G. T. Clark, _Lincoln Castle_ (_Archæol. Journal_, vol. xxxiii. pp. 215–217).

[97] “Sancta Maria de Lincoliâ in quâ nunc est episcopatus,” Domesday, vol. i. p. 336. The patron saint of this older church, however, was the Magdalene, not the Virgin. See John de Schalby’s _Life of Remigius_, in Appendix E. to Gir. Cambr. (Dimock), vol. vii. p. 194, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in preface, _ib._ pp. lxxx., lxxxii.

[98] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p. 312). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 30.

[99] See Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in _Norm. Conq._, vol. iv. pp. 218, 219.

[100] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p. 312).

[101] Sim. Durh. _Gesta Reg._ a. 1121.

[102] Said to date from the time of Eadward; Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 166.

[103] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 114.

The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to Lincoln was in accordance with a new practice, which had come in since the Norman conquest, of placing the episcopal see in the chief town of the diocese. The same motive had prompted a translation of the old Mercian bishopric from Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the woodland, with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed again to the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason, too, caused Norwich to succeed Thetford as the seat of the bishopric of East-Anglia. It was but very recently that Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief city of eastern England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls into it, was no less conveniently placed than that of the Witham for intercourse with northern Europe; and the Scandinavian traders and settlers in the first half of the eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch of prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained twenty-four churches, and its burghers seem to have been more numerous than those of any town in the realm except London and York.[106] Twenty years later their number was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of Earl Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its native population had decreased, a colony of Norman burghers was growing up and flourishing in a “new borough,” now represented by the parishes of S. Peter Mancroft and S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels had risen to forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the foundations of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga, whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once in the next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the scene of the Midwinter Council; King Henry kept Christmas there in 1121.[109] It may have been on this occasion that the citizens won from him their first charter; but the charter itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its existence from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which they had in the time of my grandfather.”[110]

[104] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 172 (Hamilton, p. 307).

[105] _Ib._ cc. 172–175 (pp. 307–311).

[106] Domesday, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117.

[107] _Ib._ pp. 116–118.

[108] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, p. 151).

[109] Eng. Chron. a. 1122.

[110] Charter printed in Blomefield, _Hist. of Norfolk_, vol. iii. p. 34.

It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that English town-life was growing up most vigorously. Tried by the test of statistics, indeed, Oxford was still but a small place; in the time of the Confessor it had only contained about a thousand dwellings, and before the Domesday survey was made the town had, through some unexplained cause, suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111] But the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise government of Robert of Oilly, to whom the chief command at Oxford was entrusted by the Conqueror, and of his nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office. Before the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an epitome of the history of all England was already in existence, though only in germ. The military capabilities of the site, recognized long ago by Eadward the Elder, had been carefully strengthened; within the natural protection of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about with rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by Eadward himself, at its western end had been made the nucleus of a mighty fortress which was soon to become famous in the struggle of Stephen and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification the sole care of the D’Oillys; within and without the city, works of piety and of public utility sprang up under their direction. The ancient ford which had given the town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the network of streams which fenced it in on every side save one; the High Bridge of our own day represents one built by the first Robert of Oilly.[114] Of the sixteen churches and chapels which Oxford now contained,[115] S. George’s-in-the-Castle was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East probably founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches which had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that of S. Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded in his time or in that of his nephew, if not actually by their munificence.[118] One of these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to become famous in after-days as the University church. As yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford was the ancient monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after many vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under its learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church which now stands hidden away beneath the later splendours of Christ Church, like a buried and yet living relic of an earlier and simpler age. Even S. Frideswide’s, however, had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney which the younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The Augustinians were a new order whose rise was closely associated with the revival of intellectual and social culture; their houses were the best schools of the time--schools in which the scholars were trained for secular no less than for clerical careers--and their presence at Oseney and S. Frideswide’s was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the first English University in the divinity lectures of Robert Pulein.[121] The burgher-life of the city had long gathered round the church of S. Martin; in its churchyard was held the portmannimot or general assembly of the citizens; they had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122] they had their common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow” beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry in the appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds. Shortly before Henry’s death, there were indications that Oxford was soon to regain the political position which it had held under the old English and Danish kings, but had entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy of awe had been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal lover, sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of further escape, called upon Heaven itself to check him; as he entered the town he was struck blind, and though her prayers afterwards restored his sight, no king after him dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for fear of incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut met outside the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance was given to the legend by the circumstances of Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that time forth we hear of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133--the very year of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I., whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had been so drawn to the neighbouring town as to build himself a “new hall” there,[125] just outside the northern wall, on the ground afterwards known as Beaumont-fields. He held but one festival there, the last Easter which he ever spent in England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for the throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become a political as well as a military centre of scarcely less importance than London itself.

[111] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154. Mr. Parker, in his _Early Hist. of Oxford_ (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), pp. 200, 201, suggests that the damage was done by the army of Eadwine and Morkere on their southward march in 1065.

[112] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 88.

[113] The chief stronghold of the new fortress, however, was not on the mound; it was a lofty tower--still standing--on the western side of the enclosure. It was built by the first Robert of Oilly, in 1071; Ann. Osen. ad ann. See Parker, _Early Hist. Oxf._, pp. 202–204.

[114] _Hist. Monast. de Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 15, 284. See also Parker, _Early Hist. Oxf._, p. 219.

[115] See lists in Parker as above, pp. 284–286.

[116] He founded S. George’s in 1074; Ann. Osen. ad ann. On S. Peter’s see Parker as above, pp. 250–254.

[117] _Hist. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. p. 15.

[118] See the evidence in Parker’s _Early Hist. of Oxford_, pp. 209, 223, 258–261.

[119] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton, pp. 315, 316). Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. pp. 143, 144. The Augustinians came there in 1111, according to the chronicle of Tynemouth, quoted in _Monast._ (as above), p. 143; but the local record in p. 144 gives 1121.

[120] Ann. Osen. a. 1129.

[121] _Ib._ a. 1133.

[122] Charter of Henry II., Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 167.

[123] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154.

[124] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton p. 315).

[125] “Ad Pascha fuit rex apud Oxineford in novâ aulâ.” Rob. of Torigni, a. 1133.

Our great picture of medieval London belongs in all its completeness to a somewhat later date; it was painted in the closing years of the twelfth century. But, as in the case of so many other things which only come out into full light under Henry II., although the colouring and the details may belong more especially to his time, the main features were already there in the time of his grandfather. The outline of the city was a sort of irregular half-ellipse, fenced in upon the northern or land side by a girdle of massive walls pierced with gates and fortified with lofty towers; the wall on the south side, being built close upon the river bank, was gradually washed away by the ebb and flow of the tide constantly beating upon its foundations. On this side the river itself was an all-sufficient protection. The eastern extremity of the city, where the wall came down towards the water’s edge, was guarded by a mighty fortress, founded by King William in the earliest days of his conquest to hold his newly-won capital in check, and always known by the emphatic name of “the Tower.” The western end was protected by two lesser fortresses,[126]--Castle Baynard and Montfichet, whose sokes filled up the space between the cathedral precincts and the city wall. Another, which must have stood in the same neighbourhood, seems to have been partly destroyed by the fire which ravaged London a few months before the Conqueror’s death, and in which the cathedral of S. Paul entirely perished.[127] Part of the ditch of this fortress was surrendered by King Henry to make room for a wall with which Bishop Richard was now enclosing his precincts;[128] while within this enclosure a new church, gorgeous with all the latest developements of Norman architectural skill, was now fast approaching completion.[129] S. Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the nucleus, of municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the summons of its great bell; in time of war the armed burghers gathered at its west door and beneath its banner, with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their standard-bearer.[130] The internal constitution of London, however, was scarcely a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of the parish and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds--all these were loosely bundled together under the general headship of the bishop and the port-reeve, to whom King William addressed his one surviving English writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the citizens “all the law whereof they had been worthy in King Eadward’s day”;[131] but by the end of Henry I.’s reign the Londoners had got far beyond this. By virtue of a royal charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed port-reeve for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which was granted in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other shires were granted year by year to their respective sheriffs; they were exempted from all tolls and mercantile dues throughout the realm, and from suit and service to all courts outside their own walls, even the pleas of the crown being intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed all the old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the various “sokens” and “customs” of churches, barons and burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies of the different parishes or townships, as well as the husting or folkmoot in which all were gathered together,[132]--and left London as it found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as it has been truly called, simply “a shire covered with houses.”

