CHAPTER X.

THE NEW ENGLAND.

1170–1206.

In the eyes of all contemporary Europe the most striking and important event in English history during the half-century which had passed away since the accession of Henry II. was the murder of Archbishop Thomas. The sensation which it produced throughout western Christendom was out of all proportion both to the personal influence of its victim during his lifetime and to its direct political results. The popular canonization bestowed upon the martyr was ratified by Rome with almost unprecedented speed, in little more than two years after his death;[2164] the stream of pilgrims which flowed to his shrine, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, was such as had hardly been seen even at the “threshold of the Apostles” or at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and it flowed on without a break for more than three hundred years. Yet Pope and pilgrims all alike were probably as blind as Thomas himself had been to the true significance for England of his life and his death. The great ecclesiastical struggle of which he was the hero and the martyr marks a turning-point in the social history of the reign of Henry II. even more than in its political history. With the quarrel between Henry and Thomas the direction of the moral and intellectual revival whose growth we have in earlier chapters endeavoured to trace from the accession of Henry I. to the death of Archbishop Theobald passed altogether out of the hands in which it had prospered so long and so well--the hands of the higher clergy and the monastic orders. The flight of Thomas scattered to the winds the little band of earnest churchmen who had been sharers with him in the inheritance of Theobald’s policy and Theobald’s work, and left the reforming party in the Church without a rallying-point and without a leader. One man alone still remained among the higher clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith.[2165]

[2164] He was canonized by Alexander III. on Ash-Wednesday, February 21, 1173. Epp. dcclxxxiii.–dcclxxxvi., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 544–550.

[2165] The story of Gilbert’s dream, in Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 240, was probably suggested by a line in the French _Life of S. Thomas_:

--“Gilebert Foliot, De lettres sout assez e servi Astarot”--

(Garnier, ed. Hippeau, p. 77)--where again in all likelihood the last words were prompted by nothing more than the exigencies of rime. That some such charges were however brought against Foliot we have seen above, p. 70, note 5{295}.

The final settlement of the controversy was in some sense a defeat of both parties; but the one which seemed to have gained the victory really suffered the heaviest loss. The king was indeed compelled to abandon his scheme for reforming the morals of the priesthood by the strong hand of his royal justice; the privilege of the clergy was saved, to fall at last before another King Henry four centuries later. Yet its staunchest champions must surely have felt their cause reduced well-nigh to an absurdity when they found that the first result of its triumph was to secure the primate’s very murderers from the penalty due to their crime;[2166] and far greater than the seeming gain of Henry’s surrender at Avranches was the loss to the English Church involved in the break-down of Theobald’s plans for the reform of the episcopate. The cowardice of the bishops during the struggle left them at its close wholly at the mercy of the king. The vacant sees, of which there were eight besides Canterbury, were filled after long delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the royal will; and before the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as completely secularized as it had been in the worst days of his grandfather. The inevitable consequences followed. As were the bishops, so, and even worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign through the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year, as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical policy. To that policy there were, indeed, two honourably marked exceptions. In 1186 Henry raised to the bishopric of Lincoln one of the holiest and wisest men then living, Hugh of Avalon. His dealings with the important and difficult question of the succession to the metropolitan see itself appear to have been prompted by equally disinterested motives. It was not the apathy or procrastination of the king, but the determination of the monks of Christ Church to use to the uttermost the favourable opportunity for asserting their independence, and the difficulty of finding any willing candidate for such a siege--perilous as the chair of S. Thomas was felt to be, that delayed the election of his successor for two years and a half, and his consecration for nine months longer still.[2167] The new Archbishop Richard was a monk of unblemished character, and though possessed of little talent or learning, fulfilled his office creditably for ten years;[2168] while Baldwin, who took his place in 1185, was a Cistercian of the best type--a type which, however, was now rapidly passing away.

[2166] Henry, not knowing what to do with the archbishop’s murderers, counselled or connived at their flight into Scotland. The Scot king and people, however, shewed such a strong disposition to hang them that they were driven to re-cross the border (MS. Lansdown., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv. p. 162). They then, it seems, took refuge at Knaresborough, and there lay hid till hunger compelled them to issue from their lurking-place. Finding themselves everywhere shunned like wild beasts, they at last in desperation gave themselves up to the mercy or the vengeance of the king. But the murderer of a priest was legally amenable to none save an ecclesiastical tribunal; Henry could do nothing with them but send them on to the Pope; and all that the Pope could do with them was to sentence them to lifelong exile and penance in Holy Land. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 163, 164); cf. MS. Lansdown (as above), pp. 162, 163. See also a minor illustration of the inconveniences attaching to this other side of the clerical immunities, in a letter of Archbishop Richard to some of his suffragans; Ep. dccxciv., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 561–564.

[2167] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 239–245, 247.

[2168] “Homo quidem mediocriter literatus, sed laudabiliter innoxius, et, ne ambularet in magnis, modulo suo prudenter contentus.” Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 235, 236).

The monastic revival which had shed such brightness over the earlier half of the twelfth century died down long before its close. S. Bernard had not yet been seven years in his grave when John of Salisbury, certainly not a hostile witness, was compelled to acknowledge that the love of power and the greed of gain had infected the whole monastic body, not excepting even the White Monks. Rome herself soon found it needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance of the military orders.[2169] Reformers in the next generation vied with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux.[2170] The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all; within the space of two generations their name, once the symbol of the highest moral and spiritual perfection which the men of their day were capable of conceiving, had become a by-word for the lowest depths of wickedness and corruption. Startling as was the change, its causes are not far to seek. Pledged though they were by the origin and primitive constitution of their order to be a standing protest against the wealth and luxury of the Benedictines, they had nevertheless become, in less than a hundred years from their first appearance in England, the richest and most powerful body of monks in the realm. At the time of their coming, almost the whole extent of arable land throughout the country was already occupied; the only resource open to the new-comers was the yet unexhausted and, as it seemed in England at least, well-nigh inexhaustible resource of pasturage. They brought to their sheep-farming the same energy, skill and perseverance which characterized all their undertakings; and their well-earned success in this pursuit, together with the vast increase of the wool-trade which marked the same period, made them in a few years masters of the most productive branch of English industry. Temptation came with prosperity. But the more obvious temptations of wealth, the temptations to ease and vanity and luxurious self-indulgence, had little power over the stern temper of the White Monks; it was a deeper and a deadlier snare into which they fell; not sloth and gluttony, but avarice and pride, were their besetting sins. In the days of Richard and John, when we find them struggling and bargaining almost on equal terms with the king’s ministers and the king himself, they were indeed a mighty power both in Church and state; but the foundation on which their power now rested was wholly different from that upon which it had first arisen; its moral basis was gone. As an element in the nation’s spiritual life the Order of Cîteaux, once its very soul, now counted for worse than nothing.

[2169] See a canon of the third Lateran Council (A.D. 1179), in Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 3 (as above, pp. 221–223). On the Templars and Hospitaliers see also W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i. c. 23 (Wright, pp. 36–38).

[2170] See especially Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, distt. ii. and iii. (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 29 _et seq._). “Grex albus, ordo nefandus,” is a description of the Cistercians quoted apparently from W. Map by his opponent W. Bothewald; Wright, _Latin Poems attributed to W. Mapes_, introd. p. xxxv. See also King Richard’s opinion of these two orders and of the Templars, in Gir. Cambr. as above, dist. ii. c. 12 (p. 54).

Still the monastic impulse which had guided so many religious movements in the past was not wholly dead. On the continent it was giving indeed fresh proofs of its vitality in the growth of two remarkable orders, those of Grandmont and of the Chartreuse, both of earlier origin than that of Cîteaux, but overshadowed until now by its transcendent fame. These however had little influence upon English religious life. The “Good Men” of Grandmont--as the brotherhood were commonly called--although special favourites of King Henry, never set foot in his island realm; the Carthusians reached it only in his last years, and the few settlements which they formed there never rose to any great importance.[2171] Out of all the English monasteries, of various orders, whose dates of foundation are known, only one hundred and thirteen arose during the thirty-five years of Henry’s reign, while a hundred and fifteen owed their origin to the nineteen troubled winters of his predecessor. In Yorkshire alone no less than twenty new houses had been founded under Stephen; only eleven were founded there under Henry.[2172] Towards the close of the century, indeed, the reputation of English monachism had fallen so low that in the high places of the Church a reaction in favour of secular clerks began to set in once more. One bishop, Hugh of Coventry, not only ventured to repeat the experiment which had been vainly tried elsewhere under the Confessor and the Conqueror, of turning the monks out of his cathedral and replacing them by secular canons, but actually proposed that all the cathedral establishments served by monks should be broken up and put upon a new foundation of a like secular character. Hugh himself was however scarcely the man to meet with general recognition in the capacity of a reformer; and his bold anticipation of the ecclesiastical revolution which was to come four centuries later ended in ignominious failure.[2173] It was, however, no less a personage than Archbishop Baldwin himself who in 1186 proposed to endow out of his archiepiscopal revenues a college of secular priests at Hackington by Canterbury, with the avowed object of providing a dwelling-place and a maintenance for the scholarship which monkish jealousy and monkish sloth had all but driven out of the cloisters where from the days of Theodore to those of Theobald it had found a home. This scheme was at once met by a determined opposition on the part of the monks of Christ Church, who suspected, perhaps not without reason, that it was part of a design for curtailing the privileges and destroying the independence of the metropolitan chapter. They instantly appealed to Rome, and the appeal opened a contest which absorbed the unlucky primate’s energies throughout the remainder of his life. He was steadily supported by the king; but the weight of the whole monastic body, except his own order, was thrown into the opposite scale; the general drift of ecclesiastical feeling still lay in the same direction; and after nearly four years of wearisome litigation at Rome and almost open warfare at Canterbury, the building of the new college was stopped by order of the Pope. The undaunted primate transferred his foundation to a new site at Lambeth, where it might have seemed less open to suspicion of rivalry with the Canterbury chapter; but the jealousy of the monks pursued it with relentless hatred, and Baldwin’s absence and death in Holy Land enabled them to secure an easy victory a year later. The next archbishop, Hubert Walter, took up his predecessor’s scheme with a zeal doubtless quickened by the fact that he was himself a secular clerk. The dispute dragged on for five more years, to end at last in the defeat of the primate, and, with him, of the last attempt made in England systematically to utilize the superfluous wealth of a great monastic corporation for the promotion of learning and the endowment of study.[2174] The attempt was made under unfavourable circumstances, perhaps by unskilful hands; and it was moreover made too soon. In English national sentiment, monachism was inseparably bound up with Christianity itself. To the monastic system England owed her conversion, her ecclesiastical organization, her earliest training as a nation and as a Church. Even if the guides to whom she had so long trusted were failing her at last, the conservatism and the gratitude of Englishmen both alike still shrank from casting aside a tradition hallowed by the best and happiest associations of six hundred years. The bent of popular sympathy was strikingly shewn by an episode in Baldwin’s quarrel with his monks, when their insolent defiance of his authority provoked him to cut off all their supplies, in the hope of starving them into submission. For eighty-four weeks not a morsel of food reached them save what was brought by their friends or by the pilgrims who crowded to the martyr’s shrine; so great however was the amount of these contributions, some of which came even from Jews, that--if we may believe the tale of one who was himself an inmate of the convent at this time--the brethren were able out of their superabundance to give a daily meal to two hundred poor strangers.[2175] As a spiritual force, however, monachism in England was well-nigh dead. Though it still kept a lingering hold upon the hearts of the people, it had lost its power over their souls. It might produce individual saints like Hugh of Lincoln; but its influence had ceased to mould the spiritual life of the nation. The time was almost ripe for the coming of the Friars.

