“When the green tree, cut asunder in the midst and severed
by the space of three furlongs, shall be grafted in again and
shall bring forth flowers and fruit,—then at last may England
hope to see the end of her sorrows.”[1]
So closed the prophecy in which the dying king
Eadward the Confessor foretold the destiny in store for his
country after his departure. His words, mocked at by one
of the listeners, incomprehensible to all, found an easy
interpretation a hundred years later. The green tree of the
West-Saxon monarchy had fallen beneath Duke William’s
battle-axe; three alien reigns had parted its surviving
branch from the stem; the marriage of Henry I. with a
princess of the old English blood-royal had grafted it in
again.[2] One flower sprung from that union had indeed
bloomed only to die ere it reached its prime,[3] but another
had brought forth the promised fruit; and the dim ideal of
national prosperity and union which English and Normans
alike associated with the revered name of the Confessor was
growing at last into a real and living thing beneath the
sceptre of Henry Fitz-Empress.
There are, at first glance, few stranger things in history
than the revival thus prefigured:—a national revival growing
up, as it seems, in the most adverse circumstances, under the
pressure of an alien government, of a race of kings who
were strangers alike to the men of old English blood and
to the descendants of those who had come over with the
Conqueror: at a time when, in a merely political point of
view, England seemed to be not only conquered but altogether
swallowed up in the vast and varied dominions of the
house of Anjou. It was indeed not the first time that the
island had become an appendage to a foreign empire compared
with which she was but a speck in the ocean. Cnut
the Dane was, like Henry of Anjou, not only king of England
but also ruler of a great continental monarchy far
exceeding England in extent, and forming together with
her a dominion only to be equalled, if equalled at all, by
that of the Emperor. But the parallel goes no farther.
Cnut’s first kingdom, the prize of his youthful valour,
was his centre and his home, of which his Scandinavian
realms, even his native Denmark, were mere dependencies.
Whatever he might be when he revisited them, in his island-kingdom
he was an Englishman among Englishmen. The
heir of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda of Normandy, on the
other hand, was virtually of no nationality, no country; but
if he could be said to have a home at all, it was certainly
not on this side of the sea—it was the little marchland of
his fathers. In the case of his sons, the southern blood of
their mother Eleanor added a yet more un-English element;
and of Richard, indeed, it might almost be said that the
home of his choice was not in Europe at all, but in Holy
Land. Alike to him and to his father, England was simply
the possession which gave them their highest title, furnished
them with resources for prosecuting their schemes of continental
policy, and secured to them a safe refuge on which
to fall back in moments of difficulty or danger. It was not
till the work of revival was completed, till it had resulted in
the creation of the new England which comes to light with
Edward I., that it could find a representative and a leader in
the king himself. The sovereign in whose reign the chief
part of the work was done stood utterly aloof from it in
sympathy; yet he is in fact its central figure and its most
important actor. The story of England’s developement from
the break-down of the Norman system under Stephen to the
consolidation of a national monarchy under Edward I. is
the story of Henry of Anjou, of his work and of its results.
But as the story does not end with Henry, so neither does
it begin with him. It is impossible to understand Henry
himself without knowing something of the race from which
he sprang; of those wonderful Angevin counts who, beginning
as rulers of a tiny under-fief of the duchy of France,
grew into a sovereign house extending its sway from one end
of Christendom to the other. It is impossible to understand
his work without knowing something of what England was,
and how she came to be what she was, when the young
count of Anjou was called to wear her crown.
The project of an empire such as that which Henry II.
actually wielded had been the last dream of William Rufus.
In the summer of 1100 the duke of Aquitaine, about to
join the Crusaders in Holy Land, offered his dominions in
pledge to the king of England. Rufus clutched at the offer
“like a lion at his prey.”[4] Five years before he had
received the Norman duchy on the same terms from his
brother Robert; he had bridled its restless people and
brought them under control; he had won back its southern
dependency, his father’s first conquest, the county of Maine.
Had this new scheme been realized, nothing but the little
Angevin march would have broken the continuity of a
Norman dominion stretching from the Forth to the Pyrenees,
and in all likelihood the story of the Angevin kings would
never have had to be told. Jesting after his wont with his
hunting-companions, William—so the story goes—declared
that he would keep his next Christmas feast at Poitiers, if
he should live so long.[5] But that same evening the Red
King lay dead in the New Forest, and his territories fell
asunder at once. Robert of Normandy came back from
Palestine in triumph to resume possession of his duchy;
while the barons of England, without waiting for his return,
chose his English-born brother Henry for their king.
Thirteen years before, at his father’s death, Henry, the
only child of William and Matilda who was actually born in
the purple—the child of a crowned king and queen, born on
English soil, and thus by birth, though not by descent,
entitled to rank as an English Ætheling—had been launched
into the world at the age of nineteen without a foot of land
that he could call his own. The story went that he had
complained bitterly to the dying Conqueror of his exclusion
from all share in the family heritage. “Have patience, boy,”
was William’s answer, “let thine elder brothers go before thee;
the day will come when thou shalt be greater than either of
them.” Henry was, however, not left a penniless adventurer
dependent on the bounty of his brothers; the Conqueror
gave him a legacy of ten thousand pounds as a solid provision
wherewith to begin his career. A year had scarcely
passed before Duke Robert, overwhelmed with troubles in
Normandy, found himself at his wits’ end with an empty
treasury, and besought Henry to lend him some money.
The Ætheling, as cool and calculating as his brothers were
impetuous, refused; the duke in desperation offered to sell
him any territory he chose, and a bargain was struck
whereby Henry received, for the sum of three thousand
pounds, the investiture of the Cotentin, the Avranchin, and
the Mont-St.-Michel—in a word, the whole western end of
the Norman duchy.[6] Next summer, while the duke was
planning an attempt on the English crown and vainly
awaiting a fair wind to enable him to cross the Channel, the
count of the Cotentin managed to get across without one,
to claim the estates in Gloucestershire formerly held by his
mother and destined for him by his father’s will. He was
received by William Rufus only too graciously, for the consequence
was that some mischief-makers, always specially
plentiful at the Norman court, persuaded Duke Robert that
his youngest brother was plotting against him with the
second, and when Henry returned in the autumn he had no
sooner landed than he was seized and cast into prison.[7]
Within a year he was free again, reinstated, if not in the
Cotentin, at least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel,
and entrusted with the keeping of Rouen itself against the
traitors stirred up by the Red King. William, while his
young brother was safe in prison, had resumed the Gloucestershire
estates and made them over to his favourite Robert
Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment threw himself
with all his energies into the cause of the duke of Normandy,
acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout
the war with Rufus which followed, and at the close of
the year crowned his services by the promptitude and valour
with which he defeated a conspiracy for betraying the Norman
capital to the king of England.[8] The struggle ended in a
treaty between the elder brothers, in which neither of them
forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took the
shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories
and divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack
soon brought him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the
rock crowned by the abbey of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea,
commonly called Mont-Saint-Michel. Henry threw
himself into the place with as many knights as were willing
to share the adventure; the brethren of the abbey did their
utmost to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison,
perched on their inaccessible rock, held out against their
besiegers.[9] Then hunger began to thin their ranks; nothing
but the inconsistent generosity of Robert saved them from
the worse agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they dropped away,
till Henry saw that he must yield to fate, abide by his
father’s counsel, and wait patiently for better days. He
surrendered; he came down from the Mount, once again
a landless and homeless man; and save for one strange
momentary appearance in England as a guest at the Red
King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two
years in France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge
to another with a lowly train of one knight, three squires,
and one chaplain.[12] He was at length recalled by the
townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to desperation by the
oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw off his
yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself
the duty of defending them, their town and castle, against
their former tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages
of his friends,” as his admiring historian says,[13] Henry was
thus placed in command of his father’s earliest conquest, the
key of Normandy and Maine, a fortress scarcely less mighty
and of far greater political importance than that from which
he had been driven. He naturally used his opportunity for
reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also upon
his own brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had
made himself of so much consequence in the duchy that
William Rufus, again at war with the duke, thought it time
to secure his alliance. The two younger brothers met in
England, and when Henry returned in the spring of 1095
he came as the liegeman of the English king, sworn to fight
his battles and further his interests in Normandy by every
means in his power.[15]
William and Henry had both learned by experience
that to work with Robert for any political purpose was
hopeless, and that their true interest was to support each
other—William’s, to enlist for his own service Henry’s clear
cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to secure for himself
some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate
ambitions could not fail to be centred. He had learned
in his wanderings to adapt himself to all circumstances and
all kinds of society; personally, he and Rufus can have had
little in common except their passion for the chase. Lanfranc’s
teaching, moral and intellectual, had been all alike
thrown away upon his pupil William the Red. Henry,
carefully educated according to his father’s special desire,
had early shown a remarkable aptitude for study, was a
scholar of very fair attainments as scholarship went among
laymen in his day, and retained his literary tastes not only
through all his youthful trials but also through the crowd of
political and domestic cares which pressed upon his later
life. Yet such tastes seem almost as strange in Henry as
they would in William Rufus. The one prosaic element in
the story of Henry’s youth is the personality of its hero.