[126] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Memorials of Becket_, vol. iii.), p. 3.

[127] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

[128] Dugdale, _Hist. of S. Paul’s_, app. xxiv. (Ellis), p. 305. Stow (_London_, ed. Thoms, p. 26) says that this fortress “stood, as it may seem, where now standeth the house called Bridewell.” But this is impossible; for the later palace of Bridewell stood on the right bank of the Fleet, separated from S. Paul’s by the course of that river and the whole width of the soke of Castle Baynard, so that the gift of the ditch of a castle on its site would have been perfectly useless for the enlargement of the precincts.

[129] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 73 (Hamilton, p. 146).

[130] Stow, _London_ (Thoms, p. 121). For the rights and duties of the lord of Castle Baynard, see _ib._ p. 24.

[131] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 82, 83.

[132] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 108.

This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S. Paul’s, where a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and parochial, rose out of a network of close-packed streets and alleys thronged with busy craftsmen and noisy, chaffering traders. Through the heart of it flowed the “Wall-brook,” on whose bank there lingered, long after the stream itself was buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to a landing-place at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond the Walbrook lay the East-Cheap, almost busier and more crowded still; while to the north, along the upper course of the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish quarter.[134] Population was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of the wealthier citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded with bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up the river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered round the famous abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the last Old-English king, and the palace of William Rufus, a splendid edifice with a breast-work and bastion stretching down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of the city, just outside the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where a great horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138] and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland stretching away across the northern part of Middlesex to the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Here the stag and the fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull, had their coverts, beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which the citizens were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their pleasure.[139] Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young burghers were content, in the summer evenings when their day’s work was done, with a saunter among the shady gardens and fresh springs which enlivened the northern suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a tract of low-lying moor or marsh--the Moorfields of later times--on whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s content the exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140] Business, pleasure, piety, intellectual culture, all had their places in the vigorous life of the great city. Each of the two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S. Peter’s, had a school attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady at Bermondsey, just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not absorb all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected and noted above all other citizens for their manners, dress, table and discourse.”[142] “Moreover, almost all the bishops, abbots and great men of England are, in a manner, citizens and freemen of London; as they have magnificent houses there, to which they resort, spending large sums of money, whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to go there by their own business.”[143] And between these visitors and the resident citizens there was no hard and fast line of demarcation. Neither the knight-errant’s blind contempt for practical industry nor the still blinder contempt of the merely practical man for everything which has not its value in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the old English system the merchant who had made three long voyages over sea on his own account was entitled to rank as a thegn, and to take his place among the nobles of the land. Under the Norman system a link between the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman origin, to whom London in no small measure owed the marked importance which it attained under Henry I. The Norman knights had no monopoly of the enterprizing spirit of their race; the victorious host had scarcely settled down upon the conquered soil when it was followed by a second invasion of a very different character. Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town population chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years of the conquest. The process was very likely more helped than hindered by the grinding tyranny which united all the Red King’s victims in a community of suffering; but its great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His restoration of law and order, his administrative and judicial reforms, gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and commercial energy. England under him had her heavy burthens and her cruel grievances; they stand out plainly enough in the complaints of her native chronicler. But to men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French kingdom or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman duchy under the nominal government of Robert Curthose, a country where “no man durst misdo with other,” and where the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144] may well have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and get an honest living came across the sea to find shelter and security in the rich and prosperous island. For settlers of this kind it was easy enough to make a home. No gulf of hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense of wrong suffered and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s reign had closed, English and Normans were living contentedly side by side in all the chief cities of England: sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of Norwich, the new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their own, but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse was perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers; and intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the great cities, where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or strange, and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s languages had been worn away by years of commercial intercourse, the fusion was naturally more easy; in London, whither the “men of Rouen” had come in their “great ships,” with their cargoes of wine or sturgeons,[146] long before their countrymen came with bow and spear and sword, it was easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign; and the attraction grew still stronger during the unquiet times in Normandy which followed the Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the chief Norman cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their trade, and better stored with the goods in which they were wont to deal.”[147]

[133] Stow, _London_ (Thoms), p. 97.

[134] The only body of Jews who appear in the Pipe Roll of 31 Hen. I are those of London.

[135] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[136] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[137] _Ib._ p. 6.

[138] _Ib._ p. 3.

[139] _Ib._ p. 12.

[140] _Ib._ p. 11.

[141] _Ib._ p. 4.

[142] _Ibid._

[143] _Ib._ p. 8.

[144] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

[145] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 520.

[146] _De Institutis Lundoniæ_, Thorpe, _Anc. Laws_, p. 127 (folio ed.).

[147] _Vita S. Thomæ_, Anon. II. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv.) p. 81.

That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant in the city there can be little doubt; but they seem to have won their predominance by fair means and to have used it fairly. If they, as individuals, prospered in the English capital, they contributed their full share to its corporate prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth; they brought enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social as well as political progress. In their pleasant, cheerful, well-ordered dwellings many a noble knight or baron may have been glad to accept a hospitality such as his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could never afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic may have enjoyed a refinement of society such as he could rarely hope to meet among the rough and reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general statements; we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves; we can go with them to visit the home of a typical London citizen of the early twelfth century. In the heart of the busiest trading quarter, on the spot where Mercer’s Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of S. Mary Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and Rohesia his wife. When their son, grown to manhood and high in office, was asked of his origin and extraction, he answered simply that his parents were citizens of London, dwelling blameless and respected among their fellow-burghers.[148] Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers led them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never have known that his father and mother were foreigners--Gilbert, born at Rouen, of a respectable burgher family; Rohesia, sprung from the same rank of life at Caen.[149] Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve of London,[150] and bore a high character for intelligence, industry and upright dealing. Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her motherly love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely blended together in her habit of weighing her little son at stated intervals against money, clothes and food which she gave to the poor, trusting thereby to bring a blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old enough, he was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where his father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior; and when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to spend them in riding and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle, a young knight sprung from one of the noblest families of Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate friend of the little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the simple, matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households around it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a degree as to excite special notice or envy; he and his wife lived in comfort and affluence, but only such as befitted their station; they seem to have been in no way distinguished from the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class citizens of their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the circumstance to which we owe our knowledge of its character and its history:--that in it had been born a child who was to begin his career as Thomas of London the burgher’s son, and to end it as Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop, saint and martyr.

[148] _S. Thomæ Ep._ cxxiv. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. p. 515).

[149] Anon. II. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 81.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii. p. 14) calls him _vicecomes_, which in relation to London at this period can only mean port-reeve; and a constant tradition of later days pointed to the father of S. Thomas as the most venerated predecessor of the mayor.

[151] Anon. I. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv.), p. 7.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii.), p. 14.

[153] E. Grim (_ib._ vol. ii.), p. 359. Anon. I. (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 6. Garnier, _Vie de S. Thomas_ (Hippeau), p. 3.