[2171] On Grandmont (founded in 1176, by Stephen of Tierny, near Muret in the diocese of Limoges) see _Gall. Christ._, vol. ii. col. 645; _Vita S. Steph. Muret._ (Labbe, _Nova Biblioth._, vol. ii. pp. 674–683); Bern. Guidon, _De Ordine Grandimont._ (_ib._ p. 275 _et seq._); W. Map, _De Nug. Curial._, dist. i. cc. 17, 27 (Wright, pp. 28, 29, 58, 59); and Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 21 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 254). Henry’s reverence for the brethren showed itself not only in frequent visits and benefactions to their house, and also in his desire to be buried there (above, p. 270), but also by the remarkable way in which he deferred to their suggestions and sought their counsel on grave matters of policy. Examples of this are frequent during the Becket controversy; another may be seen in _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 194. For the Chartreuse (diocese of Grenoble--founded in 1084 or 1086 by Bruno of Cöln, a canon of Reims) see W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i. cc. 16 and 28 (Wright, pp. 26–28, 59, 60); Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 20 (as above, pp. 248–252); _Gall. Christ._, vol. xvi. cols. 268, 269. The history of the English Carthusian houses is in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, vol. vi. pt. i.; a full account of one, Witham, is given in the Life of S. Hugh of Lincoln, who had been its first prior.

[2172] These figures are from Mr. Howlett’s introduction to Will. Newb., vol. i. pp. xiii, xiv.

[2173] Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 23 (as above, pp. 65, 67). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 65–67. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 470, 488, 489, 550.

[2174] The history of this quarrel is told at wearisome length by Gervase of Canterbury, and in the _Epistolæ Cantuarienses_. It is summed up and explained by Bishop Stubbs in his preface to the last-named book.

[2175] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 405.

Meanwhile the decay of holiness and learning in the cloister was brought into more vivid light by a great outburst of intellectual vigour of a wholly new type. The literary activity of the reign of Henry I. had been all but quenched by the troubles of Stephen’s reign. Chronicler after chronicler lays down his pen, as if in disgust or despair, in the middle of the dreary story, till Henry of Huntingdon and the nameless English annalist at Peterborough are left to struggle almost alone through the last years of anarchy to welcome the new king; and he is no sooner crowned than they, too, pass away into silence.[2176] The first half of Henry’s reign has no contemporary historian at all. The other branches of literature continued equally barren; and a promise of better things had scarcely dawned in the miscellaneous treatises of John of Salisbury when the whole intellectual horizon was darkened by the great ecclesiastical storm. No sooner had it subsided, however, than the literary impulse revived under wholly changed conditions. Its bent was still mainly historical; and, as might be expected, the first subject-matter upon which it seized was the history of the new martyr. Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters--his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. Modern research has ascertained that the book which may fairly be called the foundation-stone of this new school, as well as the primary authority for English political history from the death of S. Thomas to the third year of Richard Cœur-de-Lion--- the “Acts of King Henry and King Richard,” long attributed to Benedict abbot of Peterborough--is really the work of Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of London and treasurer. Its continuator, Roger of Howden, was a clerk of the royal chapel and an active and trusted officer of the royal administration under both Henry and Richard.[2177] A third chronicler of the period, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1153 to 1180, when he became dean of S. Paul’s, an office of great political as well as ecclesiastical importance, which he filled with distinction until his death in the fourth year of King John.[2178] The works of these three writers are examples of a species of historical composition which is one of the most valuable literary products of the later twelfth century. They are chronicles in the strictest sense of the word:--records of facts and events arranged year by year in orderly chronological sequence, and for the most part without any attempt at illustration, comment or criticism. But the gap which parts them from the ordinary type of monastic chronicle is as wide as that which parted the highly-placed ecclesiastical dignitary, the trusted minister of the Crown, or the favourite court-chaplain from the obscure monk who had spent, it may be, well-nigh his whole life in copying manuscripts in the scriptorium of Burton or Dunstable or Waverley. Their writers were not merely chroniclers; they were statesmen and diplomatists as well. Their position as members of the royal administration, dwelling in the capital or at the court, placed them in constant and intimate communication with the chief actors in the events which they narrate, events of which not only were they themselves frequently eye-witnesses, but in which they even took a personal, though it might be subordinate, share; it gave them access to the most authentic sources of political intelligence, to the official records of the kingdom, to the state-papers and diplomatic correspondence of the time, whereof a considerable part, if not actually drawn up by themselves, must at any rate have passed through their hands in the regular course of their daily business. The fulness and accuracy, the balance of proportion, the careful order which characterize the work of these statesmen-chroniclers are scarcely more remarkable than its cosmopolitan range; Henry’s historiographers, like Henry himself, sweep the whole known world into the wide circle of their intelligence and their interest; the internal concerns of every state, from Norway to Morocco and from Ireland to Palestine, find a place in the pages of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, side by side with the narrative of their sovereign’s wars with France or with the text of the various assizes whereby he was reforming the legal and judicial administration of their own native land. While, however, the first works of this new historical school thus rose far above the level of mere annals, they still stood far below the literary standard of history in the higher sense, which had been set up by a monk at Malmesbury half a century before. The only writer who in the latter half of the twelfth century, like William of Malmesbury in its earlier half, looked at history in its true light, not as a mere record of facts, but according to its old Greek definition, as “philosophy teaching by examples,” must be sought after all not in the court but in the cloister. William indeed had left no heir to his many-sided literary genius; but if some shreds of his mantle did fall upon any historian of the next generation, they fell upon one who bore his name, in an Augustinian priory among the Yorkshire moors.

[2176] Henry of Huntingdon, we know, intended to “devote a new book to the new king”; but it seems that this intention was not fulfilled.

[2177] On the _Gesta Hen._ and Rog. Howden see Bishop Stubbs’s prefaces to his editions of them in the Rolls series.

[2178] Stubbs, _R. Diceto_, vol. i. pref. pp. xxvi–lxxxiii.

William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in 1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a child--probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew towards its close, he wrote his _English History_, from the Norman conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry, no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old, hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian; the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S. Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life; its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes proved unavailing--when the men of the north were only too thankful to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one--a brief account of Scarborough[2180]--contains no distinct proof of having been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic, though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious and trustworthy.

[2179] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1, pp. 284, 285.

[2180] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 104).

The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of these--Bæda and Gildas--he has of course no ground in common; while the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never been quickened by a sight of the _Gesta Regum_ and _Historia Novella_, of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation. Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract from them their moral and political significance for the instruction of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary, written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad. In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told, but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal; his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale; he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive true history altogether out of the literary field.

[2181] On Will. Newb. and his work see Mr. Howlett’s preface to vol. i. of his edition of the _Historia Anglicana_ in the Rolls series.

[2182] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 69, 70).

[2183] See _e.g._, l. ii. c. 10, and l. iv. c. 32 (as above, pp. 123–125, 385, 386), l. v. cc. 6 and 14 (vol. ii. pp. 424–427, 451–453).

[2184] L. i. c. 26 (vol. i. p. 81).

[2185] From Mr. Freeman, in the _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxxiii. (1878), p. 216.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature. Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the accession of Henry II. Long before that time--probably in the days when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude--Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I. Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole credit of the _History of the British Kings_ to which his name is attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of their calling--doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac--beguiled their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187] Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into French verse for her entertainment.[2188]

[2186] Geoff. Monm. _Hist. Reg. Brit._, l. i. c. 1 (Giles, Caxton Soc., pp. 1, 2).

[2187] Alf. Beverl. (Hearne), pp. 1–3.

[2188] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6436–6460 (Wright, Caxton Soc., pp. 224, 225).

The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace, a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his later work, the _Roman de Rou_ or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings. It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood, this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and eloquent protest in the preface to his _Historia Anglicana_.[2189] Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the _Brut_ (as Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects, but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought, Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface of the ground, Henry--so the monks afterwards declared--guided by what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin, hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree, was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]

[2189] Will. Newb. proœm. (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 11–18).

[2190] “Hanc [sc. Britanniam] sub jure tuo, sub pace tuâ, teneamus; Jus tibi, pax nobis, totaque terra simul”--

ends Henry’s letter to Arthur in the _Draco Norm._, l. ii. c. 22, vv. 1279, 1280 (Howlett, _Will. Newb._, vol. ii. p. 707). See above, p. 57, note 2{226}. The whole story is extremely curious; but I feel too doubtful about the character of the source from which it comes to venture upon any discussion of its possible significance.

[2191] “Sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo,” Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 192. “Ex gestis Britonum et eorum cantoribus historicis,” _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 49). These pyramids were there in William of Malmesbury’s day, when one of them was already threatening to fall “præ nimiâ vetustate.” They were covered with “antiquitatis nonnulla spectacula, quæ plane possunt legi licet non plane possunt intelligi.” These were pictures of bishops and kings, with old English names written under them; Arthur, however, is not in the list. William thought that the persons represented were buried underneath. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 21 (Hardy, pp. 34, 35).

[2192] See the various accounts of the invention and translation of Arthur in Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. cc. 9, 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 48–51), and _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 191, 192; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 36; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 48, and Ann. Margam, a. 1190 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. pp. 21, 22). Gerald seems to have been present himself. He tells us the “translation” was made by the king’s order; and indeed his account, taken by itself, would leave an impression that the whole thing occurred during King Henry’s lifetime; but R. Coggeshall and Rog. Wend. both distinctly give the date, 1191; the Margam Annals place it only a year earlier; and in both those years the reigning king was far away.

It is easy to see what was, at any rate in Henry’s mind, the political significance of this transaction. When Arthur could be thus publicly exhibited as dead and buried, it was because the long-cherished dreams of Celtic national independence, of which his name had been the symbol and the watchword, were dead and buried too. But the scene thus enacted at Glastonbury in 1191 had also another meaning of which perhaps none of the actors in it could be fully aware. It marked the final “passing of Arthur” out of the sphere of politics into a wholly new sphere of pure intellect and philosophical romance. If Geoffrey of Monmouth corrupted the sources of British history, he atoned for his crime by opening to the poets of the generation succeeding his own a fount of inspiration which is hardly exhausted yet. Their imagination seized upon the romantic side of these old-world legends, and gradually wove them into a poetic cycle which went on developing all through the later middle ages not in England alone, but over the whole of civilized Europe. But in the hands of these more highly-cultured singers the wild products of bardic fancy took a new colour and a new meaning. As usual, it was the Church who first breathed into the hitherto soulless body the breath of spiritual and intellectual life. The earliest of the Arthurian romances, as we possess them now, is a wholly new creation of the religious mysticism of the twelfth century, the story of the Holy Grail--

“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord Drank at the last sad supper with His own. This, from the blessed land of Aromat-- After the day of darkness, when the dead Went wandering o’er Moriah--the good saint, Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. And there awhile it bode; and if a man Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once, By faith, of all his ills. But then the times Grew to such evil that the holy cup Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear’d.”

As one by one the older legends of Arthur and Merlin, the later stories of Lancelot and Tristan and Gawaine, were moulded into literary form, a link to bind them all together was found in the “quest of the Grail,” vowed by the whole company of Arthur’s knights assembled at the Table Round, achieved only by one, the Galahad whose pure figure has gleamed upon all after-time, as it flashed first upon the corrupt court of the Angevins, the mirror of ideal Christian chivalry.

The greater part--certainly the noblest part--of this vast fabric of romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet, an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most varied capacities--as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household he held several ecclesiastical preferments--a canonry at S. Paul’s, the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name, the treatise _De Nugis Curialium_--“Courtiers’ Triflings”--is a fruit of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to 1189. By its title and origin it recalls the _Polycraticus_; and the difference between the two books marks the change which had come over the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes--scraps of folklore from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip, court-scandal--all, as it seems, picked out at random from the writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of it all is as earnest as that of the _Polycraticus_, though veiled under a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John; he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories--for a moral they always have--he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman; I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry--if we may venture to borrow his own metaphor--with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor. King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation, the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas--perhaps we should rather say of Theobald--and now sees no way of dealing with the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force; which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves. That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which drew Bishop Goliath.

[2193] On these Arthur-romances and Walter Map’s share in them see Sir F. Madden’s introduction to his edition of _Sir Gawayne_ (Bannatyne Club), and that of M. Paulin Paris to the first volume of his _Manuscrits Français de la Bibliothèque du Roi_, summarized in Mr. H. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i. pp. 562–569.