No man had ever less of the romantic or poetic temperament;
if he had none of the follies or the faults of chivalry,
he had just as little of its nobler idealism. From his first
bargain with Robert for the purchase of the Cotentin to his
last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage of his
heir, life was to him simply a matter of business. The
strongest points in his character were precisely the two
qualities which both his brothers utterly lacked—self-control,
and that “capacity for taking trouble” which is sometimes
said to be the chief element of genius. But of the higher
kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul rather
than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was
essentially a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense
of the words. His self-control was not, like his father’s, the
curb forcibly put by a noble mind upon its own natural
impetuosity; it was the more easily-practised calmness of
a perfectly cold nature which could always be reasonable
because it had to fight with no impulse of passion, which
was never tempted to “follow wandering fires” because they
lit in it no responsive flame; a nature in which the head
had complete mastery over the heart, and that head was one
which no misfortunes could disturb, no successes turn, and
no perplexities confuse.
The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every
one else quite unprepared for such an emergency. Henry
was never unprepared. His quickness and decision secured
him the keys of the treasury and the formal election of those
barons and prelates who had been members of the fatal
hunting-party, or who hurried to Winchester at the tidings
of its tragic issue; and before opposition had time to come
to a head, it was checked by the coronation and unction
which turned the king-elect into full king.[16] Henry knew
well, however, that opposition there was certain to be.
Robert of Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and
covered with glory, was sure to assert his claim, and as sure
to be upheld by a strong party among the barons, to whom
a fresh severance of England and Normandy was clearly not
desirable. In anticipation of the coming struggle, Henry
threw himself at once on the support of his subjects. In
addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath—taken almost
in the words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]—he issued on the
same day a charter in which he solemnly and specifically
promised the abolition of his brother’s evil customs in Church
and state, and a return to just government according to the
law of the land. The details were drawn up so as to touch
all classes. The Church, as including them all, of course
stood first; its freedom was restored and all sale or farming
of benefices renounced by the king. The next clause appealed
specially to the feudal vassals: those who held their
lands “by the hauberk”—the tenants by knight-service—were
exempted from all other imposts on their demesne
lands, that they might be the better able to fulfil their own
particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief were exempted
from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships, marriages,
reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in
the last reign; but the redress was not confined to them;
they were distinctly required to exercise the same justice
towards their own under-tenants. The last clause covered
all the rest: by it Henry gave back to his people “the laws
of King Eadward as amended by King William.”[18] Like
Cnut’s renewal of the law of Eadgar—like Eadward’s own
renewal of the law of Cnut—the charter was a proclamation
of general reunion and goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity,
the Red King’s minister, Ralf Flambard, in popular estimation
the author of all the late misdoings, was at once cast
into the Tower;[19] the exiled primate was fetched home as
speedily as possible; and in November the king identified
himself still more closely with the land of his birth by
taking to wife a maiden of the old English blood-royal,
Eadgyth of Scotland, great-granddaughter of Eadmund
Ironside.[20]
His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused
the thorny crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England
had far other charms; and his movements were quickened
by Ralf Flambard, who early in the spring made his escape
to Normandy.[21] It was probably through Ralf’s management
that the duke won over some of the sailors who
guarded the English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly
at Portsmouth while the king was keeping watch for him at
the old landing-place, Pevensey.[22] At the first tidings of the
intended invasion Henry, like Rufus in the same case
thirteen years before, had appealed to Witan and people,
and by a renewal of his charter gained a renewal of their
fealty. No sooner, however, was Robert actually in England
than the great majority of the barons prepared to go over to
him in a body. But the king born on English soil, married
to a lady of the old kingly house, had a stronger hold than
ever Rufus could have had upon the English people; and
they, headed by their natural leader and representative, the
restored archbishop of Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving
loyalty.[23] The two armies met near Alton;[24] at the
last moment, the wisdom either of Anselm, of the few loyal
barons, or of Henry himself, turned the meeting into a peaceful
one. The brothers came to terms: Robert renounced his
claim to the crown in consideration of a yearly pension from
England; Henry gave up all his Norman possessions except
Domfront, whose people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in
the treaty made at Caen ten years before between Robert
and William, it was arranged that whichever brother lived
longest should inherit the other’s dominions, if the deceased
left no lawful heirs.[26]
The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of
August;[27] and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red
King’s death, ended the last Norman invasion of England.
But the treaty of Winchester, like that of Caen, failed to
settle the real difficulty. That difficulty was, how to control
the barons. According to one version of the treaty, it
was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in
England by their adherence to Robert and those who had
done the same in Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike
go unpunished;[28] according to another, perhaps a more probable
account, the brothers agreed to co-operate in punishing
traitors on both sides.[29] Henry set to work to do his part
methodically. One after another, at different times, in
various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were
brought to justice in England: some heavily fined, some
deprived of their honours and exiled. It was treason not so
much against himself as against the peace and order of the
realm that Henry was bent upon avenging; Ivo of Grantmesnil
was fined to the verge of ruin for the crime of making
war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but upon his
own neighbours for his own personal gratification—a crime
which was part of the daily life of every baron in Normandy,
but which had never been seen in England before,[30] and
never was seen there again as long as King Henry lived.
The most formidable of all the troublers of the land was
Henry’s old enemy at Domfront—Robert, lord of Bellême
in the border-land of Perche, earl of Shrewsbury and
Arundel in England, count of Alençon and lord of Montgomery
in Normandy, and now by his marriage count of
Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles of
Bridgenorth and Arundel in preparation for open revolt
when he was summoned to take his trial on forty-five
charges of treason against the king of England and the
duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer, Henry led his
troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it surrendered;
Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and
Robert of Bellême was glad to purchase safety for life and
limb at the cost of all his English possessions.[31]
From that moment Henry’s position in England was
secured; but all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent
elder brother fulfil his part of their compact. The traitors
whom Henry expelled from England only carried their treason
over sea to a more congenial climate, and the helpless, heedless
duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême,
William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their
fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry
by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to
him in England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself,
began to see that his personal intervention alone could re-establish
order in the duchy. On his appearance there in 1104
he was joined by all the more reasonable among the barons.