The Norman settlers were not the only new element in the population of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land of Normandy, France and the Empire, the immediate neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally of the English kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies of England. The relation between the two countries was primarily a political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech and kindred temper drew Fleming and Englishman together in the bonds of a natural sympathy which grew with the growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges were even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen and Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important part of the trade of eastern England. Not only was the estuary of the Scheld a high-way of communication with the more distant regions of central Europe, but Flanders herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry for which the raw material was in great part furnished by England. The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the great yearly fairs of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly from the wool of English sheep. Dover was the chief mart for this export; in the itinerary of the canons of Laon we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales, which were deposited in a warehouse built for that special purpose till they could be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the Flemings had almost a monopoly of this weaving trade, although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at Huntingdon, Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen were already beginning to emulate their example; it may, on the other hand, point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all direct communication with England, there must have seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater settlements--one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth--which were to work a revolution in English industry.

[154] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 5 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 536).

[155] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 401 (Hardy, p. 628). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 64; Ann. Camb. a. 1107; Brut y Tywysogion, a. 1105.

A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different position from both the Fleming and the Norman. These were the Jews. Their first appearance in England is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who brought over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they play a less conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find them at Lincoln, Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be no doubt that they were already established in most of the chief English towns. They formed, however, no part of the townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or for evil, save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means of accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care against all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually appears is that of a money-lender--an occupation in which the scruples of the Church forbade Christians to engage, lest they should be contaminated with the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples, the Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless contributed to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would have been possible without such aid. But, except in this indirect way, their presence contributed nothing to the political developement of the towns; and in their social developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter exempt from the jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as from that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from the Christian community around it, had no part at all.

[156] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 317 (Hardy, p. 500, note).

Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the general manner of life was much the same in all ranks of society. The domestic arrangements of the castle or manor-house differed little from those of the citizen’s dwelling. In both the accommodation usually consisted merely of a hall, a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure of cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for the whole household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with hay or rushes;[158] a fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in its centre, or in a wide recess at one end; and round the fire were ranged in due order the tables and benches at which the family, guests and servants all assembled for meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but one daily repast--the mid-day dinner--and those who wished to ape courtly manners followed his example; the practice, however, found little favour with the mass of the people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess, and preferred their four meals a day according to ancient English custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted his business or conversed with his friends; and it was in the hall too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared and the wooden shutters which closed the unglazed windows safely barred,[160] guests and servants, divided at most by a curtain drawn across the room, lay down to sleep in the glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used at once as bedroom and private sitting-room by the master and mistress of the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving as a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of S. Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which a burgher-mother rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a dainty silken coverlet.[165] The whole house, whether in town or country, was commonly of wood.[166] With open hearths and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably altogether lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert Becket’s house was burnt over his head several times, and in each case a large part of London shared in the destruction.[167] But the buildings thus easily destroyed were as easily replaced; while the cost of a stone house was beyond the means of any but the great nobles, unless it were here and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was no other building material to be had except wood or rubble, for the nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into general use was a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes used for roofing, the majority of houses, even in great cities like London, were covered with thatch.[169] All the architectural energy of the time spent itself in two channels--military and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was as yet a very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the stone wall of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness and solidity, was often nothing more than a shell, the space inside it being divided by wooden partitions into rooms covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even where the keep was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or elegance was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity which gives to the remains of our early castles a grandeur of their own, and strikes the imagination far more impressively than the elaborate fortifications of later times. But it left no scope to the finer fancies of the architect. His feeling for artistic decoration, his love of beauty, of harmonious light and shade, had free play only in his work for the Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury and elegance had to find expression chiefly in minor matters, and especially in dress. During the last reign the extravagance of attire among the nobles had been carried to a pitch which called forth the energetic remonstrances of serious men; prelate after prelate thundered against the unseemly fashions--the long hair curled and scented like a woman’s, the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes and loose flowing garments which rendered all manly exercises impossible.[170] After the Red King’s death a reforming party, headed by the new sovereign and his friend Robert of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return to the more rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a close-fitting tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet, thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk, then as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their neighbours from beyond the Channel. Among the rural population, however, foreign fashions were slow to penetrate; and the English countryman went on tilling his fields clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the ordinary costume of all classes of men among his forefathers, and which has scarcely yet gone out of use among his descendants.

[157] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. pp. 2, 5.

[158] _Ib._ p. 16.

[159] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 407 (Hardy, p. 636).

[160] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. p. 13.

[161] _Ib._ pp. 2, 15.

[162] _Ib._ p. 5.

[163] _Ib._ p. 16.

[164] _Ib._ p. 10.

[165] Ed. Grim (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. ii.), p. 357. Anon. I. (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 4.

[166] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, pp. 8, 17, 18.

[167] According to Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii. p. 8), fires and drunkenness were the two plagues of London.

[168] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, p. xxvii. (introduction).

[169] _Ib._ p. 18.

[170] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 816. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 314 (Hardy, p. 498).

[171] Will. Malm. as above, and l. v. c. 407 (p. 636).

[172] We see this long cloak in a story of Robert of Bellême (Hen. Hunt. _De Contemptu Mundi_, ed. Arnold, p. 310), and in that of Henry “Curt-Mantel” (Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 28., ed. Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

The life of the English country folk had changed since the first days of the Norman settlement almost as little as their dress. The final transformation, now everywhere complete, of the ancient township into the feudal manor was but the last step in a process which had begun at least as far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now developed, was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the home-farm, the lord’s demesne land, cultivated partly by free tenants, partly by the customary labour due from the villeins whose cottages clustered on its border, and whose holdings, with a tract of common pasture and common woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the portion thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed in large open fields in strips of an acre or half an acre in extent, each man holding a certain number of strips scattered one in one field and one in another; while in proportion to the total amount of land which he thus held he contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the heavy plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common. On the estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings were mostly of virgates or half-virgates--that is, land to the extent of some thirty or fifteen acres, and furnishing in the former case two oxen, in the latter one ox, to the common plough team, which usually consisted of four; those belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight. Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of the common pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well as of the common woodland where he fed his pigs on the oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for fuel and other household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land, but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage with or without a garden. Whatever the extent and character of their holding, they held it in consideration of certain services due to the lord, discharged partly by labour upon his demesne land, partly by customary payments in money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes on particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173] The superintendence of all these matters was in the hands of the reeve or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with the regulation of its labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock, the ingathering of its dues, the letting of its unoccupied land, and the general account of its revenues. Under his orders every villein was bound to do a certain amount of “week-work”--to plough, sow, or reap, or otherwise labour on the demesne land a certain number of days every week; generally the obligation, on every virgate held in villenage, was for two or three days a week throughout the year, sometimes with an extra day at harvest-tide. The customary dues and services varied with the special custom of each manor; they consisted partly of payments either in kind or money, or both, and partly of services such as hewing, carting, and drying wood, cutting turf, making thatch, making malt, mowing and carrying hay, putting up fences, providing ploughs and labour for a specified length of time at particular seasons, ploughing, sowing, harrowing and reaping a given extent of the demesne land. Some of the rents were paid by the discharge of a special duty; the cowherds, oxherds, shepherds, swineherds, usually held a piece of land “by their service,” that is, in consideration of their charge over the flocks and herds of the lord; sometimes we find a further labour-rent paid by their wives, who winnow and reap so much corn on the demesne.[174] Many of the cotters doubtless held their little dwellings on a similar tenure, by virtue of their offices as the indispensable craftsmen of the village community, such as the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the wheelwright. The mill, too, an important institution on every large manor, paid a fixed money rent, and sometimes a tribute of fish from the mill-stream.[175]

[173] “Præcaria” or “præcationes.”

[174] _Liber Niger_ (App. to Chron. Petroburgense, ed. Stapleton, Camden Soc.), pp. 158, 163, 164, 165.

[175] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 158, “i molendinus cum i virgâ terræ reddit xl solidos et cc anguillas.”