[2194] For the life of Walter Map see Mr. Wright’s _Biog. Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 295–298, and his preface to _De Nug. Cur._ (Camden Soc.) pp. i.–viii.

[2195] “Venator vester sum, feras vobis affero, fercula faciatis.” W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. ii. c. 32 (Wright, p. 106).

[2196] They have been edited, under the title of _Latin Poems ascribed to Walter Mapes_, by Mr. T. Wright for the Camden Society.

Side by side with Walter Map, in the foremost rank of this new school of critics and satirists, stands his probably younger contemporary, Gerald de Barri. Gerald was born in 1147 in the castle of Manorbeer, some three miles from Pembroke. He has left us a vivid picture of his childhood’s home--its ramparts and towers crowning a lofty hill-top exposed to all the winds that swept over the stormy Irish Sea, whirled up the creek that ran up from the Bristol Channel to westward of the castle, and ruffled with ceaseless wavelets the surface of the little stream that flowed through the sandy valley on its eastern side;--its splendid fishponds at the northern foot of the hill, the enclosed tract of garden-ground beyond, and at the back of all, the protecting belt of woodland whose precipitous paths and lofty nut-trees were perhaps alike attractive to Gerald and his brothers in their boyish days.[2197] His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer, represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales--a child of his daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke; and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life and in every page of his writings. On both sides he came of a race of fighting-men, and he was certainly not the least pugnacious of his family. The countless battles of his life were, however, to be fought with other weapons than the sword which had won Manorbeer for his paternal ancestors, and which was soon to win for some of his mother’s nearest kinsmen--for her half-brother Robert Fitz-Stephen, her nephews Meiler and Robert and Raymond, her own brother Maurice Fitz-Gerald--a wider heritage and a more lasting fame beyond the Irish Sea. Gerald’s bent towards the clerical profession shewed itself in his earliest years; as a child he was known at Manorbeer as “the little bishop.” At three different periods before he reached the age of twenty-five, he spent some years in study at Paris, where he also lectured upon rhetoric with considerable success. He finally came home in 1172, just as King Henry, having twice passed through South Wales on his way to and from Ireland, was planning out a new scheme for the government of the principality. One part of this scheme was, as we have seen, the delegation of the supreme authority to the young Welsh prince Rees Ap-Griffith. Another part was the revival of the policy begun by the Norman kings of managing the Welsh people through the instrumentality of the Church, and, to this intent, filling the ranks of the clergy in Wales with as many foreign priests as possible. Experience had, however, shewn that men of pure English or Norman blood were not always the fittest instruments for such a purpose. A year after Gerald’s birth a compromise had been tried in the appointment to the bishopric of S. David’s of a prelate who was half Norman and half Welsh:--David, son of Gerald of Pembroke and Nest, brother of Maurice Fitz-Gerald and of Angareth the wife of William de Barri. When Angareth’s son Gerald came home from Paris in 1172, therefore, the influence of her family was at its height. The foremost man in South Wales was her cousin Rees Ap-Griffith; the second was her brother the bishop of S. David’s. It was only natural that Gerald, sharing with his uncle the qualification of mingled Welsh and Norman blood, and already known as a distinguished scholar of the most famous seat of learning in Europe, should be at once selected for employment in the business of reforming his native land. Gerald himself was eager for the work; he had no difficulty in obtaining from Archbishop Richard a commission to act as his legate and representative in the diocese of S. David’s; thus armed, he began a vigorous campaign against the evil doings of clergy and laity alike--forcing the people to pay their tithes of wool and cheese, a duty which the Welsh were always very unwilling to fulfil; compelling the priests to abandon the lax system of discipline which they had inherited from the ancient British Church, and had contrived to retain in spite of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald; excommunicating the sheriff and deposing the archdeacon of Brecknock themselves when they dared to resist his authority, and receiving in 1175, as the reward of his zeal, the appointment to the vacated archdeaconry.

[2197] Gir. Cambr. _Itin. Kambr._, l. i. c. 12 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 92).

Early in the next year his uncle, Bishop David, died. The young archdeacon had just issued victorious from a sharp struggle in behalf of the see against the bishop of S. Asaph’s, who had attempted to encroach upon its rights; the darling wish of his heart was to see it restored to its ancient metropolitical rank; and he had managed to kindle in his fellow-canons a spark of the same ambition. They saw in him the only man capable of bringing their desire to fulfilment, and made a bold attempt to obtain him for their bishop. By this time, however, both King Henry and Archbishop Richard had learned enough of Gerald’s character to perceive that, however useful he might be as an archdeacon in Wales, he was not at all the man to suit their purposes as bishop of any Welsh see, least of all as bishop of S. David’s. Henry, with a burst of fury, summarily refused the nomination of the chapter; a long wrangle ended in the appointment of Peter de Leia, prior of the Cluniac house of Much Wenlock, to the vacant see. Peter, being a foreigner, a monk, and a man of no great intellectual capacity, was utterly unable either to rule his turbulent Welsh flock or to cope with his self-willed and quick-witted Welsh canons; Gerald undertook to teach him his duties, but found him such an unsatisfactory pupil that he soon gave up the task in disgust, and again betook himself to Paris. There he remained, studying civil and canon law, and lecturing at the same time with great success, till the summer of 1180, when he returned to England, was received by the chapter of Canterbury at a great banquet on Trinity Sunday, and thence proceeded into Wales. He found Bishop Peter at his wits’ end, and the diocese in utter confusion, which he at once set himself to remedy after his own fashion. Thus matters went on till 1184, when Henry on his last hurried visit to England found time to intervene once more in the troubled affairs of South Wales. He called a council on the border, summoned Gerald to meet him there, and employed him to arrange the final submission of his cousin Rees to the English Crown; and then he dexterously removed the over-zealous archdeacon from a sphere where he was likely henceforth to be more dangerous than useful, by making him one of his own chaplains, and sending him next year to Ireland in attendance upon John. John came back in September; Gerald lingered till the following Easter. Two books were the fruit of this visit: a _Topography of Ireland_, published in 1187, and dedicated to the king; and the _Conquest of Ireland_, which came out under the patronage of Count Richard of Poitou in 1188. Towards the close of that year, when Archbishop Baldwin went to preach the Crusade in Wales, Gerald accompanied him half as interpreter, half as guide. An _Itinerary of Wales_ forms the record of this expedition, which was followed by a journey over sea, still in the company of the archbishop, with whom Gerald seems to have remained in more or less close attendance upon Henry’s movements until the final catastrophe in July 1189. He then offered his services to Richard, who sent him home once more to his old task of helping to keep order in South Wales. For a while he found favour with all parties;[2198] William of Longchamp offered him the bishopric of Bangor, John, in his day of power after William’s fall, offered him that of Landaff. Gerald however refused them both, as he had already refused two Irish sees; he cared in fact for no preferment short of the metropolitan chair of S. David. Shut out of Paris by the war between Richard and Philip Augustus, he withdrew to Lincoln and resumed his theological studies under its chancellor William, whom he had known in his earlier college days on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, till in the summer of 1198 he was roused to action once more by the death of Bishop Peter de Leia. The fight began at once; the chapter of S. David’s nominated Gerald for the vacant see; the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, set his face against the nomination; they defied his authority and appealed to king and Pope; Gerald himself fought his own battle and that of the see with indomitable courage, at home and abroad, for nearly four years; but the canons were less resolute than their bishop-elect, he found himself at last fighting alone against the world, and in 1202 he gave up the struggle and withdrew to spend the rest of his life in the quiet pursuit of letters.[2199]

[2198] Gerald himself goes so far as to say, with respect to Richard’s appointment of William of Longchamp as justiciar, “cui archidiaconum adjunxit” (_De Rebus a se gestis_, dist. ii. c. 21, Brewer, vol. i. p. 84). We find however no hint of such a thing elsewhere.

[2199] Gerald’s life may be studied in his own book, _De Rebus a se gestis_, published in the first volume of the Rolls edition of his works; and, more conveniently, in Mr. Brewer’s preface to the same volume.

For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But, unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman--“Giraldus Cambrensis”--still lives in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism; he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own day--“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats them. Whatever he touches--history, archæology, geography, natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin empire--is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important work, the _Topography of Ireland_, is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home. The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters. Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities, at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants; and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars, almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise _De Expugnatione Hiberniæ_ is by far the most complete and authentic account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland. The _Topographia_, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]

[2200] That Thomas was Gerald’s chosen model may be seen all through his writings. He harps upon the martyr’s life and death somewhat as Thomas himself harped upon the life of Anselm.

[2201] Green, _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. p. 172.

[2202] Gir. Cambr. _De Jure Menev. Eccles._, dist. vii. (Dimock, vol. iii. pp. 372, 373).

[2203] Gir. Cambr. _Expugn. Hibern._, introit. (Dimock, vol. v. p. 209).

[2204] Brewer, _Gir. Cambr._, vol. i. pref. p. xl.

[2205] _Ibid._

A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his _Welsh Itinerary_, followed some three or four years later by a _Description of Wales_.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground, dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands, describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom, although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the _Gemma Ecclesiastica_,[2207] or _Jewel of the Church_, a handbook of instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood, compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh clergy in his day. In his _Mirror of the Church_[2208] the general state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map. The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous character--a half-finished autobiography, a book of _Invectives_ against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the _Rights of the Church of S. David’s_, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally _On the Education of Princes_, but really occupied for the most part with a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209] All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation. When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s _Irish Topography_, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most distinguished representatives.

[2206] Dimock, vol. vi.

[2207] Brewer, vol. ii.

[2208] _Speculum Ecclesiæ_ (Brewer, vol. iv.).

[2209] Gerald’s works have all been edited for the Rolls series by Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock, except the _Vitæ Sex Episcoporum_, which are in Wharton’s _Anglia Sacra_, vol. ii., and _De Instructione Principum_, which has been published by the Anglia Christiana Society.

[2210] It is only fair to note that Gerald at the close of his life published a little book of _Retractations_, printed in first volume of his works (ed. Brewer).

[2211] Gir. Cambr. _De Rebus a se gestis_, l. ii. c. 16 (Brewer, vol. i. pp. 72, 73). I have availed myself of Mr. Brewer’s translation of the passage, in his preface to the same volume, p. xlvii.

The spirit which breathes through the pages of Gerald and Walter is the spirit of the rising universities. The word “university” indeed, as applied to the great seats of learning in the twelfth century, is somewhat of an anachronism; the earliest use of it in the modern sense, in reference to Oxford, occurs under Henry III.;[2212] and the University of Paris appears by that name for the first time in 1215,[2213] the year of our own Great Charter. But although the title was not yet in use, the institution now represented by it was one of the most important creations of the age. The school of Bologna sprang into life under the impulse given by Irnerius, a teacher who opened lectures upon the Roman civil law in 1113.[2214] Nearly forty years later, when Gratian had published his famous book on the Decretals, a school of canon law was instituted in the same city by Pope Eugene III.; and in 1158 the body of teachers who formed what we call the University won a charter of privileges from the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa.[2215] We have already, in the course of our story, had more than one glimpse of the great school of arts and theology which was growing up during the same period in Paris. There, where the study of divinity had long found a congenial home under the shadow of the cathedral church, William of Champeaux in 1109--the year of S. Anselm’s death--opened on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève a school of logic which in a few years became the most frequented in Europe. Under his successors, Abelard and Peter Lombard (the latter of whom was made bishop of Paris in 1159), the schools of Paris became the centre of the intellectual life of Christendom.[2216] Teachers and scholars from every nation met on equal terms, as fellow-citizens of a new and world-wide commonwealth of learning, on the slopes of the “Mount,” and went forth again to carry into the most distant lands the instruction which they had acquired. There a Wiltshire lad could begin a lifelong intimacy with a youth from Champagne;--could pass from the lectures of Abelard to those of a master who, though disguised under the title of “Robert of Melun,” was in reality a fellow-countryman of his own; could enter the _quadrivium_ under the guidance of a German teacher, make acquaintance with Aristotle by the help of another learned Englishman, and complete his theological studies, it may be, under the same Robert Pulein whom we saw lecturing at Oxford some twelve or thirteen years before.[2217] There a scholar from the Welsh marches could sit at the feet of the English master Gerard La Pucelle,[2218] and another from the depths of Pembroke could give lectures on rhetoric and could study theology with William of Blois, who in after-days came at the call of the Burgundian S. Hugh to undertake the direction of a school at Lincoln.[2219] There Ralf de Diceto was a fellow-student with Arnulf of Lisieux;[2220] there, in all likelihood, John of Salisbury met Nicolas Breakspear and Thomas Becket. Thence, we cannot doubt, came through some of these wandering scholars the impulse which called the schools of Oxford into being. The first token of their existence is the appearance of Robert Pulein in 1133. From that time forth the intellectual history of Oxford is again blank till the coming of Vacarius in 1149; and it is not till the reign of Henry II. has all but closed that we begin to discern any lasting result from the visits of these two teachers. Then, however, the words of Gerald would alone suffice to shew that the University was to all intents and purposes full-grown. It had its different “faculties” of teachers, its scholars of various grades; and the little city in the meadows by the Isis, famous already in ecclesiastical legend and in political and military history, had by this time won the character which was henceforth to be its highest and most abiding glory, as the resort of all “the most learned and renowned clerks in England.”

