Part 7

Both as a man and as a ruler, the figure of Henry II has come down to us distorted by the loves and hates of an age of the most violent and bitter controversy. Brilliant though scarcely heroic to his friends, to his enemies he was a veritable demon of tyranny and crime, whose lurid end pointed many a moral respecting the sins of princes and the vengeance of the Most High. Eminently a strong man, he was not regarded as in any sense superhuman, but rather as an intensely human figure, tempted in all points like as other men and yielding where they yielded. Heavy, bull-necked, sensual, with a square jaw, freckled face, reddish hair, and fiery eyes that blazed in sudden paroxysms of anger, he must, in Bishop Stubbs’s phrase, “have looked generally like a rough, passionate, uneasy man.”[29] The dominant impression is one of exhaustless energy accompanied by a physical restlessness which kept him whispering and scribbling during mass, hunting and hawking from morning to night, and riding constantly from place to place throughout his vast dominions with a rapidity that always took his enemies by surprise. On one occasion he covered one hundred and seventy miles in two days. Well-educated for a prince of his time and able to hold his own in ready converse with the clerks of his court, his tastes were neither speculative nor romantic, but were early turned toward practical life. He was primarily “an able, plausible, astute, cautious, unprincipled man of business,”[30] fond of work and delighting in detail, with a distinct gift for organization and a mastery of diplomacy, wise in the selection of his subordinates, skilful in evasion, but quick and sure in action. Strong, clear-headed, and tenacious, Henry represents the type of the man of large affairs, and in another age might have amassed a large private fortune as a successful business man. In the twelfth century the chief opportunity for talent of this sort was in public life, where the king’s household was also the government of the state, the strengthening of royal authority was the surest means of attaining national unity and security, and the interest of the king coincided with the interest of the state. To the present day, with its cry for business men in public office, this seems natural enough; but we must remember that feudalism meant exactly the opposite of business efficiency, and that the problem of creating an effective government in the midst of a feudal society turned largely on the maintenance of a businesslike administration of justice, finance, and the army. By his success in these fields Henry went a long way toward creating a modern state, and did, as a matter of fact, establish the most highly organized and effective government of its time in western Europe.

Our conceptions of the nature of Henry II’s public work have been in certain respects modified as the result of modern research. It has become clear, in the first place, that he was an administrator rather than a legislator, and that such of his legislation as has reached us belongs in the category of instructions to his officers rather than in that of general enactments. These measures lack the permanence of statutes; they are supplemented, modified, withdrawn, in accordance with the will of a sovereign whose restless temper showed itself in a constant series of legal and administrative experiments. Many of his changes seem to have been effected through oral command rather than written instructions. In the second place, Henry’s originality has been somewhat diminished by a more careful study of the work of his predecessors, notably of Henry I, in whose reign it is now possible to trace at work some of the elements that were once supposed to have been innovations of his grandson. As a whole, however, the work of Henry II stands the test of analysis and gives him an eminent place in the number of mediæval statesmen.

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Precocious in many ways as was the political organization of Henry’s dominions, it was conditioned by the circumstances of its time, and we must be careful to conceive it in terms of the twelfth century and not of the fifteenth or the twentieth. The Norman sovereign had at his disposal none of the legal or bureaucratic traditions which were still maintained at Constantinople and were not without their influence upon the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Nor was the time ripe for the creation out of hand of a strong central government for his various territories, such as became possible in the Burgundian state of the fifteenth century and in the Austrian state which was modelled upon it. Henry was in the midst of a feudal society and had to make the best of it. He had to reckon with the particularistic traditions of his several dominions as well as with the feudal opposition to strong government, and western Europe was still a long way from the economic conditions which lie at the basis of modern bureaucracies.