We may draw some illustrations of the life of these rural communities from the “Black Book” of Peterborough, in which the manors belonging to the abbey were described about the year 1125. On the manor of Thorp there were twelve “full villeins” holding eleven acres each, and working on the demesne three days a week; there were also six half villeins who did the like in proportion to their holdings. All these paid of custom ten shillings annually, besides five sheep for eating, ten ells of linen cloth, ten porringers, and two hundred loaves for the love-feast of S. Peter; moreover they all ploughed sixteen acres and a half for their lord. Six _bordarii_ paid seven shillings a year; and they all rendered twenty-two bushels of oats for their share of the dead wood, twenty-two loaves, sixty-four hens, and one hundred and sixty eggs.[176] At Colingham twenty villeins worked each one day a week, and three boon-days in August; they brought sixty waggon-loads of wood to the manor-house, dug and carried twenty loads of turf and twenty of thatch, harrowed all the winter-ploughing, and paid annually four pounds in money. There were also fifty sokemen who paid twelve pounds a year, ploughed, harrowed and reaped eighteen acres, besides ploughing with their own ploughs three times in Lent; each of them worked three days in August, and served of custom six times a year in driving the deer for the abbot’s hunting.[177] At Easton twenty-one villeins holding a virgate each worked twice a week throughout the year and three boon-days in August; they had twelve ploughs with which they worked once in winter and once in spring, and then harrowed; they ploughed fifteen acres and three roods, whereof five acres and one rood were to be sown with their own seed; in spring they had to plough ten acres and a half and sow twenty and a half with their own seed; in summer, for fifteen days, they had to do whatsoever the lord commanded. They also made seventy-three bushels of malt from the lord’s barley; and they paid seventeen shillings and sixpence a year. A man named Toli held one virgate at a rent of five shillings a year; and eleven sokemen held thirteen virgates and a half by a payment of twelve shillings, two days’ work in summer and winter, and fifteen days in summer at the lord’s bidding. The miller, with a holding of six acres of arable land and two of meadow, rendered one mark of silver to the lord.[178]

[176] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), pp. 158, 159.

[177] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 159.

[178] _Ib._ pp. 159, 160.

Fisherton, again, supplies illustrations of a great variety of services. On this manor there were twenty-six “full villeins,” twelve “half villeins,” one “cotsetus” and three “bordarii.” The full villeins worked two days a week, the half villeins one day, throughout the year; the four cottagers worked one day a week in August, their food being supplied by the lord. The villeins had among them nine ploughs, which were all brought into requisition once in winter and three times in spring. The full villeins carted a load of wood, the half villeins in proportion; the full villeins moreover ploughed and harrowed of custom an acre in spring, and half an acre in winter; they also lent their ploughs once in summer for fallowing. At Pentecost the lord received one penny for every villein plough-ox. Each full villein paid twopence at Martinmas and thirty-two pence on the four quarter-days; the half villeins paid half the sum. Every one of them gave a hen at Christmas. The mill brought three shillings a year, the fishing five shillings. Land enough for twelve full villeins lay unoccupied; the reeve had to discharge its dues out of his own purse, and hire it out at the best rent he could get. There were twenty sokemen, holding three ploughlands, and lending their ploughs once in winter, twice in spring, and once for fallowing; each of them reaped one acre, and did two days bene-work in August; at hay-harvest they gave of custom three days’ work, one for mowing, one for turning the hay, and one for carrying it; each gave a hen at Christmas, and they all paid four pounds a quarter. On the demesne were three ploughs, each with a team of eight oxen; these were under the care of five ox-herds, who held five acres each, and whose wives reaped one day a week in August, the lord supplying their food.[179] At Oundle we get a glimpse not only of the rural township, but of the little dependent town growing up on it. “In Oundle are four hides paying geld to the king. Of these hides, twenty-five men hold twenty virgates, and pay of custom twenty shillings a year, forty hens, and two hundred eggs. The men of the township have nine ploughs; from Michaelmas to Martinmas they find ploughs for the lord’s use once a week, and from Martinmas to Easter once a fortnight, and ten acres fallow. Each virgate owes three days’ work a week. There are ten _bordarii_, who work one day a week; and fifteen burghers, who pay thirty shillings. The market of the township renders four pounds and three shillings. A mill with one virgate renders forty shillings and two hundred eels. The abbot holds the wood in his own hand. The men of the township, with six herdsmen, pay five shillings a year poll-tax. The church of this township belongs to the altar of the abbey of Borough.”[180]

[179] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 164.

[180] _Ib._ p. 158.

Services such as these were doubtless an irksome and a heavy burthen; to modern ideas of independence, the life of the rural population was the degraded life of serfdom. But there was another side to the system. The lord had his duties as well as the villein; the villein had his rights as well as the lord. When their work for the lord was done and their customary dues were paid, the villagers were free to make their own arrangements one with another for the yoking of their oxen to the common ploughs and the tillage of the common fields; and the rest of their time and produce of their labour was theirs to do with as they would, subject merely to such restrictions as to grinding at the lord’s mill, or obtaining his license for the sale of cattle, as were necessary for maintaining the integrity of the estate. While they owed suit and service to their lord, he was bound by his own interest as well as by law and duty to guard them against external interference, oppression, or injury; the extent of his rights over them, no less than of their duties to him, was defined by a strict and minute code of custom to which long prescription gave all and more than all the force of law, and law itself could occasionally step in to avenge the wronged villein even upon his lord; Alfred of Cheaffword is recorded in the Pipe Roll as having paid a fine of forty shillings for scourging a rustic of his own.[181] The villein’s life was not harder than that of the poor free man; it was quite as secure from wrong, and far more secure from want. The majority of the cultivators were indeed tied to their land; but their land was equally tied to them; the lord was bound to furnish each little bundle of acre-strips with its proper outfit of plough-oxen, to provide each tenant with his little cottage, and to see that the heritage passed on to the next generation, just as the manor itself, and with it the tenants and their services, passed from father to son in the case of a lay proprietor, or from one generation of monks to another in a case like that of Peterborough. Even if a villein failed in his dues, the worst punishment that could befall him was the seizure of his little household goods; eviction was out of the question. The serfdom of the villein was after all only the lowest link in a chain of feudal interdependence which ended only with the king himself. If the “rustics” possessed their homesteads only on condition of work done at the lord’s bidding and for his benefit, the knight held his “fee” and the baron his “honour” only on condition of a service to the king, less laborious indeed, but more dangerous, and in reality not a whit more morally elevating. If they had to ask their lord’s leave for giving a daughter in marriage, the first baron of the realm had to ask a like permission of the king, and to pay for it too. If their persons and their services could be transferred by the lord to another owner together with the soil which they tilled, the same principle really applied to every grade of feudal society; Count William of Evreux only stated a simple fact in grotesque language when he complained that his homage and his services had been made over together with the overlordship of his county by Robert Curthose to Henry I., with no more regard to his own will than if he had been a horse or an ox.[182] The mere gift of personal freedom, when it meant the uprooting of all local and social ties and the withdrawal of all accustomed means of sustenance, would have been in itself but a doubtful boon. There were, however, at least three ways in which freedom might be attained. Sometimes the lord on his death-bed, or in penance for some great sin, would be moved by the Church’s influence to enfranchise some of his serfs. Sometimes a rustic might flee to one of the chartered towns, and if for the space of a year and a day he could find shelter under its protecting customs from the pursuit of his lord’s justice, he was thenceforth a free burgher. And there was a greater city of refuge whose protection was readier and surer still. The Church had but to lay her consecrating hands upon a man, and he was free at once. To ordain a villein or admit him as a monk without his lord’s consent was indeed forbidden; but the consecration once bestowed was valid nevertheless; and the storm of indignation which met the endeavour of Henry II. to enforce the prohibition shows that it had long been almost a dead letter.

[181] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 55.

[182] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 814.