[2212] Anstey, _Munimenta Academica_, vol. i. introd. p. xxxiv.

[2213] Mullinger, _Univ. Cambridge_, p. 71 (from Savigny, _Gesch. des Röm. Rechts_, c. xxi. sec. 127).

[2214] _Ib._ pp. 36, 37, 72.

[2215] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 73.

[2216] _Ib._ pp. 75–77.

[2217] See above, vol. i. pp. 480–483.

[2218] See above, p. 449.

[2219] _Ib._ pp. 453, 456.

[2220] Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 16 (Giles, pp. 100, 101).

On a site less favoured by nature, Oxford’s future rival was more slowly growing up. A lift of slightly higher ground above the left bank of the river Grant--better known to us now as the Cam--on the southern margin of what was then and for five hundred years afterwards a vast tract of flood-drowned fen stretching northward as far as the Wash, there stood at the close of the seventh century--long before Oxford makes its first appearance in history--a “little waste chester”[2221] representing what had once been the Roman city of Camboritum. At the coming of the Normans the place was known as Grantebridge, and contained some three or four hundred houses, twenty-seven of which were pulled down by the Conqueror’s orders to make room for the erection of a castle.[2222] It may be that here, as at Lincoln, the inhabitants thus expelled went to make for themselves a new home beyond the river; and a church of S. Benet which still survives, and whose tower might pass for a twin-sister of Robert D’Oilly’s tower of S. Michael’s at Oxford, may have been the nucleus of a new town which sprang up half a mile to the south-east of the old one, on the right bank of the Cam. Around this new town there gathered in the course of the following century a fringe of religious foundations. The “round church” of the Holy Sepulchre, clearly a work of the time of Henry I., was probably built by some crusader whose imagination had been fired by the sight of its prototype at Jerusalem. A Benedictine nunnery, part of whose beautiful church now serves as the chapel of Jesus College, was established under the invocation of S. Radegund early in the reign of Stephen; an hospital dedicated to S. John the Evangelist was founded at some time between 1133 and 1169 under the patronage of Bishop Nigel of Ely. This hospital, like most institutions of the kind, may have been served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine. Some years before this, however, the Augustinians had made a more important settlement in the same neighbourhood. As early as 1092 Picot the sheriff of Cambridgeshire had founded within the older town on the left bank of the river a church of S. Giles, to be served by four regular canons. In 1112 this little college was removed to Barnwell, some two miles to the north-eastward, on the opposite side of the river, where it grew into a flourishing Austin priory. Wherever there were Austin canons a school was sure to spring up ere long; so, too, we cannot doubt, it was at Cambridge. Whether the seeds of learning were first sown in the cloisters of S. John’s or of Barnwell, or under the shadow of that old S. Benet’s which seems to have been the original University church[2223]--who it was that played here the part which had been played at Oxford by Robert Pulein--we know not; but we do know that by the middle of the following century the old Grantebridge had sunk into a mere suburb of the new town beyond the river, and the existence of the schools of Cambridge had become an established fact.[2224]

[2221] Bæda, _Hist. Eccles._, l. iv. c. 19.

[2222] Domesday, vol. i. p. 189.

[2223] See Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 299, note 3; and Willis and Clark, _Archit. Hist. Cambr._, vol. i. p. 276 and note 3.

[2224] On the rise of Cambridge--town and university--see Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 332–334. The schools were not formally recognized as an “University” till 1318; _ib._ p. 145. For S. Radegund’s see Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. iv. pp. 215, 216; for Barnwell, _ib._ vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 83–87; for S. John’s Hospital, _ib._ pt. ii. p. 755. The present S. John’s College stands on the site of the hospital.

The student-life of the twelfth century--whether it were the life of scholar or of teacher--had nothing either of the ease or the dignity which we associate with the college life of to-day. Colleges in the modern sense there were indeed none. Students of all ranks and ages, from boys of ten or twelve years to men in full priestly orders, lodged as they could in a sort of dames’-houses or hostels scattered up and down the streets and lanes of the city. The schools were entirely unendowed; there was no University chest, no common fund, no pecuniary aid of any kind for either scholars or teachers. The sole support of both was, at first, the power under whose sheltering wings the school had grown up--the Church. Every book, even, had to be either bought out of their own private purses or borrowed from the library of some religious establishment. We may perhaps gather some idea of what this latter resource was likely to furnish in the great educational centres from a catalogue which has been preserved to us of the library attached to Lincoln minster, at the time when the Lincoln school of theology was at the height of its fame under Gerald’s friend William of Blois and the saintly bishop Hugh. Five-and-thirty years before Hugh’s appointment to the see, the church of Lincoln possessed, in addition to the necessary service-books which were under the care of the treasurer, some thirty or forty books in the chancellor’s keeping. Among these we find, besides a number of Psalters, works of the Latin Fathers, Epistles, Gospels, and a complete Bible in two volumes, the Canons, Statutes and Decretals of the Popes;--the Decretals edited by Ivo of Chartres;--the works of Vergil: a copy of the military treatise of Vegetius, bound up with the Roman History of Eutropius, “which volume Master Gerard gave in exchange for the Consolations of Boëthius, which he lost”;--Priscian’s Grammar:--a “Mappa Mundi”: and a _Book of the Foundation of Lincoln Minster_, with a collection of its charters. Of nine books presented by Bishop Robert de Chesney, who died in 1166, the most noticeable were the works of Josephus and of Eusebius, and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard. Somewhat later, one Warin of Hibaldstow presented to the chapter a “book of Aristotle”--doubtless a Latin version of his treatise on logic or on natural philosophy--and seven volumes, whose contents are not stated, were given by Master “Radulphus Niger” or Ralf the Black, known to us as one of the minor chroniclers of King Henry’s later years. A copy of Gratian’s great book of Decretals was presented about the same time by an archdeacon of Leicester; Gerald de Barri, probably during his residence at Lincoln at the close of Richard’s reign, added another law-book called _Summula super Decreta_, a copy of S. Anselm’s treatise _Cur Deus Homo_, and three of his own works, the _Topographia Hiberniæ_, the _Life of Bishop Remigius_, and the _Gemma Sacerdotalis_ or _Ecclesiastica_; and the list closes with another copy of the _Sentences_, acquired seemingly in the early years of the following century.[2225]

[2225] See the Catalogues of Lincoln cathedral library in the twelfth century, in _Gir. Cambr. Opp._, vol. vii. (Dimock and Freeman), App. C., pp. 165–171.

The head of the scholastic body was the chancellor, who was an officer of the diocesan bishop--in the case of Oxford, the bishop of Lincoln. From him those who had reached a certain degree of proficiency in the schools received their license to become teachers in their turn; and it was an established rule that all who had attained the rank of Master or Doctor should devote themselves for a certain time to the work of instructing others. They gave their lectures how and where they could, in cloister or church-porch, or in their own wretched lodgings, their pupils sitting literally at their feet, huddled all together on the bare ground; their living depended solely on their school-fees, and these were often received with one hand only to be paid away again with the other, for many an ardent young teacher of logic or rhetoric was, like John of Salisbury and Gerald de Barri, at one and the same time giving lectures in these arts to less advanced scholars and pursuing his own studies under some great doctor of theology. The course of study was much the same everywhere. From the fifth century downwards it had consisted of two divisions, _trivium_ and _quadrivium_. Under the former head were comprised Grammar, defined by an early teacher as the art of “writing and reading learnedly, understanding and judging skilfully;”[2226] Dialectics, including logic and metaphysics; and Rhetoric, by which were meant the rules and figures of the art, chiefly derived from Cicero. The Quadrivium included Geometry, not so much the science now known by that name as what we call geography; Arithmetic, which in the middle ages meant the science of mystical numbers; Music, in other words metre and harmony; and Astronomy, of course on the Ptolemaic system, although as early as the fifth century a theory had been put forth which is said to have given in after-days the clue to Copernicus.[2227] There was a separate faculty of Theology, and another of Law. Between these different faculties there seems to have been a good deal of jealousy. The highest authorities of the Western Church, while encouraging by every means in their power the study of the canon law, set their faces steadily against the civil law of imperial Rome; the “religious” were over and over again forbidden to have anything to do with it: and on the continent the two branches of the legal profession were followed by different persons. As, however, the procedure of the canon law was founded upon that of the Theodosian code, the English clerical lawyers in Stephen’s time and in Henry’s early years found their account in combining the two studies; by degrees both together passed out of the hands of the clergy into those of a new class of lay lawyers; and in later days, while on the continent the canon law fell into neglect with its exclusively clerical professors, in England it was preserved by being linked with the civil law under the care of lay _doctores utriusque juris_.[2228]

[2226] “Docte scribere legereque, erudite intelligere probareque.” Martianus Capella, quoted by Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24, 25.

[2227] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24–26.

[2228] _Ib._ pp. 37–39.

Theology had, however, a yet more formidable rival in the schools of logic. The text-book commonly used in these schools was a Latin translation, made by Boëthius in the sixth century, of part of Aristotle’s treatise upon logic. Early in the twelfth century the natural philosophy of Aristotle was in some measure rendered accessible to western students through translations made by travelled scholars such as Adelard of Bath from Arabic versions which they had picked up in the schools of Salerno or of the remoter East. Of the “Ethics” nothing was known save a few fragments imbedded in the works of Latin writers, until a hundred years later, when they found their way back to Europe, probably in the train of the returning crusaders, and certainly in a very strange shape--that of a Latin translation from a Hebrew version of what was, after all, nothing more than an Arabic commentary founded upon a Syriac version of the original Greek text.[2229] Garbled as it was, however, this new Aristotelian lore revolutionized the schools of western Christendom by laying open to them wholly new fields of criticism and speculation. The spirit of free inquiry in which Adelard had begun to deal with physical science invaded every region of intellectual thought and knowledge, while the spread of legal studies helped to the invention of new methods of argument and disputation. In vain did Peter Lombard, in the famous book which gained for him his title of “Master of the Sentences,” strive to stem the rising tide and counterwork the influence of the rationalizing dialecticians by applying to the purposes of theology the methods of their own favourite science. The “Sentences” remained the accepted text-book of theology down to the cataclysm in the sixteenth century; but their effect was precisely the opposite to that which their author had desired.[2230] The endless “doubtful disputations,” the hair-splittings, the “systems of impossibilities,” which had already taken possession of the logic-schools in John of Salisbury’s day, were even more irritating to the practical mind and impetuous temper of Gerald de Barri. They were in fact ruining both theology and letters. “Our scholars,” Gerald complains, “for the sake of making a shew, have betaken themselves to subjects which rather savour of the quadrivium:--questions of single and compound, shadow and motion, points and lines, acute and obtuse angles--that they may display a smattering of learning in the quadrivium, whereof the studies flourish more in the East than in the West; and thence they have proceeded to the maintaining of false positions, the propounding of insoluble problems, the spinning of frivolous and long-winded discourses, not in the best of Latin, hereby holding up in their own disputations a warning of the consequences ensuing from their abandonment of the study of letters.”[2231] Yet it was from those very schools that Gerald himself, and men like him, had caught the fearless temper, the outspoken, unrestrained tone, in which they exposed and criticized not only every conspicuous individual, but every institution and every system, alike in the world and in the Church of their day. The democratic spirit of independence which had characterized the strictly clerical reformers of an earlier day had passed from the ranks of the priesthood into those of the universities, and had taken a mightier developement there. It was mainly through them that the nation at large entered in some degree into the labours of Theobald and his fellow-workers; it was they themselves who entered into the labours of Thomas Becket. A large proportion of both students and teachers--a proportion which grew larger and larger as time went on--were laymen; but an inveterate legal fiction still counted them all as “clerks.” The schools had grown up under the wings of the Church, and when they reached their full stature, they were strong enough both to free themselves from the control of the ecclesiastical authorities and to keep the privileges for which the clergy had fought. A priest of the English Church in our own day is as completely subject to the ordinary law of the land as any of his flock; but the chancellor’s court of the University of Oxford still possesses sole cognizance over all causes whatsoever, in all parts of the realm, which concern any resident member of the University.[2232]

[2229] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 94–96 and notes.