For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of
amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the
county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise had
become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he
landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of making
himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied
round him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable
allies, Elias count of Maine and his intended son-in-law,
the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was they
who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35]
Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt
down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry
thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege
of Falaise failed through the unexplained departure of Count
Elias,[36] and the war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy
in another quarter with negotiations for the return of S.
Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to England. Thither
he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by Robert
of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had
become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again
in Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties
at home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the
final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he
was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve
Duke Robert at the head of all his forces approached and
summoned him to raise the siege. He refused, “preferring,”
as he said, “to take the blame of a more than civil war for
the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were
drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too
horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen
and brothers, fathers and sons, arrayed against each other.
The clergy besought Henry to stay his hand; he listened,
pondered, and at length sent a final message to his brother.
He came, he said, not wishing to deprive Robert of his
duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer the
cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule
of one who was duke only in name. Here then was
his last proposition: “Give up to me half the land of
Normandy, the castles and the administration of justice
and government throughout the whole, and receive the
value of the other half annually from my treasury in
England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to
your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours
of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge,
if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert
declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves
ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have
been not unequally matched, but they differed greatly in
character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in
knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his
side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton
allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the
issue proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine
English troops there is no account, but the men of his
own day looked upon his whole host as English in contradistinction
to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted
in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of
England fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems
that the duke of Normandy followed his example.[40]
The first line of the Norman or ducal host under
William of Mortain charged the English front under Ralf
of Bayeux, and by the fury of their onset compelled them
to fall back, though without breaking their ranks. The
issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division of
Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count
Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank,
and cut down two hundred men in a single charge. Those
Cenomannian swords which William the Conqueror was so
proud to have overcome now carried the day for his youngest
son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters
were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army
at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine
Mercy gave into my hands, without much slaughter on our
side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain, William
Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four
hundred knights, ten thousand foot—and the duchy of
Normandy.”[42]
Forty years before, on the very same day, William the
Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English
kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas
Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the
victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of
England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most
clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man
of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently
the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct
was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat
hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged
merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of
the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy
and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal
ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the
real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the
archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death—“Peace be to
his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]—was neither sarcasm nor
flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his
life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are
enough to prove that without being a master of the art of
war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful
commander; and the complicated wars of his later years,
when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed
against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless
treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his
superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But
his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam
of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across
the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the
summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down
upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an
eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest
of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his
campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a
part of his general business as a king; they were means to
an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the
establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of
wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and
France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny
and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and
matured his own theory of government, which he practised
steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very
lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and
the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather
than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived
that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it
were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor.
The Red King had reigned wholly by terror;
Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a
merely selfish point of view, a sovereign gains nothing by
making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the
surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order,
justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests
of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get
rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from
motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness.
But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all
round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and
Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal
government was rendered possible only by the determined
struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and
their French allies. His home policy and his foreign
policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle
which he fought with his continental foes was really the
battle of England’s freedom.
From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought
wholly on the other side of the Channel. In England
Henry, as his English subjects joyfully told him, became
a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of
Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained,
hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early
struggles in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical
investitures, with which the rest of Europe had been
aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched England
at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding
lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any
spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored
in practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc.
Their position on this and all other matters of Church
policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s
demand of fealty: William would do what the English
kings who went before him had done, neither more nor
less.[46] But the king and the primate were not without
perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own
acts, the English Church had entered upon a new and more
complicated relation both to the state and to the Apostolic
see, and that the day must shortly come when she would be
dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of
European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found
expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy
which William laid down for the guidance of his successors
rather than himself:—that no Pope should be acknowledged
in England and no letter from him received there
by any one without the king’s consent;—that no Church
council should put forth decrees without his permission
and approval;—and that no baron or servant of the crown
should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s
own command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding
reigns under the name of “paternal customs,” were never
put to the test of practice as long as William and Lanfranc
lived. The Red King’s abuse of the two first, by precipitating
the crisis and driving S. Anselm to throw himself into
the arms of Rome, showed not so much their inadequacy
as the justice of the misgivings from which they had sprung.
Henry at his accession took his stand upon them in the
true spirit of their author; but the time was gone by;
Anselm too had taken his stand upon ground whence in
honour and conscience he could not recede, and the very
first interview between king and primate threw open the
whole question of the investitures. But in England and in
the Empire the question wore two very different aspects.
In England it never became a matter of active interest or
violent partisanship in the Church and the nation at large.
Only a few deep thinkers on either side—men such as
Count Robert of Meulan among the advisers of the king,
perhaps such as the devoted English secretary Eadmer
among the intimate associates of Anselm—ever understood
or considered the principles involved in the case, or its bearing
upon the general system of Church and state. Anselm
himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness
of lay investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience
to the decree of the Lateran Council; he strove not for the
privileges of his order, but for the duties of his conscience.
The bishops who refused investiture at Henry’s hands clearly
acted in the same spirit; what held them back was not so
much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own metropolitan.
The great mass of both clergy and laity cared
nothing at all how the investitures were given, and very
little for papal decrees; all they cared about was that they
should not be again deprived of their archbishop, and left, as
they had already been left too long, like sheep without a
shepherd. In their eyes the dispute was a personal one
between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to keep the
English Church in misery.
In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides,
the case compares no less favourably with its continental
parallel and with the later contest in England of which it
was the forerunner, and for which, in some respects, it unquestionably
furnished a model, though that model was very
ill followed. For two years the dispute made absolutely no
difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm
was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional
rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held
his councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral
church, and laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s
full concurrence; and the clergy, with the archbishop at
their head, were the life and soul of the party whose
loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the barons.
Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable,
he went over sea in full possession of his property,
as the king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till
Henry was provoked by a papal excommunication of all
the upholders of the obnoxious “paternal customs” except
himself, did he seize the temporalities of the archbishopric;
and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian retreat, continued
in active and unrestrained correspondence with his
chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not
only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself.
And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on
his knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication
threatened to put forth that very sentence against
William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry
himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his
most terrible weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining
peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that the time for a
settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives enabled
him to strike out a line of compromise which both
parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or
the principles for which they were contending. The English
king and primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet
decorous negotiation, without disturbing the peace or tarnishing
the honour of either Church or crown, the end to which
Pope and Emperor only came after half a century of tumult,
bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who “loved
righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile”
like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in
triumph on the chair of S. Augustine. The settlement
made little or no practical difference as far as its immediate
object was concerned. Henry ceased to confer the spiritual
insignia; but the elections, held as of old in the royal court,
were as much under his control as before. He yielded the
form and kept the substance; the definite concession of the
bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated
for the renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the
other side, too, had gained something more than a mere
form. It had won a great victory for freedom by bringing
Henry to admit that there were departments of national life
which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly despotism. It
had, moreover, gained a distinct practical acknowledgement
of the right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the supreme
court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia Regis
in secular matters. In a word, the settlement indicated
plainly that the system of William and Lanfranc was doomed
to break down before long. It broke down utterly when
Anselm and Henry were gone; the complications of legatine
intervention, avoided only by careful management in Henry’s
later years, led to the most important results in the next
reign; and when the slumbering feud of sceptre and
crozier broke out again, the difference between the cool
Norman temper and the fiery blood of Anjou, between
the saintly self-effacement of Anselm and the lofty self-assertion
of Thomas, was only one of the causes which
gave it such an increase of virulence as brought to nought
the endeavours of king and primate to tread in the steps
of those whom they professed to have taken for their
examples.
Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less
easy to trace, is the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal
government of England. Like his Church policy,
with which it was in strict accord, it was grounded upon
definite and consistent principles. At the outset of his
reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to
throw himself upon the support of his English subjects and
enabled him to find in them his surest source of strength.
Personally, his sympathies were not a whit more English or
less despotic than those of his predecessor; but, unlike
Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all its consequences
so far as he understood them, and throughout his
reign he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he
had taken at its beginning. That standpoint, as expressed
in his coronation-charter, was “the law of King Eadward
as amended by King William.” In other words, Henry
pledged himself to carry out his father’s system of compromise
and amalgamation, to take up and continue his father’s
work; and as soon as his hands were free he set himself to
fulfil the pledge. But the scheme whose first outlines had
been sketched by the Conqueror’s master-hand had to be
wrought out under conditions which had changed considerably
since his death and were changing yet farther every day.
The great ecclesiastical question was only the first and most
prominent among a crowd of social and political problems
whose shadows William had at the utmost only seen dimly
looming in the future, but which confronted Henry as present
facts that he must grapple with as best he could. At their
theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no attempt;
the time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such
work. He was neither a great legislator nor an original
political thinker, but a clear-headed, sagacious, practical man
of business. Such a man was precisely the ruler needed at
the moment. His reign is not one of the marked eras of
English history; compared with the age which had gone
before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I.
looks almost like a “day of small things.” That very
phrase, which seems so aptly to describe its outward aspect,
warns us not to despise or pass it over lightly. It is just
one of those periods of transition without which the marked
eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare the
way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his
father.
The work was no longer where his father had left it.
When the secular side of the Norman government in England,
somewhat obscured for a while by the ecclesiastical
conflict, comes into distinct view again after the settlement
of 1107, one is almost startled at the amount of developement
which has taken place in the twenty years since the
Conqueror’s death—a developement whose steps lie hidden
beneath the shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of
Henry’s early struggles. The power of the crown had outgrown
even the nominal restraints preserved from the older
system: the king’s authority was almost unlimited, even in
theory; the Great Council, the successor and representative
of the Witenagemot, had lost all share in the real work of
legislation and government; of the old formula—“counsel
and consent”—the first half had become an empty phrase
and the second a mere matter of course. The assembly
was a court rather than a council, the qualification of its
members, whether earls, barons, or knights, being all alike
dependent on their position as tenants-in-chief of the crown;
the bishops alone kept their unaltered dignity as lineal
successors of the older spiritual Witan; but even the bishops
had been compelled by the compromise of 1107 to hold
their temporalities on the baronial tenure of homage and
fealty to the king, a step which involved the strict application
of the same rule to the lay members of the assembly.
Moreover, the Witenagemot was being gradually supplanted
in all its more important functions by an inner circle of
counsellors, forming a permanent ministerial body which
gathered into its own hands the entire management of the
financial and judicial administration of the state. In one
aspect it was the “Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the
supreme court of judicature which appropriated alike the
judicial powers of the Witenagemot, of the old court of the
king’s thegns or theningmanna-gemot, and of the feudal
court of the Norman tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it
was the Exchequer, the court which received the royal
revenues from the sheriffs of the counties, arranged and
reviewed the taxation, transacted the whole fiscal business
of the crown, and in short had the supreme control and
management of the “ways and means” of the realm. The
judicial, military and social organization under the Norman
kings rests so completely on a fiscal basis that the working
of the Exchequer furnishes the principal means of studying
that of the whole system; while the connexion between the
functions of the Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis
is so close that it is often difficult to draw a line accurately
between them, and all the more so, that they were made up
of nearly the same constituent elements. These were the
great officers of the royal household:—the justiciar, the
treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal, and
their subordinates:—titles of various origin, some, as for
example the chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin,
while others seem to have existed almost from time immemorial;—but
all titles whose holders, from being mere personal
attendants upon the sovereign, had now become important
officials of the state. Like a crowd of other matters
which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the system
seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the
reign of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf
Flambard. At its head stood the justiciar;—second in
authority to the king in his presence, his representative and
vicegerent in his absence, officially as well as actually his
chief minister and the unquestioned executor of his will.
This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as far
back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius”
under his brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from
that which Æthelred II. had instituted under the title of
high-thegn or high-reeve, and which grew into a permanent
vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine and Harold
under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under
William Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who
from the position of an obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s
household had made his way by the intriguing, pushing,
unscrupulous temper which had earned him his nickname of
the “Firebrand,” was an upstart whom the barons of the
Conquest may well have despised as much as the native
English feared and hated him. After an interval during
which his office was held by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln—a
former chancellor of the Red King—it passed to a man
who from beginnings almost as lowly as those of Ralf rose to
yet loftier and, it is but fair to add, purer fame. Henry in
his wandering youth, as he rode out from Caen one morning
with a few young companions, stopped to hear mass at a
little wayside chapel. The poor priest who served it, guessing
by their looks the temper of his unexpected congregation,
rattled through the office with a speed which delighted
them; they all pronounced him just the man for a soldier’s
chaplain; Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that
he had picked up a treasure. Roger became his steward,
and discharged his functions with such care, fidelity and
good management as earned him the entire confidence of
his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s accession he was appointed
chancellor, a post whose duties involved, besides the official
custody of the royal seal, the superintendence of the clerks
of the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged with
the keeping of the royal accounts, the conducting of the
royal correspondence, the drawing up of writs and other
legal documents and records, and who were now formed into
a trained and organized body serving as secretaries for all
departments of state business. From 1101 to 1106 this
office seems to have been held successively by Roger,
William Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it
in 1106 on Waldric’s elevation to the bishopric of Laon,
but if so he resigned it again next year, to become bishop
of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]
Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The
impossibility of governing England securely by means of
feudal machinery, even with all the checks and safeguards
which could be drawn from the old English administrative
system, had by this time become self-evident. The conduct
of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity
and given him the justification for superseding them in
all the more important functions of government, by carrying
out, with a free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II.
had originated under less favourable circumstances—the
organization of a distinct ministerial body, directly
dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as
well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his
direction there grew up a trained body of administrators,
most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near
relatives, and almost all upstarts—novi homines, “new men”
in the phrase of the time—compared with the nobles whose
fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming a sort
of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility and
from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious
to both, but very much better fitted than any instruments
which either could have furnished for managing the
business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and
above the obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the
instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there was,
however, another cause for the jealousy with which they
were generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing,
more especially in his later years, a preference for foreigners
which was equally galling to all his native subjects, whatever
their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans
over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth
over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had
in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest.
The sons and grandsons of the men who had come
over with Duke William never lost one spark of their Norman
pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no
longer their home; most of them were born in England,
some had English wives, and even English mothers; to
nearly all, the chief territorial, political and personal interests
of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars
between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to
sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom,
and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically,
with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the
wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself
in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman”
and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and
his allies, and the supporters of the king of England
are all counted together indiscriminately as English.
Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory.
From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its
conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign
dependency of the English crown. Historians on both
sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry
and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously
shadow forth the truth that the reunion of
England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf
between them. The greatest French statesman of the day,
Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two
nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the
efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the
duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not
to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One
of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman
from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of
Montgomery and married an English wife—though he spent
his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman
monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his
mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the
most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to
send forth his history to the world under the name of
Orderic the Englishman. This last was no doubt a somewhat
extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races
had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s
whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal
administration, by the nature and circumstances of his
relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and
Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a
common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”—men
born beyond sea—over the heads of both alike. Slight as
were the bonds between them at present, they were the first
links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the
king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his
daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou,
did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the
two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who
were equally aliens from both.
Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of
the Exchequer. Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer
met under his presidency around the chequered
table whence they derived their name, and settled accounts
with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs were
answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from
their respective shires, the settlement amounted to a
thorough review of the financial condition of the realm.