When we speak of the Anglo-Norman or the Angevin empire, we must accordingly dismiss from our minds at the outset any notion of a government with a capital, a central treasury and judicature, and a common assembly. A fixed central treasury existed only in the most advanced of the individual states, and it was many years before the courts established themselves permanently at Westminster and Rouen. Government was still something personal, centring in the person of the sovereign, and the ministers of the state were still his household servants. The king had no fixed residence, and as he moved from place to place, his household and its officers moved with him. Indeed kings were just beginning to learn that it was safer to leave their treasure in some strong castle than to carry it about in their wanderings; it was not till 1194 that the capture of his baggage train by Richard the Lion-Hearted taught the French king Philip Augustus to leave his money and his title-deeds at Paris when he went on a military expedition. We must not be surprised to find that the principal common element in Henry’s empire was Henry himself, supplemented by his most immediate household officers, and that many of these officers, such as the seneschals and the justiciars, were limited in their functions to England or Normandy or Anjou, and usually remained in their particular country to look after affairs in the king’s absence. There was, however, one notable exception, the chancellor, or royal secretary. Regularly an ecclesiastic, so that there was no chance of his turning the office into an hereditary fief, the nature of the chancellor’s duties attached him continuously to the person of the sovereign and made him the natural companion of the royal journeys. He was far, however, from being a mere private secretary or amanuensis, but stood at the head of a regular secretarial bureau, which had its clerks and chaplains and its well-organized system of looking after the king’s business. The study of the history of institutions goes to show that, on the whole, there is no better test of the strength or weakness of a mediæval government than its chancery. If it had no chancery, as was the case under the early Norman dukes, or if its methods, as seen in its formal acts, were irregular and unbusinesslike, as under Robert Curthose, there was sure to be a lack of organization and continuity in its general conduct of affairs. If, on the other hand, the chancery was well organized, its rules and practices regularly observed, its documents clear and sharp and to the point, this meant normally that an efficient government stood behind it.

Now, judged by the most exacting standards, the chancery of Henry II had reached a high degree of perfection. It has quite recently been the subject of an elaborate study by the most eminent mediævalist of our time, the late Léopold Delisle, who cannot restrain his admiration for its regularity, its accuracy and finish, and the extraordinary range and rapidity of its work. The documents issued in the name of Henry II during his long reign of thirty-five years, says Delisle,[31] “both for his English and his continental possessions, are all drawn up on the same plan in identical formulæ and expressed with irreproachable precision in a simple, clear, and correct style, which is also remarkably uniform save for a small number of pieces which show the hand of others than the royal officers.” If the judgment of this master required support, I should be glad to confirm it from the personal examination of some hundreds of Henry’s charters and writs. Such uniformity, it should be observed, is evidence not only of the extent and technical attainments of the chancery but of substantially similar administrative conditions throughout the various dominions to which these documents are addressed: officers, functions, legal and administrative procedure are everywhere very much alike. Moreover, a study of these charters reveals another fact of fundamental importance. Even more significant than uniformity of procedure in a chancery is the type of document issued, for since the strength of government lies not in legislation but in administration, a sure index of a state’s efficiency will be found in the extent and character of its administrative correspondence. This test places the Norman empire far in advance of any of its contemporaries. Every payment from the treasury, every allowance of an account, every summons to the army, every executive command or prohibition, was made by formal royal writ--_per breve regis_, as we read page after page in the account rolls. Of the many thousands of such writs issued in Henry’s reign, exceedingly few have come down to us, but no one can read these, terse, direct, trained down to bone and muscle, without realizing the keen minds and the clear-cut administrative methods which they represent. Take an example:[32]

H. Dei gratia rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum et Aquitanorum et comes Andegavorum R. thesaurario et Willelmo Malduit et Warino filio Giroldi camerariis suis salutem.

Liberate de thesauro meo XXV marcas fratribus Cartusie de illis L marcis quas do eis annuatim per cartam meam.

Teste Willelmo de Sancte Marie Ecclesia. Apud Westmoster.

The purpose of these writs might, of course, vary--seize A of this land; do right to B for that tenement; secure C in his possession; bring your knights to such a place at such a time; summon twelve men to decide D’s right;--but each has its appropriate form, which is always crisp and exact. All speak the language of a strong, businesslike administration which expected as a matter of course prompt and implicit obedience throughout its broad dominions.