[2230] _Ib._ pp. 58–62.

[2231] Gir. Cambr. _Gemma Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 37 (Brewer, vol. ii. p. 355). Cf. _ib._ pp. 350, 351, and _Spec. Eccles._, dist. i. proœm. (vol. iv. pp. 4–9).

[2232] This privilege was secured by a charter of Edward III.; it was successfully asserted as lately as January 1886.

Not the universities, however, but the towns, were the true strongholds of English freedom. The struggle of the English towns for municipal liberty which we have seen beginning under Henry I. was renewed under Henry II. and Richard with increased vigour and success. Henry Fitz-Empress was far too clear-sighted a statesman to undervalue the growing importance of this element in English social and political life. Most of his town-charters, however, date from the earlier years of his reign, and scarcely any of them contain anything more than a confirmation of the liberties enjoyed in his grandfather’s time, with the addition in some cases of a few new privileges, carefully defined and strictly limited.[2233] In the great commercial cities, where the municipal movement had probably received a fresh impulse from the extension of trade and intercourse with the continent which was a natural consequence of Henry’s accession to the crown, the merchant-gilds soon began openly to aim at gathering into their own hands the whole powers of local government and administration, and acquiring the position of a French “commune.” The French kings encouraged the growth of the communal principle as a possible counterpoise to the power of the feudal nobles; Henry, who had little need of it for such a purpose, saw the dangers which it threatened to his system of government and held it steadily in check. In 1170 Aylwine the Mercer, Henry Hund and “the other men of the town” paid a heavy fine to the treasury for an attempt to set up a commune at Gloucester;[2234] six years later one Thomas “From-beyond-the-Ouse” paid twenty marks for a like offence at York.[2235] Owing to the close connexion between the organization of the commune and that of the gilds, every developement of this latter institution also was watched by the Crown with jealous care; in 1164 the burghers of Totnes, those of Lidford and those of Bodmin were all fined for setting up gilds without warrant from the king;[2236] and in 1180 no less than eighteen “adulterine gilds” in London met with a similar punishment.[2237] Once established, however, they seem to have been permitted to retain their existence, for in the first Pipe Roll of Richard we find them again paying their fines “as they are set down in the twenty-sixth Roll of King Henry II.”[2238] A bakers’ gild in London, a weavers’ gild at Nottingham, one of the same craft and another of fullers at Winchester, make their appearance as authorized bodies at the opening of Henry’s reign;[2239] among the “adulterine gilds” of London were those of the butchers, goldsmiths, grocers, clothiers and pilgrims.[2240] The golden days of English borough-life, however, began with the crowning of Henry’s successor. “When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of Englishmen”--as he who wrote these words has told it--“it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition of municipal life.”[2241] In his first seven years alone, we find him granting charters to Winchester, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Doncaster, Carlisle, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Some of these towns were only beginning their career of independence, and were content with the first step of all, the purchase of the _firma burgi_; some bought a confirmation of privileges already acquired; Lincoln in 1194 had got so far as to win from the king a formal recognition of its right to complete self-government in a clause empowering its citizens to elect their own reeve every year.[2242] King of knights-errant and troubadours as he seemed, Richard, it is plain, could read the signs of the times as clearly and act upon their warnings as promptly and as wisely as any of his race; and we may be very sure that this bold advance upon his father’s cautious policy towards the towns was dictated by a sound political instinct far more than by the mere greed of gain. John went still further in the same direction; the first fifteen years of his reign afford examples of town-charters of every type, from the elementary grant of the _firma burgi_ and the freedom of the merchant-gild to the little Cornish borough of Helston[2243] up to the crowning privilege bestowed upon the “barons of our city of London” in 1215, of electing their own mayor every year.[2244]

[2233] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 165–168.

[2234] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 563, from Pipe Roll 16 Hen. II.

[2235] Madox, _Firma Burgi_, p. 35, from Pipe Roll 22 Hen. II.

[2236] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 562, 563.

[2237] _Ib._ p. 562, from Pipe Roll 26 Hen. II.

[2238] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), p. 226.

[2239] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 4, 39, 52.

[2240] “Aurifabrorum,” “Bocheiorum,” “Piperariorum,” “Parariorum,” “Peregrinorum.” There are four gilds “de Ponte”; one “de S. Lazaro”; one “de Haliwell”; the rest are described simply as “the gild whereof So-and-so is alderman.” Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 562, note _z_.

[2241] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 216.

[2242] Northampton bought the _firma burgi_ in 1191, Norwich in 1192, Ipswich and Doncaster in 1194 (Madox as above, pp. 399, 400, from Pipe Rolls); Winchester bought a confirmation of its liberties in 1190 (Stubbs, _Select Chart._, pp. 265, 266), Carlisle in 1194, York and Scarborough in 1195 (Madox as above). The Lincoln charter is given by Bishop Stubbs, as above, pp. 266, 267; for its date see Pipe Roll 6 Ric. I., quoted by Madox, as above, p. 400.

[2243] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 313, 314.

[2244] _Ib._ pp. 314, 315. John’s town-charters are all in the _Rotuli Chartarum_, edited by Sir T. D. Hardy for the Record Commission. See also extracts from Pipe Rolls in Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 400 _et seq._

From the charter of Henry I. to the establishment of the commune under Richard the constitutional history of London is shrouded in obscurity. The charter granted by Henry II. to the citizens, some time before the end of 1158, is simply a confirmation of his grandfather’s.[2245] During the first fifteen years of his reign two sheriffs of London appear annually in the Pipe Rolls; in 1171 there were four, as there had been in the thirty-first year of Henry I.; but in the twentieth year of Henry II., 1171, we find that their number was again reduced to two; and from 1182 onwards there seems to have been only one, till at Michaelmas 1189 the accounts were rendered by Richard Fitz-Reiner and Henry of Cornhill, both of whom continued in office till 1191.[2246] In that year, as we have seen, the commune won its legal recognition from John and Archbishop Walter of Rouen as representatives of the absent king;[2247] and although the charter which Richard issued to the citizens of London, shortly before his final departure from England in 1194, is a mere echo of his father’s,[2248] yet the existence of the new corporation is thenceforth a recognized fact. John’s first charter to London was issued from Normandy six weeks after his crowning. It renewed the old grant of the sheriffdom of London and Middlesex, with all rights and customs thereunto belonging, to the citizens and their heirs, to have and to hold of the king and his heirs for ever. They were to appoint as sheriffs any of their own number whom they might choose, and to remove them at their pleasure; and for this privilege they were to pay, through the said sheriffs, three hundred pounds a year to the Treasury.[2249] The establishment of the commune had reduced the sheriffs to the rank of mere financial officers, and the real head of the civic administration was the mayor. The first mayor of London, Henry Fitz-Aylwine, retained his office for life; and his life extended beyond the limits of our present story. Yet the true significance of that story is strikingly illustrated by the next step in the history of London, a step which followed two years after Fitz-Aylwine’s death. On May 9, 1215, John granted to the “barons of the city of London” the right of annually electing their mayor.[2250] Five weeks later the barons of England compelled him to sign, in the meadows of Runnymede, the Great Charter which secured the liberties not of one city only but of the whole English people; and among the five-and-twenty men whom they chose from among themselves to enforce its execution was Serlo the Mercer, mayor of London.[2251]

[2245] Charter in Riley’s _Munimenta Gildhallæ_, vol. ii. part i. pp. 31, 32. It is witnessed by “archiepiscopo Cantuariæ” and “Ricardo episcopo Londoniarum”; _i.e._ Richard of London who died in May 1162, and Theobald who died in April 1161. As it is certain that neither of these two prelates ever crossed the sea after Henry’s accession, the charter must have been issued in England, and therefore before Henry went abroad in August 1158.

[2246] Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. p. 629.

[2247] Above, p. 301.

[2248] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 248, 249. Date, Winchester, April 23, 1194.

[2249] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 249–251. Date, Bonneville, July 5, 1199.

[2250] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 314, 315.

[2251] Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 605.

Little, indeed, as the burghers themselves may have dreamed of any such thing, the highest importance of their struggle for municipal liberty lies in this, that its fruits were to be reaped by a far larger community than was inclosed within the town-walls. It was from the burghers that their brethren in the rural districts caught once more the spirit of freedom which ages of oppression had well-nigh crushed out of their hearts. “‘Ketel’s case’” at Bury S. Edmund’s--the case of a tenant of the abbey who, dwelling “outside the gate,” was hanged for a theft of which he had been found guilty by the Norman process of the judicial duel usual in the manor-courts, and over whose fate the townsmen, rejoicing in the Old-English right of compurgation which they still retained, grew so bitterly sarcastic that the abbot and the “saner part of the convent” were driven by terror of a peasant revolt to admit their rural tenants to a share in the judicial franchise of the town[2252]--was in all probability only one out of many. The history of this same abbey of S. Edmund’s shews us how even the villeins were rising into a position more like that of their free brethren, how the old badges of serfdom, the heavy labour-rents, the hard customs, were vanishing one by one, and how in this process of enfranchisement the boroughs led the way.[2253] “The ancient customs belonging to the cellarer’s office, as we have seen them”--that is, as Jocelyn of Brakelond, who was a monk of S. Edmund’s from 1172 to 1211, had seen them in the old custom-roll of the house--“were these: The cellarer had his messuage and barn by the well of Scurun, where he solemnly held his court for the trial of thieves and of all pleas and quarrels; and there he received the pledges of his men, and enrolled them, and renewed them every year, and got gain by it, as the reeve did in the portmannimot. This messuage was the homestead of Beodric, who of old time was lord of this township, whence it was called Beodricesworth; whose demesne lands are now in the demesne of the cellarer; and what is now called the _aver-land_ was the land of his rustics. Now the sum of his tenements and those of his men was three hundred and thirty acres, which are lands still belonging to the township, whereof the services, when the town was made free, were divided into two parts; so that the sacristan or the reeve should receive the quit-rent, that is, twopence on every acre; and the cellarer should have the ploughings and other services, that is, the ploughing of one rood for every acre, without food (which custom is observed still); he was also to have the folds wherein all the men of the township (except the seneschal, who has his own fold) were bound to put their sheep (this custom, too, is observed still). He was also to have the _aver-penny_,[2254] that is twopence for every thirty acres; this custom was changed before the death of Abbot Hugh (1180). For the men of the township had to go at the cellarer’s bidding to Lakenheath, to fetch a load of eels from Southrey, and often they came back with their carts empty, and so they had their trouble without any benefit to the cellarer; wherefore it was agreed between them that every thirty acres should pay a penny a year, and the men should stay at home. At the present time, however, these lands are so cut up that scarcely anybody knows from whom the payment is due; so that whereas I have seen the cellarer receive twenty-seven pence in a year, now he can hardly get tenpence farthing. Moreover, the cellarer used to have control over the roads outside the township, so that no one might dig chalk or clay without his leave. He was also wont to summon the fullers of the township to lend cloths for carrying his salt; otherwise he would forbid them the use of the waters, and seize whatever cloths he found there; which customs are observed unto this day.” “Moreover the cellarer alone ought, or used, to have one bull free in the fields of this township; but now several persons have them.” “Moreover the cellarer used to warrant those who owed service to his court, so that they were exempt from scot and tallage; but now it is not so, because the burghers say that those who do service at the court ought to be exempt for their service, but not for the burgage which they hold in the town, and forasmuch as they and their wives do publicly buy and sell in the market.”[2255] After the affair of Ketel, in fact, the cellarer’s court was merged in that of the town; “it was decreed that his men should come to the toll-house with the others, and there renew their pledges, and be written in the reeve’s roll, and there give to the reeve the penny which is called _borth-silver_, and the cellarer should have half of it (but he gets nothing at all of it now); and all this was done, that all might enjoy equal liberty.”[2256]

[2252] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74. See Mr. Green’s _Stray Studies_, pp. 222–224, and _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. pp. 219, 220.