If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of Henry I. were to be judged solely from her highest official representatives, it would certainly appear to have been at a low ebb. S. Anselm had lived just long enough to accomplish the settlement of the investitures, but not to direct its working or experience its results. On his death early in 1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as to keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The supreme direction of affairs in the Church as well as in the state was thus left in the hands of the party represented by Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy and that of his master was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion than that of Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in a moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees were no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s benefit; the most sacred offices of the Church were no longer openly sold to the highest bidder; but they were made appendages to the great offices of the state; the Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of secular government. The system had undoubted advantages in a worldly point of view. A great deal of the most important political and administrative work was of a nature which, in the condition of society then existing, required the services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover, a man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and standing, so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to the temptations and corruptions of place and power than a layman surrounded with personal and social ties and open to all sorts of personal and social ambitions, and could thus be safely intrusted with a freedom of action and authority such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial and family influence might have led to the most dangerous results. On these and similar grounds Henry made a practice of choosing his chief ministers from the ranks of the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics upon them, by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of their temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to the state the services of a more able, vigorous and honest set of administrators than could have been obtained by any other means; but from another side the system lay open to grave objection. The men whom it set over the dioceses of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral character, men whom it would be most unjust to compare for a moment with the hirelings who bought their sees of William Rufus. But they were essentially of the world, worldly; their minds and their hearts were both alike fixed on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer or justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop of Ely or Salisbury. And as were the bishops, so were the priests. When once it became clear that the main road to ecclesiastical preferment lay through the temporal service of the crown, the whole body of secular clergy turned into a nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their highest point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence which they still retained passed altogether away. But the Church’s life was not in her bishops and her priests; it was in her humble, faithful laity. Down below the dull utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of the times,” the finer sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay buried but not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and then of the monks of Citeaux.

Of the two religious movements which at this time stirred the depths of English society, the earlier, that of the Austin canons, was in its origin not monastic but secular. It arose, in fact, out of a protest against monasticism. About the middle of the eleventh century an attempt had been made to redress the balance between the regular and secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by their own fault, already to a great extent lost. Some earnest and thoughtful spirits, distressed at once by the abuse of monastic privileges and by the general decay of ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform by the establishment of a stricter and better organized discipline in those cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges of secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the eighth century by Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the members of his own chapter, and generally followed in the collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model adopted by cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of Wells and Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop Thomas of York under the latter, severally attempted to enforce it upon their canons, but without success. The English clergy were accustomed to the full enjoyment not only of their separate property but of their separate houses; many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required them to break up their homes and submit to community of table and dwelling, was naturally resented as an attempt to curtail their liberty and bring them under monastic restraint. Lanfranc soon found that the only way to get rid of the old lax system was to get rid of the canons altogether; accordingly, from some few cathedrals the secular clerks were once again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced by monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of churches the canons were influential enough to resist expulsion as well as reform, and to maintain the old fashion with its merits and its abuses, its good and evil sides, all alike undisturbed and unrestrained. On the Continent, too, the rule of Chrodegang proved unequal to the needs of the time. Those who had the attainment of its object really at heart ended by taking a lesson from their rivals and challenging the monks with their own weapons. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century the attempts at canonical reform issued in the foundation of what was virtually a new religious order, that of the Augustinians or Canons Regular of the order of S. Augustine. Like the monks and unlike the secular canons, from whom they were carefully distinguished, they had not only their table and dwelling but all things in common, and were bound by a vow to the observance of their rule, grounded upon a passage in one of the letters of that great father of the Latin Church from whom they took their name.[183] Their scheme was a compromise between the old-fashioned system of canons and that of the monastic confraternities; but a compromise leaning strongly towards the monastic side, tending more and more towards it with every fresh developement, and distinguished from it chiefly by a certain simplicity and elasticity of organization which gave scope for an almost unlimited variety in the adjustment of the relations between the active and the contemplative life of the members of the order, thus enabling it to adapt itself to the most dissimilar temperaments and to the most diverse spheres of religious activity.

[183] On Austin canons see Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ (Eng. trans. ed. Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47; on canons in general, _ib._ vol. i. pp. 494, 495, 538; Stubbs, pref. to _Tract. de Inv. S. Crucis_; and Freeman, _Norm. Conq._, vol. ii. pp. 84, 85, 452, 453, and vol. iv. p. 374.

The Austin canons, as they were commonly called, made their way across the Channel at the beginning of Henry’s reign. The circumstances of their earliest settlement illustrate the intimate connexion between the religious and the national revival in England. Their first priory was founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda--“Maude the good queen,” as they gratefully called her--in the soke of Aldgate, just within the eastern wall of London. Part of its endowment was furnished by the estates of an old English cnihtengild whose members surrendered their property for the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name, was a native of Kent who had studied in Gaul under S. Anselm; through Anselm he was enabled to bring the Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda, whose confessor he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds on the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his library; how the starving brotherhood set out a row of empty plates in the refectory to attract the sympathy of the citizens who were taking their Sunday stroll round the suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of the new building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory were never empty again[184]--is a story which need not be repeated in detail. Some fifteen years later Rahere the king’s minstrel threw up his post at court to become the head of an Austin priory which he built on a plot of waste marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached to it an hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every day--so tradition told--Alfhun, the master of the hospital, went about the city as the Little Sisters of the Poor do to this day, begging in the shops and markets for help towards the support of the sick folk under his care. Most likely he was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to prove him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood devoted themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious scholar--born in the very year in which their house was founded, 1117--is known to us already as Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of England, Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons of the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in “making Christ his heir”--devoting to God’s service the heritage which had been destined for his boy, and founding the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire on the spot where the lad had expired.[186] Before the close of Henry’s reign the Austin canons had acquired such importance that two of their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the primacy of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the metropolitan chair of Canterbury was still too vividly haunted by memories of S. Anselm for Henry and Roger to venture on trying to fill it from the ranks of the latter’s party; they gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan, Ralf, bishop of Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his election was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed by Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a non-monastic primate. Not daring, however, to go the full length of appointing one of themselves, they took a middle course and chose a canon regular, William of Corbeil, prior of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The strict monastic party counted the new sort of canons very little better than the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly blameless churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional timidity and shrinking from political responsibilities which made him powerless to stem the tide of worldliness among his suffragans, though he at least kept the metropolitan chair itself safe from contaminating influences. The case of the other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting one. Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects by his general preference for foreign churchmen, had nevertheless chosen for his own spiritual adviser a priest whose name, Eadwulf, shows him to have been of English origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian house at Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor to a bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following out a cherished plan of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked bishop of Lincoln to be relieved of part of his enormous diocese by the establishment of a new see with the great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of York in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose see was fixed at Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop; naturally enough he constituted his chapter on the principles of his own order; and Carlisle, the last English bishopric founded before the Reformation, was also the only one whose cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine.[190]

[184] The history of H. Trinity, Aldgate, is printed in the appendix to Hearne’s edition of William of Newburgh, vol. iii. pp. 688–709.

[185] The story of S. Bartholomew’s and its founder comes from “Liber fundacionis ecclesiæ S. Bartholomæi Londoniarum,” a MS. of Henry II.’s time, part of which is printed in Dugdale’s _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 292–295. The remainder is as yet unprinted; but Dr. Norman Moore has published in the _S. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports_, vol. xxi. pp. xxxix.–cix., a translation made about A.D. 1400; the 22d chapter of this (pp. lxix., lxx.) contains the account of Alfhun.

[186] The stories of all these Austin priories are in Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pts. i. and ii. Merton is in pt. i. pp. 245–247; Kirkham, _ib._ pp. 207–209.

[187] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 221–223; Will. Malm., _Gesta Pontif._, l. i. c. 67 (Hamilton, p. 126). The king wanted to appoint Faricius, abbot of Abingdon; his choice was opposed by the seculars, who wanted one of their own party. This the monks of Christ Church resisted, but, as Faricius was obnoxious because he was an Italian, they finally all agreed upon Ralf, and the king confirmed their choice.

[188] Eng. Chron. a. 1123; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 7; Gerv. Cant., _Actus Pontif._ (Stubbs, vol. ii.), p. 380. On S. Osyth’s see Will. Malm., _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 731 (Hamilton, p. 146).