The profits of the demesne lands and of the judicial proceedings
in the shire-court, now commuted at a fixed sum
under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as
it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a
definite rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of
the towns seem to have corresponded to the Danegeld in
the rural districts; the feudal sources of income, reliefs,
wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits arising out
of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of his
predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning
refused to redress; all these and many other items found
their places in the exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s
court of Exchequer. Hand in hand with its financial work
went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a court in
theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief,
but in practice limited to the great officers of the household
and others specially appointed by the king, and acting
under him, or under the chief justiciar as his representative,
as a supreme tribunal of appeal, and also of first resort in
suits between tenants-in-chief and in a variety of other
cases called up by special writ for its immediate cognisance.
It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower
courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still
based upon the Domesday survey; but transfers of land,
changes in cultivation, the reclaiming of wastes on the one
hand and the creation of new forests on the other, necessarily
raised questions which called for an occasional revision
and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending
the judges of the King’s Court—who were only the barons
of the Exchequer in another capacity—on judicial circuits
throughout the country, to hold the pleas of the crown and
settle disputed points of assessment and tenure in the
several shires. As the justices thus employed held their
sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature
were thus brought into immediate connexion with each
other, and the first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging
over the gap which severed the lower from the higher
organization.
By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative
routine Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding
together all branches of public business and all classes
of society in intimate connexion with and entire dependence
on the crown, through the medium of the Curia Regis and
the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full
length in the Dialogue in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew
expounded the constitution and functions of the
fully developed Court of Exchequer; its working in Roger’s
own day is vividly illustrated in the one surviving record
which has come down to us from that time, the earliest
extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in
which the annual statement of accounts was embodied by
the treasurer. The value of this solitary roll of Henry I.—that
of the year 1130—lies less in the dry bones of the
actual financial statement than in the mass of personal
detail with which they are clothed, and through which we
get such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social
condition of the time. The first impression likely to be
produced by the document is that under Henry I. and
Roger of Salisbury—“the Lion of Justice” and “the Sword
of Righteousness”—every possible contingency of human
life was somehow turned into a matter of money for the
benefit of the royal treasury. It must, however, be remembered
that except the Danegeld, there was no direct
taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up a budget
at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents;
and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments
of unlimited extortion, but were calculated according
to a regular and fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent
modification under special circumstances. Still the items
look strange enough. We see men paying to get into office
and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the right to
enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying
that they may administer the estates of minors; suitors
paying for leave to marry heiresses or dowered widows;
heiresses and widows paying for freedom to wed the man of
their own choice. The remittances are not always in
money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or
destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there
are some amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52]
There is an endless string of land-owners, great and small,
paying for all sorts of privileges connected with their
property; some for leave to make an exchange of land
with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already
made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit
with a rival claimant of their estates, some on the contrary
to delay or avoid answering such a claim, and some
for having themselves put forth claims which they were
unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the loser
for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both
ways. Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering
their debts from his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens
of Gloucester promise thirty marks of silver if the king’s
justice can get back for them a sum of money “which was
taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted entry
brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most
interesting of all; those which relate to the growing
liberties of the towns.
The English towns differed completely in their origin
and history from those of the states which had arisen out of
the ruins of the Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy
and Gaul were daughters of Rome; they were the abiding
depositaries of her social, municipal and political traditions;
as such, they had a vitality and a character which, like their
great mistress and model, they were able to preserve through
all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal reorganization.
The English towns had no such imperial past; in
their origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable
from the general crowd of little rural settlements
throughout the country. Here and there, for one
reason or another, some particular spot attracted an unusually
large concourse of inhabitants; but whether sheltered within
the walls of a Roman military encampment like Winchester
and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial
hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round
some fortress raised for defence against the Welsh or the
Danes like Taunton or Warwick, or round some venerated
shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury or Oxford, still the
settlement differed in nothing but its size from the most
insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which sent its
reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the
shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually
large township, generally provided with a dyke and palisade,
or sometimes even a wall, instead of the ordinary quickset
hedge; or it was a cluster of townships which had somehow
coalesced, but without in any way forming an organic whole.
Each unit of the group had its own parish church and
parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes,
its own assembly for transacting its own internal
affairs; while the general borough-moot, in a town of this
kind, answered roughly to the hundred-court of the rural
districts, and the character of the borough-constitution itself
resembled that of the hundred rather than that of the single
township. The earlier and greater towns must have been
originally free; a few still retain in their common lands a
vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which
grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great
and wealthy monastery, were dependent from the first upon
the lord of the soil on which they stood; their inhabitants
owed suit and service to the earl, the bishop, or the abbot,
whichever he might chance to be, and their reeve was
appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became a
recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and
that all folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a
natural inference that all towns which had no other lord
were counted as royal demesnes, and their chief magistrate
was an officer of the crown. In the great cities he usually
bore the title of port-reeve, a word whose first syllable, though
here used to represent the town in general, refers in strict
etymology to the porta, or place where the market was held,
and thus at once points to the element in the life of the
towns which gave them their chief consequence and their
most distinctive character. The Norman conquest had led
to a great increase of their trading importance; a sense of
corporate life and unity grew up within them; their political
position became more clearly defined; they began to recognize
themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands
of the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state.
The distinction was definitely marked by the severance of
their financial interests from those of the shires in which they
stood; a fixed “aid,” varying according to their size and
wealth, was substituted in their case for the theoretically
even, but practically very unfair pressure of the Danegeld;
and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the sheriff,
their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a
fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for
as a separate item, under the name of firma burgi, either by
the sheriff or, in some cases where the privilege had been
specially conferred, by the towns themselves. At the same
time the voluntary institution of the gilds, which had long
acted as a supplement to the loose territorial and legal constitution
of the boroughs, forced its way into greater prominence;
the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer
as mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies
endowed with authority over all matters connected with
trade in the great mercantile cities; the recognition of their
legal status—generally expressed by the confirmation of the
right to possess a “gild-hall” (or, as it was called in the
north, a “hans-house”)—became a main point in the struggles
of the towns for privileges and charters. The handicraftsmen,
fired with the same spirit of association, banded themselves
together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon
and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford,
bought of the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the
customs of their respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed,
as well as they could, the example of the great cities; they
too won from their lords a formal assurance of their privileges;
Archbishop Thurstan’s charter to Beverley was
expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to
York.[56]
Plan I.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
We may glance at some of the towns of southern
England in company with some travellers from Gaul who
visited them in the later years of Henry’s reign. The
cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down and its
bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric
had once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports
which he and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and
prosperity of the island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating
northern Gaul to collect donations for the
restoration of their church, to venture beyond sea for the
same object. They set sail from Wissant—seemingly in an
English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name
of Coldistan—in company with some Flemish merchants
who were going to buy wool in England, and they landed at
Dover after a narrow escape from some pirates who chased
their vessel in the hope of seizing the money which it was
known to contain.[59] They naturally made their way to
Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop
and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy
and powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently
proceeded to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon
capital had lost its ancient rank; London, which had long
surpassed it in commercial and political importance, had
now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of kings.