[2253] On all this see Mr. Green’s _Abbot and Town_, in _Stray Studies_, pp. 213–229.

[2254] “The money paid by the tenant in commutation of the service (_avera_) of performing any work for his lord by horse or ox, or by carriage with either.” Greenwell, Glossary to _Boldon Buke_ (Surtees Soc.)

[2255] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 75, 76.

[2256] _Ib._ p. 74.

“That all might enjoy equal liberty”--Jocelyn’s words had a significance wider and deeper than he himself could know, wider and deeper than could be known perhaps even to his abbot from whom they were probably echoed; although it is clear from almost every page of Jocelyn’s story that Abbot Sampson of S. Edmund’s was a far more enlightened and far-seeing statesman than most of the great landowners of his day, whether secular or tonsured. The rural tenants of S. Edmund in his time had evidently made a good deal more progress towards enfranchisement than those of some other great houses, such as, for example, the abbey of Abingdon. In 1185, on the death of Abbot Roger of Abingdon, a dispute between the “obedientiaries,” or officers of the convent to whose support various portions of its revenues were assigned, and the steward appointed by the king to take charge of the abbot’s property during the vacancy of his office, led to the drawing-up of a consuetudinary,[2257] which it would be interesting to compare with the earlier “Black Book” of Peterborough. A large proportion of the tenants’ dues were paid in money; but there were still considerable remnants of the older system. The chamberlain of the abbey, for instance, had an acre of land at Culham, which the men of that township were bound to reap and carry to make beds for the monks. The hay to be laid “under the monks’ feet when they bathed” was supplied in like manner from a meadow at Stockgrave. A tenant named Daniel of Colebrook was bound, besides paying a rent of five shillings, to furnish the chamberlain whenever he went to London with hay for his horses, with wood and salt, and with straw for his bed. At Welsford, near Newbury, there were twenty-two “cotset-lands,” whose tenants held them by their services as swineherds, bedels (or messengers of the chamberlain’s court), shepherds, hedgewards and such like. Of eleven rent-paying tenants in the same township, one owed, besides his rent of twenty-seven pence, his personal service for getting in hay and stacking corn in August. As the whole township was in demesne, its inhabitants paid a tribute to the lord--in this case the chamberlain of the abbey--for the pannage of their pigs; they had also to furnish the services of one man for harvesting in August, and to lend their ploughs for bene-work. The men of Boxhole, Benham, Easton and Weston did the like. At Boxhole, out of twelve tenants, eight were bound, besides paying their rent, to plough an acre of the demesne and sow it with their own seed; and seven of these had moreover to carry hay and corn. One Berner and his sons held a “cotset-land” by a rent of six sextaries of honey to the cellarer and thirty-one pence to the chamberlain.[2258] There were twenty-six tenants withdrawn from demesne, of whom six owed work in August, in addition to their rent; and there were five acres of meadow which had to be mowed and carried by five men of the township. At Benham, out of twenty-four tenants, eleven were “cotsetles”; three of these were servants of the chamberlain, holding their lands by their service; the rest were to hold by rent or by work, as the lord might choose[2259]--an arrangement which applied also to the cotters of Boxhole.[2260] Of the remaining thirteen tenants at Benham, six paid rent only; the rest were bound also to plough and sow an acre or half an acre apiece, and to carry corn and hay.[2261] One was excused the ploughing and sowing, doubtless in consideration of her sex and condition--she was “Ernive a widow.”[2262] The whole township owed a customary payment or church-shot of forty-six hens.[2263]

[2257] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 297, 298.

[2258] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 300–302.

[2259] _Ib._ pp. 303–305.

[2260] _Ib._ p. 303.

[2261] And this though one of them was no less a personage than _Gaufridus vicecomes_! What can this mean? _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ as above, pp. 304, 305.

[2262] _Ib._ p. 304.

[2263] _Ib._ p. 305.

On the manor of Weston the dues were thus distributed: Robert of Pont-de-l’Arche held four acres of the abbot “by the service of half a knight.” One acre belonged to the church of the township; half a hide was held by John of S. Helen’s, on what terms we are not told. Of the remainder, over which the chamberlain was lord, half a hide was in demesne; the rest was distributed in ten portions, held by thirteen tenants--a hide or half a hide being in three cases held by two persons conjointly. Two hides and a half were for work or for gavel, at the option of the lord; in actual practice, however, there were only two cotters who owed labour instead of, or in addition to, their money-rent. On the other hand, the right of poundage, or exemption from impounding of cattle, was paid for in this village by the ploughing of two acres.[2264] The township of Berton and several others were bound to furnish sumpter-horses for conveying fish to the abbey-kitchen thrice a year; the persons responsible for this service had to pay their own travelling expenses and those of their horses; but they got each a loaf from the abbey when they left; and those who could not fulfil the service were allowed to compound for it with the kitchener “as best they could.” The same manors rendered each five hundred eggs on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, at Christmas, Easter, Rogation-tide and Pentecost; and three hundred at Candlemas and Quinquagesima, besides eighteen hens apiece at the festivals of S. Martin and at Christmas. They also gave on the Wednesday before Easter a hundred herrings, which on the following Thursday were distributed to the poor;[2265] and each of them sent moreover to the monks’ kitchen, in the course of the year, besides the eggs and hens already enumerated, twenty-four bushels of beans.[2266] Eight fisheries were bound to furnish each a certain number of eels on Ash-Wednesday;[2267] the fishermen who carried the eels to the hall were entitled to receive thence two loaves apiece.[2268] From another fishery a money-rent of seventeen shillings was due, paid in three terms; and its holder owed church-shot of twelve hens.[2269] Berton furnished five loads of straw, and Culham as many of hay, three times a year--on Christmas Eve, Easter Eve, and All Saints’ Eve--for strewing the refectory.[2270] When the chamberlain went to Winchelcombe fair, the men of Dumbleton were bound to bring home for him whatever he purchased there; the same duty fell to the tenantry of Welford when he went to the fair at Winchester.[2271]

[2264] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 305, 306.

[2265] _Ib._ pp. 307, 308.

[2266] _Ib._ p. 323.

[2267] _Ib._ pp. 308, 323.

[2268] _Ib._ p. 308.

[2269] _Ib._ p. 309.

[2270] _Ib._ p. 313.

[2271] _Ib._ pp. 326, 327.

If we compare this Abingdon consuetudinary of 1185 with the Peterborough Black Book of 1128, the main result seems to be this: the Abingdon dues are quite as heavy, if not heavier, but the labour-services are much lighter. We must not indeed assume that the difference is wholly owing to progress made during the half-century which elapsed between the compilation of the two books; the customs of different localities varied in all ages, and those of Abingdon may never have been so hard as those of Peterborough. On the estates of the bishop of Durham, on the other hand, when Hugh of Puiset took account of his dues in 1183, the old labour-rents and customs seem to have subsisted almost without alteration. A large proportion of the villeins on the bishop’s manors were holders of two bovates or oxgangs of thirty acres each, for which each man paid two shillings and sixpence for scot-pennies, half a chalder of oats, sixteen pence for aver-pennies, five cart-loads of wood, two hens and ten eggs; he had to work for the lord three days every week throughout the year except Easter-week, Whitsun-week and the twelve days of Christmas; moreover, he and all his family, except the house-wife, had to do in autumn four days boon-work in reaping; besides this, he had to reap three roods of _averipe_ (ripe oats), and plough and harrow three roods of _averere_ (oat-stubble). Each villein plough had to plough and harrow two acres; on this occasion the villeins had a corrody from the bishop, and so they had on occasion of a great boon-work. They were to harrow whenever required; to perform services of carting, for which they got every man a loaf; to make each one booth for the fair of S. Cuthbert; “and when they make lodges” (possibly for the bishop’s hunting) “and cart wood, they are free of other work.” These were the services due from twenty-two out of the thirty-six tenants on the manor of Boldon. Of the remainder, twelve were “cotmen,” holding each twelve acres and working throughout the year, except at the above-named seasons, two days a week, and rendering twelve hens and sixty eggs. One man held two oxgangs of thirty-seven acres, at a rent of half a mark; another was the pounder, who held twelve acres, received from each plough one thrave of corn, and rendered twenty-four hens and five hundred eggs. The mill paid five marks and a half. The villeins were bound to give their labour every year, if required, for the building of a house (perhaps a hunting-lodge) forty feet long and fifteen feet wide; in that case they were forgiven fourpence for aver-pennies. The whole township rendered seventeen shillings for cornage, and one cow.[2272] Clevedon and Whitburn contained twenty-eight villeins and twelve cotmen whose services were the same as at Boldon; besides these and the pounder, there were four other tenants; one held two bovates of twenty-four acres at a rent of sixteenpence, and “went on the bishop’s errands”; one held sixty acres and a toft at eightpence, and fulfilled the same duty; the other two held their lands at a money-rent only.[2273] At Sedgefield there were fifty-one tenants, of whom twenty were villeins holding and labouring on the same terms as their brethren at Boldon; twenty more were “farmers,” holding two bovates apiece, paying five shillings, ploughing and harrowing half an acre, and finding two men to mow, two to reap, and two to make hay, for two days, and also one cart for two days to carry corn, and the same to cart hay; they also did four days’ boon-work in autumn with all their families except the housewives. The reeve, the smith and the carpenter held land by their service; the pounder got his thraves of corn and paid his dues in hens and eggs as on the other manors. Five _bordarii_ held five tofts, paid five shillings, and did four days’ boon-work. William of Oldacres and Uhtred of Butterwick held lands, whose extent is not specified, at a rent of sixteen shillings and half a mark respectively.[2274] At Norton there were thirty villeins holding and labouring like those of Boldon, save that for lack of pasture-land they owed no cornage; and twenty farmers, whose tenure was much the same as that of the farmers of Sedgefield. Alan of Normanton held one carucate for ten shillings, and had to find thirty-two men for a day’s work when required, four carts for one day or two for two days for carrying corn, and the same for carting hay; besides which his men, if he had any, were to work four boon-days in autumn with all their families except the housewives, but Alan himself and his own household were free of this service. Adam, son of Gilbert of Hardwick, held a large piece of land by a money-rent. There was a mill, with eight acres and a meadow, and rendering twenty marks; a pounder, holding on the usual terms; and there were twelve cotmen, holding tofts and crofts, and paying partly in money, partly in work.[2275] The palatine bishopric, it is clear, was an old-fashioned district where innovations of any kind were slow to penetrate. Even here, however, the newer system of money-payment in commutation of service was beginning to make its appearance. The tenures on the manor of Whickham had undergone a sweeping change, apparently not long before Bishop Hugh’s survey was drawn up. On this manor there were thirty-five villeins, holding each an oxgang of fifteen acres. Each of these had been wont to pay sixteenpence, and to work three days a week throughout the year, three boon-days in autumn with all his family except his wife, and a fourth boon-day with two men; in their ordinary work they had to mow the grass, to cut and carry the hay, to reap and carry the corn; and over and above this, they had to plough and harrow two acres of _averere_ with each plough; for this, however, they had a corrody. They had also, in the course of their work, to “make a house” forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, to make three fisheries in the Tyne, and to do carting and carrying like the villeins of Boldon; they gave nine shillings cornage, one cow, and for every oxgang one hen and ten eggs. “Now, however,” adds the record, “the said manor of Whickham is at farm”--demesne, villeins, mill, fisheries and all:--it may possibly, like its neighbour Ryton, have been let at farm to the tenants themselves; but at any rate, its entire services and dues, except a small tribute of hens and eggs, were commuted for a rent of six-and-twenty pounds.[2276]

[2272] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 3, 4. Cornage was a “payment made in commutation of a return of cattle” (_ib._ Glossary).