[189] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 195, 211; Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 60; Will. Malm., _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 445 (Hardy, p. 680); _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 185 (Hamilton, p. 325).

[190] On Carlisle and Eadwulf (or Æthelwulf) see Joh. Hexham, a. 1133 (Raine, vol. i. pp. 109, 110); and Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 141–145.

Meanwhile a mightier influence than theirs was regenerating all the Churches of the West--our own among the number. Its root was in a Burgundian wilderness; but the seed from which it sprang was of English birth. Harding was an Englishman who spent his boyhood in the monastery of Sherborne in Dorset, till he was seized with a passion for wandering and for study which led him first to Scotland, then to Gaul, and at last to Rome. It chanced that on his return thence, passing through the duchy of Burgundy, he stopped at the abbey of Molêmes. As he saw the ways and habits familiar to his childhood reproduced in those of the monks, the wanderer’s heart yearned for the peaceful life which he had forsaken; he took the vows, and became a brother of the house. But when, with the zeal of a convert, he began to look more closely into his monastic obligations, he perceived that the practice of Molêmes, and indeed of most other monasteries, fell very far short of the strict rule of S. Benedict. He remonstrated with his brethren till they had no rest in their minds. At last, after long and anxious debates in the chapter, the abbot determined to go to the root of the matter, and appointed two brethren, whose learning was equalled by their piety, to examine diligently the original rule and declare what they found in it. The result of their investigations justified Harding’s reproaches and caused a schism in the convent. The majority refused to alter their accustomed ways; finding they were not to be reformed, the zealous minority, consisting of Robert the abbot, Harding himself (or Stephen, as he was called in religion), and sixteen others equally “stiff-necked in their holy obstinacy,” left Molêmes, and sought a new abode in the wilderness. The site which they chose--in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from Dijon--was no happy valley, no “green retreat” such as the earlier Benedictine founders had been wont to select. It was a dismal swamp overgrown with brushwood, a forlorn, dreary, unhealthy spot, from whose marshy character the new house took its name of “the Cistern”--_Cistellum_, commonly called Citeaux. There the little band set to work in 1098 to carry into practice their views of monastic duty. The brotherhood of Molêmes, left without a head by their abbot’s desertion, presently appealed to the archbishop of Lyons and the Pope, and after some negotiation Robert, willingly or unwillingly, returned to his former post. His departure gave a shock to the foundations of the new community; zeal was already growing cold, and of those who had followed him out from Molêmes all save eight followed him back again. Those eight--“few in number, but a host in merit”--at once chose their prior Alberic to be abbot in Robert’s stead, while the true founder, Stephen Harding, undertook the duties of prior. Upon Alberic’s death in 1110 Stephen became abbot in his turn, and under him the little cistern in the wilderness became a fountain whose waters flowed out far and wide through the land. Three-and-twenty daughter-houses were brought to completion during his life-time. One of the earliest was Pontigny, founded in 1114, and destined in after-days to become inseparably associated with the name of another English saint. Next year there went forth another Cistercian colony, whose glory was soon to eclipse that of the mother-house itself. Its leader was a young monk called Bernard, and the place of its settlement was named Clairvaux.[191]

[191] For the Life of S. Stephen Harding, and the early history of Citeaux and its order, see Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. cc. 334–337 (Hardy, pp. 511–517); Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), pp. 711–714; and _Gallia Christiana_, vol. iv. pp. 980–984.

From Burgundy and Champagne the “White Monks,” as the Cistercians were called from the colour of their habit, soon spread over France and Normandy. In 1128 they crossed the sea and made an entrance into their founder’s native land; William Giffard, bishop of Winchester, founded the abbey of Waverley in Surrey for twelve monks from the Cistercian house of Aumône in Normandy.[192] The movement spread rapidly in all directions. In 1131 Walter Lespec the founder of Kirkham, zealous in every good work, established in the heart of the Yorkshire wolds a “daughter of S. Bernard,” the abbey of Rievaux;[193] far away on the Welsh border, in the valley of the Wye, Tintern was founded in the same year by Walter de Clare.[194] The story of another famous Yorkshire house, Fountains, is a curious repetition of that of Citeaux itself. Thirteen monks of the Benedictine convent of S. Mary at York, fired by the example of the newly-established brotherhood at Rievaux, determined, like Stephen Harding and his friends at Molêmes, to go forth into the wilderness where they might follow the Cistercian rule in freedom. But when they asked their abbot’s leave to depart it was sternly refused. Archbishop Thurstan, to whom they appealed for support, came in person to plead their cause with the abbot, and was so insolently received that after a stormy scene in the chapter-house he laid the convent under interdict, and walked out followed by the zealous thirteen “with nothing but the clothes on their backs.” The warmly-sympathizing primate gave them a temporary shelter in his own home; at Christmas he bestowed upon them for their dwelling a lonely valley called Skeldale, near Ripon, “full of thorns and enclosed by rocks,” and for their maintenance the little township of Sutton. They at once chose one of their number, Richard by name, as abbot, and went forth under his guidance to settle in their new abode, although the cold of a Yorkshire winter was at its bitterest, and they had not where to lay their heads. In the middle of the valley stood a great elm--“thick and leafy as elms are wont to be.”[195] That tree was the original abbey of our Lady of Fountains. Its spreading branches formed a roof to shelter the little band of monks; “their bread was supplied to them by the archbishop, their drink by the streamlet which ran through the valley,” and which, as in the case of Citeaux, suggested a name for the future house. In this primitive dwelling they fulfilled their religious exercises in peace and contentment till the winter was past, when they began to think of constructing a more substantial abode. They had no mind to follow their own inspirations and set up an independent rule of their own; in all humility they wrote to S. Bernard (who since the death of S. Stephen Harding was universally looked up to as the head of the Cistercian order), telling him all their story, and beseeching him to receive them as his children. Bernard answered by sending to them, with a letter full of joyous welcome and hearty sympathy, his friend and confidant, Godfrey, to instruct them in the Cistercian rule. They had now been joined by ten more brethren. But the elm-tree was still their only shelter, and their means of subsistence were as slender as at the first. Presently there came a famine in the land; they were reduced to eke out their scanty store of bread with leaves and stewed herbs. When they had just given away their two last loaves--one to the workmen engaged on the building, the other to a passing pilgrim--this supreme act of charity and faith was rewarded with a supply sent them by the lord of Knaresborough, Eustace Fitz-John. At last, after struggling on bravely for two years, they found it impossible to continue where they were, with numbers constantly increasing and means at a standstill; so the abbot went to Clairvaux and begged that some place might be assigned to them there. S. Bernard granted the request; but when Abbot Richard came back to fetch the rest of the brotherhood he found that all was changed. Hugh, dean of York, had just made over himself and all his property to Fountains. It was the turn of the tide; other donations began to flow in; soon they poured. Five years after its own rise the “Fountain” sent out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants speedily covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood cherish their beloved elm-tree as a witness to the lowly beginnings whence had sprung the mightiest Cistercian house in England. It bore a yet more touching witness four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old age, the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.[196]

[192] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 237, 241.

[193] _Ib._ pp. 274, 280, 281.

[194] _Ib._ pp. 265, 267, 270.

[195] So says the historian of Fountains. How this can have been, in Yorkshire and at Christmas-time, I cannot pretend to explain.

[196] The story of Fountains is in the _Narratio_ of Hugh of Kirkstall, in _Memorials of Fountains_ (Walbran, Surtees Soc.), and Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 292 _et seq._ See also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 50). The elm was standing in Leland’s day.

