Chapter 17

The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount"; but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.

With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of the town, on the border between the England that remained to the West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about. The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of Æthelred the Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than Æthelred, and his conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties. Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.

From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The "bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead" so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow, and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom; what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."

In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.

It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhône and the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign Cæsar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediæval baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of the Cæsars in the plain of the Po.

Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided, the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote, their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.

It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford. Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the "penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.

THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.

For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south. There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendée there is a continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M. Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers. To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through Anjou.

There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King René. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.

To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St. Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.