If such a system be given enough time, it will inevitably exert a strong and persistent influence in favor of centralization and uniformity, and it would be interesting to know just what was accomplished in these directions during the half century of the Norman empire’s existence. The parting advice which Henry had received from his father Geoffrey was to avoid the transfer of customs and institutions from one part of his realm to another, and the wisdom of the warning was obvious under feudal conditions, if not in all imperial governments. But there is a difference between the field of local custom and the institutions of administration, and while even in matters of feudal law there is some evidence of a generalization of certain reforms in the rules of succession, in the conduct of government it was impossible to keep the different parts of the empire in water-tight compartments so long as there was a common administration and frequent interchange of officials between different regions. We must remember that Henry was a constant experimenter, and that if a thing worked well in one place it was likely to be tried in another. Thus the Assize of Arms and the ordinance for the crusading tithe were first promulgated for his continental dominions, while the great English inquest of knights’ fees in 1166 preceded by six years the parallel Norman measure. The great struggle with Becket over the church courts seems to have had a Norman prologue. The chronological order in any given case might well be a matter of chance; but in administrative matters the influence is likely to have travelled from the older and better organized to the newer and more loosely knit dominions, from England, Normandy, and Anjou on the one hand to Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony on the other.

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Of Henry’s hereditary territories, Anjou seems the least important from the point of view of constitutional influence. Much smaller in area than either Normandy or England, it was a compact and comparatively centralized state long before Henry’s accession, but the opportunity for immediate action on the count’s part simplified its government to a point where its experience was of no great value under Anglo-Norman conditions. Certainly no Angevin influence is traceable in the field of finance, and none seems probable in the administration of justice. In the case of Normandy and England the resemblance of institutions is closest, and a host of interesting problems present themselves which carry us back to the effects of the Norman Conquest and even further.

It is, of course, one of the fundamental problems of English history how far the government of England was Normanized in the century following the Conquest. To a French scholar like Boutmy everything begins anew in 1066, when “the line which the whole history of political institutions has subsequently followed was traced and defined.”[33] To Freeman, on the other hand, the changes then introduced were temporary and not fundamental. He is never tired of repeating that the old English are the real English; progress comes by going back to the principles of the Anglo-Saxon period and casting aside innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times; “we have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things, we have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation.”[34] The trend of present scholarly opinion lies between these extremes. It refuses to throw away the Anglo-Saxon period, whose institutions we are just beginning to read aright; but it rejects its idealization at Freeman’s hands, who, it has been said, saw all things “through a mist of moots and witans” and not as they really were, and it finds more truth in Carlyle’s remark that the pot-bellied equanimity of the Anglo-Saxon needed the drilling and discipline of a century of Norman tyranny.[35]

Whether he was needed much or little, the Norman drill-master came and did his work, and when he had finished the two countries were in many respects alike. He left his mark on the English language and on English literature, which were submerged for three centuries under the French of the court, the castle, and the town, and in the process were permanently modified into a mixed speech. He left his mark on architecture in the great cathedrals of the Norman bishops and the massive castles with their Norman keeps. He made England a feudal society, however far it may have gone in that direction before, and its law, from that day to this, a feudal law. And he remade the central government under the strong hand of a masterful dynasty which compelled its subjects to will what the king willed. Whatever permanence we may assign to Anglo-Saxon local institutions,--and we cannot help granting them this in considerable measure,--it is not now held that there was any notable Anglo-Saxon influence upon the central administration. At best England before the Conquest was a loose aggregation of tribal commonwealths divided by local feeling and by the jealousies of the great earls, and its kingship did not grow stronger with process of time. The national assembly of wise men, whose persistence Freeman labored in vain to prove, became the feudal council of the Norman barons, and this council, the _curia regis_, and the royal household which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration.

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Yet in a vigorous state central and local are never wholly separable, and it is where they touch that recent study has been able to show some continuity of development between the two periods, namely in the fiscal system which culminated in the exchequer of the English kings. Of all the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the efficient conduct of their government. Nowhere in western Europe did a king receive so large a revenue as here; nowhere was it collected and administered in so regular and businesslike a fashion; nowhere do the accounts afford so complete a view of “the whole framework of society.” The main features of this system are simple and striking.