The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from that of the earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines was, so to say, in the world though not of it. They sought tranquillity and retirement, but not solitude; the site of an abbey was chosen with a careful eye to the natural resources of the place, its accessibility, and the advantages which it offered for cultivation and production of all kinds. A Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed was intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay population, either a cluster of rural settlements, or, not unfrequently, a busy, thriving town. But by the close of the tenth century, although the palmy days of the Benedictine fathers as the guardians of art and literature were in part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled for five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators and civilizers of Europe, was well-nigh accomplished; and the position into which they had unavoidably drifted as owners of vast landed property protected by special privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On the one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads upon the Church in general was creeping even into the cloister. On the other, the monasteries were growing rich and powerful at the expense of the parochial and diocesan organization. The laity were too apt, while showering their pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to leave those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for; and the growing habit of diverting the tithes of various estates and districts to the endowment of some abbey with which they were quite unconnected was already becoming a distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of the Cistercians was a direct protest. They refused to have anything to do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no right to them; their houses were of the plainest possible construction: even in their churches scarcely an ornament was admitted to soften the stern grandeur of the architecture; there were no broidered hangings, no delicate paintings, no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for the most solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate than the simple white surplice or alb; and their ordinary habit, made from the wool of their flocks, was not black like that of the Benedictines, but the natural white or gray, for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to men who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as well as the deceitfulness of riches.[197] Their aim was to be simply voices crying in the wilderness--a wilderness wherein they were resolved to dwell, as much as possible, alone. Their rule absolutely forbade the erection of a house even of their own order within a certain distance of another. But the cry that came forth from the depth of their solitude thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined the order. It was the leaven of that influence, more than all others, which worked on and on through the nineteen years of anarchy that followed Henry’s death till it had leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church, and made her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had been half a century in existence, William of Malmesbury, himself a member of one of the most ancient and famous of English Benedictine abbeys, could describe it as the unanimously acknowledged type of the monastic profession, the ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad to the negligent, and a model to all.[198]

[197] See abstract of rule in Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 224, 225.

[198] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 337 (Hardy, p. 517).

How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents, Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him--Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark--he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the chief object of his devotion--S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: “Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!” Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin--a farthing--to lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric’s day the place was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels.” Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock.” The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric’s life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]

[199] The story of S. Godric is in _Libellus de Vitâ S. Godrici_, by Reginald of Durham (Surtees Society).

It was in 1122--two years after the wreck of the _White Ship_--that Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there sixty years. He is the last of the old English saints; his long life, beginning probably before the Conqueror’s death and ending only seven years before that of Henry II., is a link between the religious life of the earlier England which had passed away and that of the newer England which was arising in its place. The spiritual side of the revival was in truth closely connected with its national side. All the foreign influences which the Norman conquest had brought to bear upon the English Church had failed to stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather, she was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One of the most striking signs of the times was the renewal of reverence for those older English saints whose latest successor was striving to bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s patrimony. Normans and English hushed their differences before the grave of the Confessor; Lanfranc was forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At Canterbury itself the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm was still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced by Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal for discipline or their passion for architectural display, worked in the same direction. It was in the old minster of S. Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had placed the Benedictine colony whose settlement helped to bring about the appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of another early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury reared his abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of London planted the Austin canons at Chiche over the shrine of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury planted them at Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation of a bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S. Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two of the very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William of S. Calais and Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour that art could devise or wealth procure, was one vast monument to the honour of S. Cuthbert. Literary activity was re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive precentors of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up into more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S. Dunstan. Eadmer’s best inspiration came to him indeed from a nearer source; his most valuable work is the history of his own time, which he grouped, as in a picture, around the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of sympathy which extended far beyond his local associations at Canterbury. The saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid and Oswald, found in him a new biographer. In the northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks were busy at Durham with the story of their own church and its patron, Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot of Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost every church of importance in central and southern England was throwing open its archives to the eager researches, and contributing its memorials of early Mercian and West-Saxon saints to swell the hagiological collections of a young monk at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.

There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England where the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had never died out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for more than a century the depository of the sole contemporary edition of the English Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national history continued to be recorded in the national tongue down to the early years of Henry I. In the middle of his reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in consequence of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from Worcester, and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with additions from local history and other sources. It is only in their version that the earliest Chronicle of Worcester has been preserved to us. But they did more than transcribe the story of the past. When the copyist had brought his work down to the latest event of his own day--the sinking of the _White Ship_ in 1120--another scribe carried on the annals of Peterborough and of England for ten more years, in the native speech of the land; and when he laid down his pen it was taken up by yet another English writer whose notices of contemporary history, irregular and fragmentary though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the darkness of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death of the first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]

[200] In strictness, we must except the years 1043–1066, when the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

[201] On the school of Worcester and its later influence, and the relations between the Chronicles of Worcester and Peterborough, see Green, _Conquest of England_, pp. 341, 342 and notes, and p. 370, note 2; and Earle, _Parallel Chronicles_, Introd.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him--patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been--to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s birth in 848 and Florence’s own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

[202] On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Roger of Howden, vol. i. (Rolls ed.); Mr. Arnold’s prefaces to Simeon, vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon (_ibid._); and Mr. Hodgson Hinde’s preface to Simeon (Surtees Soc.).

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English.[204] They early destined their son to a literary career; “My father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined.” It is plain that submission to the father’s wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, “Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore’s school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: “Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school.[206] The bent of the lad’s mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;--and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey’s darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,” he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]

[203] This conclusion, which seems the only one possible, as to the date of William’s birth is that of Mr. W. de Gray Birch, _On the Life and Writings of Will. of Malmesbury_, pp. 3, 4 (from _Trans. R. Soc. of Lit._, vol. x., new series).

[204] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. iii. (Hardy, p. 389).

[205] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[206] The history of Malmesbury is in Will. Malm.’s _Vita S. Aldhelmi_, i.e. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. (Hamilton, pp. 332 _et seq._)

[207] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[208] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot,[209] it was natural that his first endeavour should be to “collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign nations.” As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become his home, the question arose--could nothing be found among our own people worthy of the remembrance of posterity?[210] He had but to look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To Ealdhelm’s own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint’s relics in 1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of his miraculous powers, and--as generally happened in such cases--of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days’ intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William’s childhood.[211] In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately form.[212] Among the older literary treasures which served as a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his consecration.[213] The muniment-chest was full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, Ælfred and Eadward, Æthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as Æthelstan’s gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower.[214] On the left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm’s shrine, stood a tomb which in William’s day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself--John Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established a school under Ælfred’s protection at Malmesbury, and to have been there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence.[215] The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits, and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern home.[216]

[209] Godfrey was a monk of Jumièges; Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

[210] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 142).

[211] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 275 (Hamilton, pp. 438, 439).

[212] _Ib._ c. 218 (p. 365).

[213] _Ib._ c. 224 (pp. 376–378).

[214] _Ib._ c. 246 (p. 397).

[215] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 240 (Hamilton, p. 394), and _Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 122 (Hardy, p. 190). The story seems however to be false. It probably originated in a confusion, first between John Scotus and John the Old-Saxon, who was nearly murdered by the monks of Athelney; and secondly, between both these Johns and a third scholar bearing the same name, who is mentioned by Gotselin of Canterbury as buried at Malmesbury, but whose real history seems to be lost. See Lanigan, _Eccles. Hist. of Ireland_, vol. iii. pp. 300, 301, 315, 316, 318–320.

[216] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 260 (Hamilton, p. 415).