But its connexion with the crown was far from being
broken. Its proximity to the New Forest made it a
favourite residence of the Conqueror and his sons; William
himself had built not only a castle on the high ground at
the western end of the city, just below the west gate of the
Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern
quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was
here that he usually held his Easter court, and his successors
continued the practice. One very important department of
the royal administration, moreover, was still permanently
centred at Winchester—the Treasury, which under its
English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there by
Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been
finally transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of
Henry II.[62] Of the two great religious foundations, one, the
“Old Minster,” or cathedral church of S. Swithun, the
crowning-place and burial-place of our native kings, assumed
under the hands of its first Norman bishop the aspect which,
outwardly at least, it still retains. The other, the “New
Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old
one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot
and some of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to
punish the brotherhood, he planted his palace close against
the west front of their church; and they found their position
so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s leave, they
migrated outside the northern boundary of Winchester to a
new abode which grew into a wealthy and flourishing house
under the name of Hyde Abbey, leaving their old home to
fall into decay and to be represented in modern days by a
quiet graveyard.[63] As a trading centre Winchester ranked
in Henry’s day, and long after, second to London alone; the
yearly fair which within living memory was held on S.
Giles’s day upon the great hill to the east of the city[64] preserved
a faint reminiscence of the vast crowds of buyers and
sellers who flocked thither from all parts of the country
throughout the middle ages.
At the opposite end of the New Forest the little town
of Twinham, or Christchurch as it was beginning to be
called from its great ecclesiastical establishment, whose
church had been rebuilt on a grand scale by Ralf Flambard,
had, on the octave of Pentecost, a fair which the travellers
took care to attend, much to the disgust of the dean, who
was anxious to secure all the offerings of the assembled
crowd for the improvement of his own church, and had no
mind to share them with our Lady of Laon.[65] They met
with a warmer welcome at Exeter at the hands of its archdeacon
and future bishop Robert.[66] In the next reign
Exeter was counted as the fourth city in the kingdom.[67]
Natural wealth of its own it had none; the bare rocky soil
of the south coast of Devon produced nothing but a few
oats, and those of the poorest quality;[68] but the mouth of
the Exe furnished a safe and convenient anchorage for small
merchant vessels either from Gaul or from Ireland, and
though Bristol was fast drawing away this latter branch of
her trade, Exeter could still boast of “such an abundance
of merchandise that nothing required for the use of man
could ever be asked for there in vain.”[69] It was far otherwise
with Salisbury, to which the travellers were probably
drawn chiefly by the fame of its bishop;[70] the Salisbury of
those days was not the city in the plain which now spreads
itself around the most perfect of English Gothic minsters,
but the city whose traces, in a very dry summer, may still
now and then be seen in the fields which cover the hill of
Old Sarum. Crowded as it was into that narrow circle—narrow,
and without possibility of enlargement—Bishop
Roger’s Salisbury was an excellent post for military security,
but it had no chance of attaining industrial or commercial
importance, although he did not disdain to accept the grant
of its market tolls, which till 1130 formed part of the ferm
of Wilton.[71] Wilton was apparently still the chief town of
the shire to which it had originally given its name; like
Christchurch it had its fair, but, like Christchurch too, its
importance was mainly derived from its abbey, where the
memory of S. Eadgyth or Edith, a daughter of Eadgar, was
venerated by English and Normans alike, by none more
than the queen who shared Eadgyth’s royal blood and had
once borne her name.[72] The visitors from Laon, however,
seem to have been more impressed by another name which
one is somewhat startled to meet in this southern region—that
of Bæda, whose tomb was shown them in the abbey
church of Wilton, and was believed to be the scene of
miraculous cures.[73] They retraced their steps into Devonshire,
where they found the legends of Arthur as rife among
the people as they were among the Bretons of Gaul; they
were shown the chair and oven of the “blameless king,” and
a tumult nearly arose at Bodmin out of a dispute between
one of their party and a man who persisted in asserting
that Arthur was still alive.[74] After visiting Barnstaple and
Totnes[75] they turned northward towards the greatest seaport
of the west, and indeed, with one exception, of all England:
Bristol.
Plan II.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the
Bristol of to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the
enormous growth of the town, but from the changes which
have taken place in the physical conformation of its site.
Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula formed by the
junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of
both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the
earlier aspect of the place is very hard to realize. The
original Bristol stood wholly upon the high ground which
now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a small tongue
of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the
north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round
it almost in the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon
on the southern side of the town, just below the present
Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the Norman conquest, it seems, the
lower course of the Frome had already been diverted from
its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug till the
middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of
marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and
flooded every day by the tide which came rushing up the
estuary of Severn almost to the walls of the town, and made
it seem like an island in the sea.[78] Within its comparatively
narrow limits Bristol must have been in general character
and aspect not unlike what it is to-day—a busy, bustling,
closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of
commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin,
Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant
Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt
to avoid the shock of the “Higra,” the mighty current which
still kept its heathen name derived from the sea-god of their
forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into the safe
and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships
could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the
west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81]
surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London.
The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no
credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan
and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed
to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for
the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in
full career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the
experiences of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on
board some of the vessels in the harbour to buy some clothes,
and to inspect the strange wares brought from lands which
can have had little or no intercourse with the inland cities
of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by
their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they
would most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and
themselves sold into bondage in a foreign land.[82]
No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their
reception there by the bishop[83]—whom the healing virtues
of its waters had induced first to remove his bishopstool
thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and then to buy the
whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred
pounds[84]—their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they
penetrated no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they
turned back from the gates of a region which was then
reckoned the fairest and wealthiest in England. The vale
of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly paradise, where
the soil brought forth of its own accord the most abundant
and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another the
trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of
the traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;—above
all, where the fruit of the vine, which in other parts of
England was mostly sour, yielded a juice scarcely inferior to
the wines of Gaul. Another source of wealth was supplied
by the fisheries of the great river, the fertilizer as well as the
highway of this favoured district. Religion and industry,
abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85]
Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political
rank it had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower
down the river, Gloucester was more accessible for trade,
while its special importance as the key of the South-Welsh
border had made it one of the recognized places for assemblies
of the court from the time of the Danish kings. The
chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford,
had once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but
despite its castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of
no great size,” whose broken-down ramparts told the story
of a greatness which had passed away.[86]
Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary
of the Severn was to the southern part of western England,
that of the Dee was to its northern part; Chester was at
once the Bristol and the Gloucester of the north-west coast—the
centre of its trade and its bulwark against the Welsh.
Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial life.
Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland
and forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern
half had not yet recovered from the harrying with which the
Conqueror had avenged its revolt in 1068. For more than
sixty miles around York the ground still lay perfectly bare.
“Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven—tracts that
were once well watered, smiling meadows—if a stranger sees
them now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them,
he would not recognize his home.” The one thing which
had survived this ruin was, as ever, the work of the Roman.[87]
York still kept its unbroken life, its ecclesiastical primacy, its
commercial greatness; the privileges of its merchants were
secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild
with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the
making of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business;
and they were freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89]
Far to the north-west, on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after
more than two centuries of ruin, had been restored and
repeopled by William Rufus. The city had been destroyed
by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly desolate
till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who
occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and
reunited it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some
material relics of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman
walls were still there, to be used up again in the new fortifications
with which the Red King encircled his conquest; and
some years later the triclinium of one of its Roman houses called
forth the admiring wonder of a southern visitor, William of
Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding country
lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a
colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in
the land and till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life.
Yet before the end of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so
vigorous that the archbishop of York found himself unable
to make adequate provision for its spiritual needs, and was
glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and its district
into a separate diocese.
The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military
character, as an outpost of defence against the Scots. On
the opposite coast we see springing up, around a fortress
originally built for the same purpose, the beginning of an
industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The “customs”
of the town contain provisions for the regulation of
both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in
at the mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they
will; if a dispute arise between one of them and a foreign
merchant, it must be settled before the tide has ebbed thrice;
the foreign trader may carry his wares ashore for sale, except
salt and herrings, which must be sold on board the ship.