In every administrative district of Normandy and England the king had an agent--in England the sheriff, in Normandy the _vicomte_ or _bailli_--to collect his revenues, which consisted chiefly of the income from lands and forests, the fees and fines in the royal courts, the proceeds of the various feudal incidents, and the various payments which there were from time to time levied under the name of Danegeld, scutage, aid, or gift. Twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, these agents were required to come to the treasury and render their accounts to the king’s officers. At Easter the sheriff was expected to pay in half of his receipts, receiving therefor down to 1826 a receipt in the form of a notched stick or tally, split down the middle so that there was exact agreement between the portion retained at the exchequer and the portion carried off by the sheriff to be produced when the accounts of the year were settled at Michaelmas. The great session of the exchequer at Michaelmas was a very important occasion and is described for us in detail in a most interesting contemporary treatise, the _Dialogue on the Exchequer_, written by Richard the King’s Treasurer, in 1178–79. There the sheriff met the great officials of the king’s household who were also the great officers of the Anglo-Norman state--the justiciar, chancellor, constable, treasurer, chamberlains, and marshal, reënforced by clerks, tally-cutters, calculators, and other assistants. The place and the institution took their names from a chequered table or chess-board--the Latin name _scaccarium_ means a chess-board--in size and shape not unlike a billiard table, covered with cloth which was ruled off into columns for pence, shillings, pounds, hundreds and thousands of pounds. On one side were set forth in this graphic manner the sums which the sheriff was required to pay, on the other he and his clerk tried to offset these with tallies, receipts, warrants, and counters representing actual cash. Played with skill and care on each side, for the stakes were high, this great match was likened to a game of chess between the sheriff and the king’s officers. Its results were recorded each year, district by district and item by item, on a great roll, called the pipe roll from the pipes, or skins of parchment sewed end to end, of which it was made up. For England we have an unbroken series of these rolls from the second year of Henry II, as well as an odd roll of Henry I, constituting a record of finance and government quite unique in contemporary Europe. The series was doubtless as complete for Normandy, but there survive from Henry’s reign only the roll of 1180 and fragments of that of 1184. For the other Plantagenet lands nothing remains.

This remarkable fiscal system comprised accordingly a regular method of collecting revenue, a central treasury and board of account, and a distinctive and careful mode of auditing the accounts. There was nothing like it north of Sicily, and contemporaries admired it both for its administrative efficiency and for the wealth and resources which it implied. Although something of the sort seems to have existed in all the territories of the Plantagenet empire and the different bodies seem to have maintained a certain amount of coöperation, all our records come from England and Normandy, and there can be no question that it is distinctively an Anglo-Norman institution. Whether, however, it is English or Norman in origin and how it came into existence, are still in many respects obscure questions. The exchequer is not an innovation of Henry II, for the surviving roll of Henry I and certain incidental evidence show that it existed on both sides of the Channel in the reign of his grandfather. In the time of the author of the _Dialogue_ there was a tradition that it had been imported from Normandy by William the Conqueror, but this must be discounted by the fact that certain elements of the system can be traced in Anglo-Saxon England. The truth is that the exchequer is a complicated institution, some parts of which may be quite ancient and the results of parallel development on both sides of the Channel; at least the problem of priority has reached no certain solution. Its most characteristic feature, however, its peculiar method of reckoning, does not seem either of Norman or English origin, but derived from the abacus of the ancient Romans, as used and taught in the continental schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

One who tries to perform with Roman numerals a simple problem in addition or subtraction--or better yet, in multiplication or division--will have no difficulty in understanding why people unacquainted with the Arabic system of notation have had recourse to a counting-machine or abacus. The difficulty, of course, lies not so much in the clumsy form of the individual Roman numbers as in the absence of the zero and the reckoning by position which it makes possible. This defect the abacus supplied. By means of a sanded board or a cloth-covered table or a string of counters it provided a row of columns each of which represented a decimal group--units, tens, hundreds, etc.--by which numerical operations could be rapidly and accurately performed. Employed by the ancient Romans, as by the modern Chinese, the arithmetic of the abacus became a regular subject of instruction in the schools of the Middle Ages, whence its reckoning was introduced into the operations of the Anglo-Norman treasury. The most recent student of the subject, Reginald Lane Poole, connects the change with the Englishmen who studied at the cathedral school of Laon early in the twelfth century. To me it seems somewhat earlier, brought by abacists who came to England in the eleventh century from the schools of Lorraine.[36] In either case its introduction was much more than a change of bookkeeping. Convenient as such reckoning was in general, it was the only possible method for men who could neither read nor write, like the Anglo-Norman sheriffs and many of the royal officers, and its use made it possible to carry on the fiscal business of the state on a large scale, in an open and public fashion, with full justice to all parties, and with accuracy, certainty, and dispatch. It was a businesslike system for busy and businesslike men.

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