Under the influence of surroundings such as these William began his studies in English history. But he was brought to a standstill at the very threshold for lack of a guide. From the death of Bæda to his own day, he could not by the most diligent researches discover a single English writer worthy of the name of historian. “There are indeed certain records of antiquity in the native tongue, arranged according to the years of our Lord after the manner of a chronicle, whereby the times which have gone by since that great man (Bæda) have been rescued from complete oblivion. For of Æthelweard, a noble and illustrious man who set himself to expound those chronicles in Latin, it is better to say nothing; his aim indeed would be quite to my mind, if his style were not unbearable to my taste.”[217] The work of Florence was probably as yet altogether unpublished; it was certainly not yet finished, nor does it appear to have been heard of at Malmesbury. That of Eadmer, whose first edition--ending at the death of Anselm--must have been the last new book of the day, received from William a just tribute of praise, both as to its subject-matter and its style; but it was essentially what its title imported, a _History of Recent Events_; the introductory sketch prefixed to it was a mere outline, and, starting as it did only from Eadgar’s accession, still left between its beginning and Bæda’s death a yawning chasm of more than two centuries which the young student at Malmesbury saw no means of bridging over save by his own labour.[218] “So, as I could not be satisfied with what I found written of old, I began to scribble myself.”[219]

[217] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, pp. 1, 2).

[218] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, p. 2).

[219] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, pp. 143, 144).

Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of William’s first historical work, the _Gesta Regum Anglorum_ or _Acts of the English Kings_, followed a few years later by a companion volume devoted to the acts of the bishops. He was stirred by the same impulse of revived national sentiment which stirred Florence of Worcester to undertake his version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very differently on two different minds. William’s _Gesta Regum_ were first published in 1120, two years after the death of Florence. The work of Florence, although he never mentions it, had doubtless reached him by this time, and must certainly have been well known to him before he issued his revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the Chronicle had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself a loftier aim. In his own acceptation of the word, he is the first English historian since Bæda; he is in truth the founder of a new school of historical composition. William’s temper, as displayed in his works, might form the subject of a curious psychological study. It is a temper which, in many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the world in our own day than to a monk of the twelfth century. He has none of the narrowness of the cloister; he has little of the prejudices common to his profession or his age; he has still less prejudice of race. The Norman and the English blood in his veins seem completely to neutralize each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his violent English sympathies, William calmly balances the one side against the other, and criticizes them both with the judicial impartiality of a spectator to whom the matter has a purely philosophical interest. The whole bent of his mind indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than political. With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his readers quite as much as to instruct them. He utterly discards the old arrangement of events “by the years of our Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance of chronology on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them in the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight of his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with dry political details, always seizing an opportunity to break in upon their monotony with some curious illustration, some romantic episode, some quaint legend, or--when he reaches his own time--some personal scandal which he tells with all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst of his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales, sometimes of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating to a student bent only upon following the main thread of the history. But in William of Malmesbury the main thread is often of less real value than the mass of varied adornment and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is no Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval historians who can vie with him in the telling of a story. His long and frequent digressions into foreign affairs are often of great intrinsic value, and they show a depth of insight into the history of other nations and a cosmopolitan breadth of thought and feeling quite without parallel in his time. His penetration into individual characters, his power of seizing upon their main features and sketching them to the life in a few rapid skilful strokes--as in his pictures of the Norman kings or of the Angevin counts--has perhaps not many rivals at any time. Even when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves, there is a value in the light which they throw upon the writer’s own temper or on that of the age in which he lived. Not a few of them have a further interest as fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians, we might never have known. The Norman conquest had doomed to gradual extinction a vast growth of unwritten popular verse which, making its way with the wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of England for four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were numbered. He had managed to hold his ground against the growing hostility of the Church; but the coming of the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence. His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who sat in the seat of his former patrons; _jongleur_ and _ménestrel_ from over sea had taken in the king’s court and the baron’s castle the place which the gleeman had once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only the common people still hailed his appearance as a welcome break in the monotonous drudgery of their daily life. Before his day was quite over, however, the new school of patriotic historians had arisen; and they plunged into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose stores they might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines of the structure which they were building up on the meagre foundations of the Chronicle. Florence was the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process. William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay at his own door: a simple English ballad which the country-folk around Malmesbury in his day still chanted as they went about their work was the spell by which S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first to his singing and then to his preaching, four hundred years before.[220] The same spell of song, handed on from generation to generation, and passing from the gleeman’s lips into the pages of the twelfth century historians with William at their head, has transformed the story of the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that too often only serves to darken the true character of the period which it professes to illustrate. What it does illustrate is not the tenth century but the twelfth. It helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national revival towards the national past, by showing us the England of Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not as it actually was, but as it appeared to the England of Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,--to the England of Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.

[220] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 190 (Hamilton, p. 336).

We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they treated almost as an equal, and whom they came, with a train of secular clerks and lay followers, to visit and consult on matters of Church or state or of their own personal interests. If the king himself chanced to pass that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman kings were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of his own eyes, at any rate from that of his friend Abbot Godfrey; his portrait of Henry I. was in all likelihood painted from life as the king paid his devotions before S. Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table in the refectory, or--quite as probably--as William, in his turn, sat in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his friend and patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester, if not actually with the king himself. The hospitality of the abbey was repaid by that which greeted its brethren wherever they went, on business for their house or for themselves. The monk went in and out of castle or town, court or camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William, indeed, might be sure of a welcome anywhere; and William, indefatigable as a student, was almost equally so as a traveller. The little sketches of town and country which illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the _Gesta Pontificum_ must have been made on the spot. He had seen the marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down the legend of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of the martyrdom;[222] he had seen with his own eyes the Roman walls of Carlisle, and heard with his own ears the rough Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as it was to a southerner, he yet learned enough to catch from some northern gleeman the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt, wandered with delight up that vale of Severn which he paints in such glowing colours, and been drawn to write the life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of his church and his tomb at Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was the garner in which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted and set in order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that absolute security from outward disturbance and worldly care, which to the modern student is but a hopeless dream.

[221] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 91 (Hamilton, pp. 196–198); _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 20 (Hardy, pp. 32–34); _Antiq. Glaston._, _passim_.

[222] _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, pp. 152–155); _Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 213 (Hardy, p. 366).

[223] _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 253 (Hardy, p. 427).

The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224] Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a _History of the English_ in emulation of the _Gesta Regum_. Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers, among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened a school, apparently in Normandy, for the diffusion of the scientific lore which he had acquired in the East. He had picked up, among other things, an Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding mathematicians for centuries after. But his teaching of the physical science of the East was vehemently opposed by western scholars; his own nephew, who had been one of his pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was in the shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put forth, under the title of _Quæstiones Naturales_, a plea for a more free inquiry into the principles of natural science, instead of the blind following of old authorities which had hitherto contented the scholars of the West.[229] In the last years of Henry’s reign he seems to have returned once more to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows how daring was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen, and how vast was the range of study and experience now thrown open to English scholars. We see that England was already within reach of that wider world of which her Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.

[224] _Ib._ l. v. c. 394 (p. 620).

[225] _Ib._ c. 390 (p. 616).

[226] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 418 (Hardy, p. 650).

[227] “In historicis nos narrationibus occupatos detorsit a proposito tua, Rodberte, voluntas. Nuper enim cum in bibliothecâ nostrâ sederemus, et quisque pro suo studio libros evolveret, impegisti in Amalarium de Ecclesiasticis Officiis. Cujus cum materiam ex primâ statim tituli fronte cognosceris, amplexus es occasionem quâ rudimenta novæ professionis animares. Sed quia confestim animi tui alacritatem turbavit testimoniorum perplexitas et sermonum asperitas, rogasti ut eum abbreviarem. Ego autem ... munus injunctum non aspernanter accepi.” ... (Will. Malm. _Abbreviatio Amalarii_, prolog.) Mr. Birch (_Will. Malm._, p. 43) takes this Robert to be the earl. But does not the phrase about “nova professio” rather suggest a new-made monk of the house?

[228] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 409 (Hardy, p. 638).

[229] On Adelard, see Wright, _Biog. Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 94–100.

[230] “In Perdonis ... Adelardo de Bada, 4s. et 6d.” Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter) p. 22--among the “Nova placita et novæ conventiones” of Wiltshire. Mr. Hunter (_ib._, pref. p. xxi.) takes this to be the traveller, but Mr. Wright doubts it.

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray--the brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.

[231] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

[232] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 68.