[2273] _Ib._ p. 5.

[2274] _Ib._ p. 11.

[2275] _Boldon Buke_ (Greenwell), pp. 12, 13.

[2276] _Ib._ pp. 33, 34.

On the whole, the glimpses which we get of the condition of the rural population of England under the Angevin kings seem to indicate that they were by no means excluded from a share in the progress of the kingdom at large. Even if their dues had grown heavier, this surely points to an advance in agricultural prosperity and of the material ease and comfort which are its natural results. The spread of industry shewed itself in many ways. In the towns we can trace it in the growing importance of the handicraftsmen, proved by the jealousy with which their gilds were regarded by the central government and still more by the civic authorities. The weavers seem to have been special objects of civic dislike; in most of the great towns they were treated as a sort of outcasts by the governing body; and in 1201 the London citizens bought of John, at the price of twenty silver marks a year and sixty marks down, a charter authorizing them to turn the weavers out of the city altogether. The sequel of this bargain is eminently characteristic of John; but it is equally significant of the growing influence of the craftsmen. The king took the citizens’ money and gave them the charter which they desired, but he made it null and void by granting his protection to the weavers as before, merely exacting from them an annual payment of twenty marks instead of eighteen.[2277]

[2277] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. pp. lxi–lxiii.

Hand in hand with the growth of industry went the growth of trade. Markets and fairs were springing up everywhere, and a keen commercial rivalry sprang up with them. The little borough of S. Edmund’s set up a “merchant-gild,” whose members insisted that all who did not belong to it must pay toll in their market.[2278] The great success of Abingdon fair in Henry’s early years stirred up the jealousy of both Wallingford and Oxford, and their remonstrances compelled the king to order that inquisition should be made, through twenty-four of the old men of the shire “who were living in his grandfather’s time,” whether the obnoxious little township had in those days enjoyed the privilege of a market. The case was tried in full shire-moot at Farnborough; the twenty-four elders were duly elected, and swore that Abingdon had had a full market in the time of King Henry the First. The jurors were however challenged by the opposing party, whereupon Henry ordered “the men of Wallingford and the whole county of Berkshire” to meet before his justices at Oxford, and there to choose fresh recognitors. This time the jury could not agree among themselves. The Wallingford jurors swore that they remembered nothing sold at Abingdon in the first King Henry’s reign except bread and ale; the Oxford men admitted more than this, but not a “full market”--nothing brought by cart or boat (there was an old-standing quarrel between Oxford and Abingdon about boat-cargoes and river-tolls); the shiremen acknowledged that there had been a “full market,” but doubted whether goods were carried thither by any boats save those belonging to the abbot himself. The justiciar, Earl Robert of Leicester, who was presiding over the court in person, transmitted these various opinions to the king without venturing to decide the case. As it chanced, however, he could--so at least the Abingdon story ran--add to them an useful reminiscence of his own childhood: he had himself seen a full market at Abingdon not only in the days of King Henry I., but as far back as the days of King William, when he, Earl Robert, was a little boy in the abbey-school. And so the men of Abingdon won their case.[2279]

[2278] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74.

[2279] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 227–229. This happened 1158–1161. Mr. Eyton (_Itin. Hen. II._, pref. pp. v, vi) denies on chronological grounds the authenticity of Earl Robert’s supposed witness to the state of affairs in the Conqueror’s time. He does not adduce his proofs; I can therefore only leave this part of the matter undecided, and take the Abingdon story as I find it.

Disputes of this kind, however, were not always so peacefully settled. Some forty years later--in 1201--the monks of Ely set up, under the protection of a royal charter, a market at Lakenheath, within the “liberties” of S. Edmund’s abbey. The chapter of S. Edmund’s, “together with their friends and neighbours,” sent to Ely an amicable remonstrance against this proceeding, adding that they would willingly make good the fifteen marks which the monks of Ely had paid for their charter, if these latter would consent to forego the use of it. The remonstrance however produced no effect. The brotherhood of S. Edmund’s therefore demanded a recognition to declare whether the new market had been set up to their injury, and to the injury of the market at their own town. The verdict of the recognitors decided that it was so. The next step was to inform the king, and ascertain from him the exact tenour of his charter to Ely; search was made in the royal register, and it was found that the market had been granted only on condition that it should not damage the interests of other markets in the neighbourhood. Hereupon the king, for a promise of forty marks, gave to S. Edmund’s a charter providing that no market should thenceforth be set up within the liberties of the abbey save by the abbot’s consent; and he issued orders to the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, for the abolition of the market at Lakenheath. The justiciar sent on the order to the sheriff of Suffolk; and the sheriff, having no jurisdiction within the liberties of S. Edmund’s, forwarded it to the abbot for execution. Next market-day the hundred-reeve came to Lakenheath, and shewing the letters of king and sheriff, supported by the testimony of the freemen, forbade the market in the king’s name; he was however met with nothing but contempt and abuse. The abbot, who was in London at the time, after consulting with some “wise men” there, wrote to his bailiffs bidding them assemble all the men of S. Edmund’s with their horses and arms, overthrow the market by force, and take prisoners as many of the buyers and sellers as they could. In the middle of the night some six hundred well-armed men set out from S. Edmund’s for Lakenheath. When they reached it the market was deserted; all the stall-holders had fled. The prior of Ely was at Lakenheath with his bailiffs, having come that same night in expectation of the intended attack; but he “would not come out of his house”; so the bailiffs of S. Edmund’s, after vainly demanding pledges from him that he would “stand to right” in the abbey-court, seized the butchers’ trestles and the planks which formed the stalls, as well as the cart-horses, sheep and oxen, “yea, and all the beasts of the field,” and carried them away to Icklingham. The prior’s bailiffs hurried in pursuit, and begged to have their goods on pledge for fifteen days, which was granted. Within the fifteen days came a writ summoning the abbot to answer for this affair at the Exchequer, and to restore the captured animals. “For the bishop of Ely, who was a man of ready and eloquent speech, had complained in his own person to the justiciar and the great men of England, saying that an unheard-of insult had been done to S. Etheldreda in time of peace; wherefore many were greatly stirred up against the abbot.”[2280]

[2280] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 98, 99.

The developement of foreign commerce, resulting from the wide-spread relations of the Angevin kings with lands on both sides of the sea which encompassed their island-realm, woke a rivalry no less keen between some of the great trading cities, although they might shew it in less rough and ready fashion than the champions of the mercantile privileges of S. Edmund’s. One interesting illustration has recently come to light, in a writ of Henry II. to the bailiffs of Dublin in favour of the citizens of Chester. Henry, as we know, had granted to the men of Bristol the right of colonizing Dublin and holding it of him and his heirs with the same liberties and privileges as were enjoyed by Bristol itself. Bristol and Chester had for ages been rivals in the trade with Ireland; Chester now saw itself in imminent danger of being altogether shut out of that trade, an exclusion which would have meant little less than ruin to the city. We can hardly doubt that its citizens appealed to the king for a reservation of their commercial privileges in Dublin as against the Bristol merchants. At any rate, Henry in 1175 or 1176 issued a writ to the bailiffs of Dublin commanding that the burghers of Chester should be free to buy and sell at Dublin as they had been wont to do, and should have the same rights, liberties and free customs there as they had had in his grandfather’s days.[2281] Yet more important than the trade of the western seaports with Ireland was that of the eastern coast, not only with the continental dominions of the Angevin house, but with almost the whole of Europe. Not the least beneficial result of the Angevins’ renewal of the old political ties between England and the Empire was the increase of trade which it helped to bring from the merchant-cities of northern Germany and the Low Countries to the port of London. Nor were the kings themselves blind to the advantage of these commercial relations. Richard on the eve of his return from captivity in 1194 granted to the citizens of Cöln a gildhall in London, “with all their other customs and demands,” for an annual payment of two shillings.[2282] The hall of the other Teutonic merchants--famous in later days under the name of the Steel-yard--was probably established about the same period; and early in the following century we find an elaborate and interesting code of regulations for the trade of the Lorrainers, the “men of the Emperor of Germany,” the Danes and the Norwegians.[2283] The developement of commerce brought with it a corresponding growth of riches, and of the material comforts and refinements of life. Domestic architecture began to improve. Henry Fitz-Aylwine issued at the opening of his mayoralty an “Assize” which has been described as “the earliest English Building Act,” and which at any rate shews that the civic authorities were earnestly endeavouring to secure health and comfort in the houses within their jurisdiction, and also to guard against the risk of fire which had ruined so many citizens in times past.[2284] Ecclesiastical architecture progressed still more rapidly; church-building or rebuilding went on all over the country on a scale which proves how great was the advance, both in artistic taste and material wealth, which England had made under the just rule and peaceful administration of her first Angevin king. At the opening of John’s reign the citizens of London were contemplating an important architectural work of another kind: they were planning to replace the wooden bridge over the Thames with a bridge of stone. Degenerate representative as he was in more important respects of the “great builders” of Anjou, John had yet inherited a sufficient share of their tastes to feel interested in such an undertaking as this; and in April 1202 we find him writing to the mayor and citizens of London to recommend them an architect, Isenbert, master of the schools at Saintes, whose skill in the construction of bridges had been lately proved at Saintes and at La Rochelle.[2285] The citizens however seem not to have adopted the king’s suggestion; they found an architect among themselves, in the person of Peter, chaplain or curate of S. Mary Colechurch--the little church beneath whose shadow S. Thomas the martyr was born. It was Peter who “began the stone bridge at London”; and in a chapel on that bridge his body found its appropriate resting-place when he died in 1205.[2286]

[2281] The real meaning of this writ is pointed out by Mr. J. H. Round in the _Academy_, May 29, 1886 (new issue, No. 734, p. 381). The writ itself is there reprinted from the Eighth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical MSS., where it has been wrongly interpreted, owing to a misreading of the word which stands for Dublin.

[2282] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. introd. p. xli, from _Placita de quo warranto_, p. 468.

[2283] Riley as above, pp. 61, 64, and introd. pp. xxxv–xxxix.

[2284] Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize is printed by Mr. Stapleton from the _Liber de Antiquis Legibus_, pp. 206–211. It is there dated 1189.

[2285] Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. p. 83.

[2286] Ann. Waverl. a. 1205 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. ii. pp. 256, 257).

There can be little doubt that a large part of the means for this developement of commercial and architectural energy was furnished by the Jews. The Jewish settlements increased rapidly both in numbers and in importance under Henry II. In the Pipe Rolls of his first five years we find, in addition to the London Jews who appeared in the thirty-first year of his grandfather, and those of Oxford and Lincoln of whom there are traces in the next reign, Jewries at Norwich, Cambridge, Thetford and Bungay, as well as at an unnamed place in Suffolk, which from other evidence seems to have been Bury S. Edmund’s;[2287] and we have already seen that before Henry’s death there were important Hebrew colonies at Lynn, Stamford, York, and many other places. At Winchester the Jews were so numerous and so prosperous that a writer in Richard’s early years calls it their Jerusalem.[2288] The great increase in their numbers throughout England during Henry’s reign is shewn by the fact that in 1177 he found it necessary to grant them permission for the making of a Jewish burial-ground outside the walls of every city in England, instead of sending all their dead to be buried in London, as had been the practice hitherto.[2289] Legally, the Jews were still simply chattels of the king. Practically, they were masters of the worldly interests of a large number of his Christian subjects, and of a large portion of the wealth of his realm. Without their loans many a great and successful trading venture could never have been risked, many a splendid church could never have been built, nay, many a costly undertaking of the king himself might have been brought to a standstill for lack of funds necessary to its completion. The abbey-church of S. Edmund was rebuilt with money borrowed in great part, at exorbitant interest, from Jewish capitalists. Abbot Hugh, when he died in 1173, left his convent in utter fiscal bondage to two wealthy Jews, Isaac son of Rabbi Joses, and Benedict of Norwich.[2290] The sacred vessels and jewels belonging to Lincoln minster were in the same year redeemed by Geoffrey, then bishop-elect, from Aaron, a rich Jew of the city who had had them in pledge for seven years or more.[2291] In 1187 Aaron died; his treasure was seized for the king, and a large part of it sent over sea. The ship which bore it went down between Shoreham and Dieppe, and the sum of the lost treasure was great enough for its loss to be chronicled as a grave misfortune by the treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Nigel;[2292] while two years later the affairs of the dead Jew still made a prominent figure in the royal accounts.[2293] His house, as it stands at the head of the “Steep Hill” of Lincoln to this day, is one of the best examples of a mode of domestic architecture to which Christian townsfolk had scarcely yet begun to aspire, but which was already growing common among those of his race: a house built entirely of stone, in place of the wooden or rubble walls and thatched roofs which, even after Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize, still formed the majority of dwellings in the capital itself.

[2287] Jews at Norwich, Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 8; Cambridge, _ib._ p. 15; Thetford and Bungay, 5 Hen. II. (Pipe Roll Soc.), p. 12. In 4 Hen. II. (Hunter), p. 127, the sheriff of Suffolk renders an account of twenty silver marks “pro Judæis”; as we find Jews at S. Edmund’s at the opening of Richard’s reign, it seems probable that they are the persons referred to here.

[2288] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 62.

[2289] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 182.

[2290] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 2, 3.

[2291] Gir. Cambr. _Vita S. Remig._, c. 24 (Dimock and Freeman, vol. vii. p. 36).

[2292] _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 5.

[2293] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), pp. 8, 59, 219, 226, 229, 246.

It is no wonder that these people, with their untold stores of wealth, their independence of all ordinary jurisdictions, their exemption from all the burthens of civil life, their voluntary exclusion from the common brotherhood of Christendom, their strange aspect and their mysterious language, were objects of universal jealousy, suspicion and hatred, which they on their part took but little pains to conciliate or allay. The religious feelings of the whole population of Oxford were outraged by a Jew who publicly mocked at S. Frideswide amid the solemnities of her festival-day, well knowing that neither prior nor bishop, chancellor nor portreeve, dared lift a finger to check or to punish him.[2294] Darker stories than this, however, were whispered against his race. They were charged not only with ruining many Englishmen of all classes by their usury, and with openly insulting the Christian sacraments and blaspheming the Christians’ Lord, but with buying Christians for money in order to crucify them.[2295] A boy, afterwards canonized as S. William, was said to have been thus martyred at Norwich in 1137;[2296] another, Robert, at S. Edmund’s in 1181;[2297] and a third at Winchester in 1192.[2298] Little as we may be inclined to believe such tales, we can scarcely wonder that they found credit at the time, and that the popular hatred of the Jews went on deepening till it broke out in the massacres of 1190. That outbreak compelled the king to interfere in behalf of his “chattels”; but the fines with which he punished it, though they deterred the people from any further attempts to get rid of the Jews by force, could not alter the general feeling. At S. Edmund’s Abbot Sampson, immediately after the massacre, sought and obtained a royal writ authorizing him to turn all the remaining Jews out of the town at once and for ever;[2299] and in 1194 Richard, or Hubert Walter in his name, found it needful to make an elaborate ordinance for the regulation of Jewish loans throughout the realm and the security of Jewish bonds. Such loans were to be made only in six or seven appointed places, before two “lawful Christians,” two “lawful Jews,” two “lawful writers,” and two clerks specially named in the ordinance; the deed was to be drawn up in the form of an indenture; one half, sealed with the borrower’s seal, was to be given to the Jewish lender; the other half was to be deposited in a common chest having three locks; the two Christians were to keep one key, the two Jews another, and the two royal clerks the third; and the chest was to be sealed with three seals, one being affixed by each of the parties who held the keys. The clerks were to have a roll containing copies of all such deeds; for every deed threepence were to be paid, half that sum by the Jew and half by his creditor; the two scribes got a penny each, and the keeper of the roll the third; and no transactions whatsoever in connexion with these Hebrew bonds was henceforth to take place save in accordance with these regulations.[2300]

[2294] _Mirac. S. Fridesw._, in _Acta SS._, vol. lvi. p. 576 (October 19).

[2295] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 28.

[2296] Eng. Chron. a. 1137.

[2297] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 12.

[2298] Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), p. 60.

[2299] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 33.

[2300] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iii. pp. 266, 267. These “Capitula de Judæis” form the twenty-fourth chapter of _Forma procedendi in placitis Coronæ Regiæ_ (see above, p. 337), printed also in Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 259–263.

It is just possible that this growth of anti-Jewish feeling may have helped in some degree to the growth of a sense of national unity among the other dwellers in the land. All Christians, to whatever race they might belong, whatever tongue they might speak, could not but feel themselves to be one people as against these Oriental intruders. It is at any rate clear that of the foreign elements which had been infused into the population of England during the hundred and forty years which had passed since Duke William landed at Pevensey, the Hebrew element was the only one which had not amalgamated with the native mass. The fusion in blood between Normans and English, which we saw making rapid progress under Henry I., was before the end of his grandson’s reign so far complete that the practice of “presentment of Englishry”--that is, the privilege whereby the hundred in which a man was found slain escaped paying the murder-fine to the treasury, if it could prove that the victim was not of Norman blood--had to be given up because the two nationalities had become so intermixed in every class above that of serfs that it could hardly ever be made out to which of them any man really belonged.[2301] In this fusion the English element, as it was far the larger, was also the weightier and the stronger. In the matter of speech it was fast regaining its supremacy. Foreign priests and foreign prelates were learning to speak and to preach to the English people in their own tongue; Norman barons and knights were learning to talk English with their English-speaking followers and dependents; some of them were learning to talk it with their own wives.[2302] If the pure Teutonic speech of our forefathers had suffered some slight corruption from foreign influences, Walter Map’s legend of the well at Marlborough whereof whosoever drank spoke bad French for ever after[2303] may hint that the language of the conquerors was becoming somewhat Anglicized in the mouths of some at least of their descendants; and the temper of these adoptive Englishmen was changing yet more rapidly than their speech. Of the many individual figures which stand out before us, full of character and life, in the pages of the twelfth-century historians, the one who in all ages, from his own day to ours, has been unanimously singled out as the typical Englishman is the son of Gilbert of Rouen and Rohesia of Caen.

[2301] _Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 10 (Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 201, 202).

[2302] See the story of Helwyse de Morville and her husband--parents of the Hugh de Morville who was one of the murderers of S. Thomas--in Will. Cant. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. i.), p. 128.

[2303] W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. v. c. 6 (Wright, pp. 235, 236).

The whole policy of the Angevin kings tended to mould their insular subjects into an united English nation. Their equal administration completed that wiping-out of local distinctions which had been begun by the wisdom of the Norman kings and helped on by the confusion of the civil war; their developement of old English methods of judicial and administrative procedure brought the English people again visibly and tangibly to the forefront of affairs. Even those very qualities and tendencies which were most un-English in the Angevins themselves helped indirectly to a like result. The almost world-wide range of their political interests gave England once more a place among the nations, and a place far more important than any which she had ever before held. For, above all, it was England that they represented in the eyes of the continental powers; it was as “Kings of the English” that they stood before the world; and it was as Kings of the English that their successors were to stand there still, when the Angevin empire had crumbled into dust. On the eve of that catastrophe the new England found a voice. The English tongue once more asserted its right to a place among the literary tongues of Europe. The higher English poetry, which had slumbered ever since the days of Cadmon, suddenly woke again to life among the Worcestershire hills. The story of the origin of Layamon’s _Brut_ can never be told half so well as in the poet’s own words. “A priest there was in the land, Layamon was he named; he was Leovenath’s son; may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church by Severn’s bank--good it there seemed to him!--hard by Radstone, where he read books. It came into his mind, and into his chief thoughts, that he would tell the noble deeds of Englishmen--what they were called, and whence they came, who first owned English land.... Layamon began to journey wide over this land, and got the noble books that he took for models. He took the English book that Saint Beda made; another he took, in Latin, that Saint Albin made, and the fair Austin, who brought baptism in hither; a third book he took, and laid there in the midst, that a French clerk made, Wace was he called, who well could write, and he gave it to the noble Eleanor who was the high King Henry’s queen. Layamon laid these books before him, and turned the leaves; he lovingly beheld them; may the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers and wrote on a bookskin, and the true words set together, and the three books compressed into one.”[2304] We must not blame a dweller on the western border in the early days of King John if, when setting himself to tell “the noble deeds of Englishmen,” he thought it needful to begin with the fall of Troy after the pattern of Wace and Wace’s original, Geoffrey of Monmouth. We can only be thankful to this simple English priest for leaving to us a purely English poem of more than thirty thousand lines which is indeed beyond all price, not only as a specimen of our language at one of its most interesting stages, but as an abiding witness to the new spirit of patriotism which, ten years and more before the signing of the Great Charter, was growing up in such quiet corners of the land as this little parish of “Ernley” (or Areley Kings) by Severn-side. The subject-matter of Layamon’s book might be taken chiefly from his French guide, Wace; but its spirit and its language are both alike thoroughly English. The poet’s “chief thought,” as he says himself, was to “tell the noble deeds of Englishmen,” to Englishmen, in their own English tongue. A man who wrote with such an ambition as this was surely not unworthy of the simple reward which was all that he asked of his readers: “Now prayeth Layamon, for love of Almighty God, every good man that shall read this book and learn this counsel, that he say together these soothfast words for his father’s soul, and for his mother’s soul, and for his own soul, that it may be the happier thereby. Amen!”[2305]

[2304] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 1–3.

[2305] Layamon (Madden), vol. i. pp. 3, 4.

Layamon’s _Brut_ was written at some time between John’s crowning and his return to England, after the loss of Normandy, in 1206.[2306] It was a token that, on both sides of the sea, the Angevins’ work was all but ended, their mission all but fulfilled. The noblest part of that mission was something of which they themselves can never have been fully conscious; and yet perhaps through that very unconsciousness they had fulfilled it the more thoroughly. “The silent growth and elevation of the English people”--as that people’s own historian has taught us--“was the real work of their reigns;”[2307] and even from a survey so imperfect as ours we may see that when John came home in 1206 the work was practically done.

[2306] On the date, etc., of Layamon see Sir F. Madden’s preface to his edition of the _Brut_, vol. i.; and Mr. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i. pp. 632–635.

[2307] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 217.

INDEX

Aaron of Lincoln, ii. 487

Abelard, i. 480

Abingdon, its customs in 1185, ii. 475–477; its fair, 481, 482. _See_ Faricius

Achard, lord of Châlus, ii. 382, 383

Aclea, battle of, i. 102

Acre taken by the crusaders, ii. 319

Adaland, archbishop of Tours, i. 131, 132

Adalbert, count of Périgord, i. 145

Adam, Master, i. 482, 492, 493

Adam de Bruce, ii. 145

Adam de Port, ii. 162

Adela, first wife of Geoffrey Greygown, i. 121, 135

Adela, countess of Chalon-sur-Saône, second wife of Geoffrey Greygown,