No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides, or any
other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except
from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make,
or cut cloth for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of
Beverley, on the marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown
up a town of sufficient consequence to win from the lord of
the soil, Archbishop Thurstan of York, a charter whose privileges
were copied from those of the metropolitan city itself.
As a whole, however, the north was still a wild region,
speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury complained,
“we southrons could make nothing,” and living a
life so unconnected with that of southern England that even
King Henry still thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary
body-guard with a troop of auxiliaries whenever he crossed
the Humber.[94]
This isolation was in great part due to physical causes.
What is now the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast
tract of moor and woodland, stretching from Wakefield to
the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills to the sources of
the Don; while further east, the district between the lower
course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide
morass. Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder,
though not to bar, the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England.
The only safe line of communication was the
Foss Way, which struck across the central plain and along
the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence
turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round
between forest and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the
chief station on the highway between York and the south.
Under the Norman rule the city had risen to a new importance.
Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed;
the south-western was now covered by a castle, and
the south-eastern by a cathedral church. Neither building
was the first of its kind which had occupied the spot. Few
sites in England could have been more attractive to a
soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone ridge descending
abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin,
watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping
gradually down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far
as the bank of the Trent. The hundred and sixty-six
houses which the Conqueror swept away to make room for
his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier fortification,
a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual old
English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls
of stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church,
on the other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well
seem to cry out for a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary
was already in existence[97] on the site where Bishop Remigius
of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly home in the valley of the
Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the foundations of that
great minster of our Lady whose noble group of towers now
rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the country
round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation of
the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste.
Of the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the
Thames to the Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison
the most important town. Even in Roman times the
original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum Colonia had been
found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread down to
the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace
which lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William,
the needs of an increasing population, as we have seen,
covered the site of the older fortress with dwellings: when
these were cleared away at William’s bidding, their exiled
inhabitants found a new home on a plot of hitherto waste
ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled by
the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the
city on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S.
Mary-le-Wigford and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years
later Lincoln was counted one of the most populous and
flourishing cities in England.[100] The roads which met on the
crest of its hill to branch off again in all directions formed
only one of the ways by which trade poured into its market.
Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide
strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the
day quite up to the bridge: it was connected with the
Trent at Torksey by a canal, probably of Roman origin,
known as the Foss Dyke; this after centuries of neglect
was cleared out and again made navigable by order of
Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still
more extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the
Humber. The “men of the city and the merchants of the
shire” were already banded together in a merchant-gild;[102]
and it is doubtless this gild which is represented by the
“citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred
marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of
holding their city in chief of the king.[103]
Plan III.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to
Lincoln was in accordance with a new practice, which had
come in since the Norman conquest, of placing the episcopal
see in the chief town of the diocese. The same motive had
prompted a translation of the old Mercian bishopric from
Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the woodland,
with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of
cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed
again to the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason,
too, caused Norwich to succeed Thetford as the seat of the
bishopric of East-Anglia. It was but very recently that
Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief city of eastern
England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway
navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls
into it, was no less conveniently placed than that of the
Witham for intercourse with northern Europe; and the
Scandinavian traders and settlers in the first half of the
eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch of
prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained
twenty-four churches, and its burghers seem to have been
more numerous than those of any town in the realm
except London and York.[106] Twenty years later their number
was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of Earl
Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its
native population had decreased, a colony of Norman
burghers was growing up and flourishing in a “new borough,”
now represented by the parishes of S. Peter Mancroft and
S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels had risen to
forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the foundations
of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga,
whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once
in the next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the
scene of the Midwinter Council; King Henry kept Christmas
there in 1121.[109] It may have been on this occasion that the
citizens won from him their first charter; but the charter
itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its existence
from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of
Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which
they had in the time of my grandfather.”[110]
Plan IV.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that
English town-life was growing up most vigorously. Tried
by the test of statistics, indeed, Oxford was still but a small
place; in the time of the Confessor it had only contained
about a thousand dwellings, and before the Domesday survey
was made the town had, through some unexplained cause,
suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111]
But the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise
government of Robert of Oilly, to whom the chief command
at Oxford was entrusted by the Conqueror, and of his
nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office. Before
the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously
varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an
epitome of the history of all England was already in existence,
though only in germ. The military capabilities of
the site, recognized long ago by Eadward the Elder, had
been carefully strengthened; within the natural protection
of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about with
rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by
Eadward himself, at its western end had been made the
nucleus of a mighty fortress which was soon to become famous
in the struggle of Stephen and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification
the sole care of the D’Oillys; within and without the
city, works of piety and of public utility sprang up under
their direction. The ancient ford which had given the
town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the
network of streams which fenced it in on every side save
one; the High Bridge of our own day represents one built
by the first Robert of Oilly.[114] Of the sixteen churches and
chapels which Oxford now contained,[115] S. George’s-in-the-Castle
was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East probably
founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches which
had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and
those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that
of S. Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded
in his time or in that of his nephew, if not actually by their
munificence.[118] One of these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to
become famous in after-days as the University church. As
yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford was the ancient
monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after many
vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin
canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under
its learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church
which now stands hidden away beneath the later splendours
of Christ Church, like a buried and yet living relic of an
earlier and simpler age. Even S. Frideswide’s, however,
had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney which the
younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in
the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The
Augustinians were a new order whose rise was closely associated
with the revival of intellectual and social culture;
their houses were the best schools of the time—schools in
which the scholars were trained for secular no less than for
clerical careers—and their presence at Oseney and S. Frideswide’s
was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford
to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the
first English University in the divinity lectures of Robert
Pulein.[121] The burgher-life of the city had long gathered
round the church of S. Martin; in its churchyard was held
the portmannimot or general assembly of the citizens; they
had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122] they had their
common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow”
beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry
in the appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds.
Shortly before Henry’s death, there were indications that
Oxford was soon to regain the political position which it
had held under the old English and Danish kings, but had
entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy of awe had
been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story
went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal
lover, sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of
further escape, called upon Heaven itself to check him; as
he entered the town he was struck blind, and though her
prayers afterwards restored his sight, no king after him
dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for fear of
incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed
that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut
met outside the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance
was given to the legend by the circumstances of
Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that time forth we hear
of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133—the very year
of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I.,
whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had
been so drawn to the neighbouring town as to build himself
a “new hall” there,[125] just outside the northern wall, on the
ground afterwards known as Beaumont-fields. He held but
one festival there, the last Easter which he ever spent in
England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for the
throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become
a political as well as a military centre of scarcely less
importance than London itself.
Plan V.
Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.
London, Macmillan & Co.
Our great picture of medieval London belongs in all its
completeness to a somewhat later date; it was painted in
the closing years of the twelfth century. But, as in the case
of so many other things which only come out into full light
under Henry II., although the colouring and the details may
belong more especially to his time, the main features were
already there in the time of his grandfather. The outline
of the city was a sort of irregular half-ellipse, fenced in upon
the northern or land side by a girdle of massive walls
pierced with gates and fortified with lofty towers; the wall
on the south side, being built close upon the river bank, was
gradually washed away by the ebb and flow of the tide constantly
beating upon its foundations. On this side the
river itself was an all-sufficient protection. The eastern
extremity of the city, where the wall came down towards
the water’s edge, was guarded by a mighty fortress, founded
by King William in the earliest days of his conquest to hold
his newly-won capital in check, and always known by the
emphatic name of “the Tower.” The western end was
protected by two lesser fortresses,[126]—Castle Baynard and
Montfichet, whose sokes filled up the space between the
cathedral precincts and the city wall. Another, which must
have stood in the same neighbourhood, seems to have been
partly destroyed by the fire which ravaged London a few
months before the Conqueror’s death, and in which the
cathedral of S. Paul entirely perished.[127] Part of the ditch of
this fortress was surrendered by King Henry to make room
for a wall with which Bishop Richard was now enclosing
his precincts;[128] while within this enclosure a new church,
gorgeous with all the latest developements of Norman architectural
skill, was now fast approaching completion.[129] S.
Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the nucleus, of
municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot
assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the
summons of its great bell; in time of war the armed
burghers gathered at its west door and beneath its banner,
with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their standard-bearer.[130]
The internal constitution of London, however, was scarcely
a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome
of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of
the parish and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions
of the great individual landowners, of the churches,
of the gilds—all these were loosely bundled together under
the general headship of the bishop and the port-reeve, to
whom King William addressed his one surviving English
writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff
of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the
citizens “all the law whereof they had been worthy in King
Eadward’s day”;[131] but by the end of Henry I.’s reign the
Londoners had got far beyond this. By virtue of a royal
charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed port-reeve
for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served
at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which
was granted in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other
shires were granted year by year to their respective sheriffs;
they were exempted from all tolls and mercantile dues
throughout the realm, and from suit and service to all courts
outside their own walls, even the pleas of the crown being
intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet
there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed
all the old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the
various “sokens” and “customs” of churches, barons and
burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies of the different
parishes or townships, as well as the husting or folkmoot in
which all were gathered together,[132]—and left London as it
found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as
it has been truly called, simply “a shire covered with
houses.”
This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S.
Paul’s, where a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and
parochial, rose out of a network of close-packed streets and
alleys thronged with busy craftsmen and noisy, chaffering
traders. Through the heart of it flowed the “Wall-brook,” on
whose bank there lingered, long after the stream itself was
buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with
merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to
a landing-place at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond
the Walbrook lay the East-Cheap, almost busier and more
crowded still; while to the north, along the upper course of
the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish quarter.[134] Population
was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of the wealthier
citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded with
bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up
the river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered
round the famous abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the
last Old-English king, and the palace of William Rufus, a
splendid edifice with a breast-work and bastion stretching
down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of the city, just outside
the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where a great
horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse
of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running
streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138]
and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland
stretching away across the northern part of Middlesex
to the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Here the stag and the
fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull, had their coverts,
beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which the citizens
were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their pleasure.[139]
Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the
greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young
burghers were content, in the summer evenings when their
day’s work was done, with a saunter among the shady
gardens and fresh springs which enlivened the northern
suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a tract of
low-lying moor or marsh—the Moorfields of later times—on
whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s
content the exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140]
Business, pleasure, piety, intellectual culture, all had their
places in the vigorous life of the great city. Each of the
two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S. Peter’s, had a school
attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady at Bermondsey,
just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not
absorb all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected
and noted above all other citizens for their manners, dress,
table and discourse.”[142] “Moreover, almost all the bishops,
abbots and great men of England are, in a manner, citizens
and freemen of London; as they have magnificent houses
there, to which they resort, spending large sums of money,
whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies
by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to
go there by their own business.”[143] And between these visitors
and the resident citizens there was no hard and fast line of
demarcation. Neither the knight-errant’s blind contempt
for practical industry nor the still blinder contempt of the
merely practical man for everything which has not its value
in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the
old English system the merchant who had made three
long voyages over sea on his own account was entitled to
rank as a thegn, and to take his place among the nobles
of the land. Under the Norman system a link between
the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman
origin, to whom London in no small measure owed
the marked importance which it attained under Henry I.
The Norman knights had no monopoly of the enterprizing
spirit of their race; the victorious host had
scarcely settled down upon the conquered soil when it was
followed by a second invasion of a very different character.
Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to
seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired
dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people,
but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The
fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town
population chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years
of the conquest. The process was very likely more helped
than hindered by the grinding tyranny which united all the
Red King’s victims in a community of suffering; but its
great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His restoration
of law and order, his administrative and judicial
reforms, gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and
commercial energy. England under him had her heavy
burthens and her cruel grievances; they stand out plainly
enough in the complaints of her native chronicler. But to
men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French
kingdom or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman
duchy under the nominal government of Robert Curthose,
a country where “no man durst misdo with other,” and where
the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144] may well
have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder
that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and
get an honest living came across the sea to find shelter and
security in the rich and prosperous island. For settlers of
this kind it was easy enough to make a home. No gulf of
hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense of wrong suffered
and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their
English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s
reign had closed, English and Normans were living contentedly
side by side in all the chief cities of England:
sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of Norwich, the
new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their own,
but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse
was perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement,
Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress,
made their way rapidly among the English burghers; and
intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the great cities,
where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or strange,
and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s
languages had been worn away by years of commercial
intercourse, the fusion was naturally more easy; in London,
whither the “men of Rouen” had come in their “great ships,”
with their cargoes of wine or sturgeons,[146] long before their
countrymen came with bow and spear and sword, it was
easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which the
Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors
attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital
of their own sovereign; and the attraction grew still stronger
during the unquiet times in Normandy which followed the
Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the chief Norman
cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them
out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their
trade, and better stored with the goods in which they were
wont to deal.”[147]
That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant
in the city there can be little doubt; but they seem to
have won their predominance by fair means and to have
used it fairly. If they, as individuals, prospered in the
English capital, they contributed their full share to its corporate
prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at
large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth;
they brought enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social
as well as political progress. In their pleasant, cheerful,
well-ordered dwellings many a noble knight or baron
may have been glad to accept a hospitality such as
his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could
never afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic
may have enjoyed a refinement of society such as he
could rarely hope to meet among the rough and
reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born
laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general
statements; we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves;
we can go with them to visit the home of a typical
London citizen of the early twelfth century. In the heart
of the busiest trading quarter, on the spot where Mercer’s
Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of S. Mary
Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more
famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and
Rohesia his wife. When their son, grown to manhood and
high in office, was asked of his origin and extraction, he
answered simply that his parents were citizens of London,
dwelling blameless and respected among their fellow-burghers.[148]
Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers led
them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never
have known that his father and mother were foreigners—Gilbert,
born at Rouen, of a respectable burgher family;
Rohesia, sprung from the same rank of life at Caen.[149]
Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve of London,[150] and bore a
high character for intelligence, industry and upright dealing.
Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her
domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her
motherly love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely
blended together in her habit of weighing her little
son at stated intervals against money, clothes and food
which she gave to the poor, trusting thereby to bring a
blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old enough, he
was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where his
father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior;
and when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to
spend them in riding and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle,
a young knight sprung from one of the noblest families of
Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate friend of the
little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the simple,
matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that
it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households
around it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a
degree as to excite special notice or envy; he and his wife
lived in comfort and affluence, but only such as befitted their
station; they seem to have been in no way distinguished from
the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class citizens of
their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the circumstance
to which we owe our knowledge of its character
and its history:—that in it had been born a child who was
to begin his career as Thomas of London the burgher’s son,
and to end it as Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop, saint
and martyr.
The Norman settlers were not the only new element in
the population of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land
of Normandy, France and the Empire, the immediate
neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally of the English
kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies of
England. The relation between the two countries was
primarily a political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech
and kindred temper drew Fleming and Englishman together
in the bonds of a natural sympathy which grew with the
growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges were
even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen
and Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important
part of the trade of eastern England. Not only was
the estuary of the Scheld a high-way of communication with
the more distant regions of central Europe, but Flanders
herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry for
which the raw material was in great part furnished by England.
The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the
great yearly fairs of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly
from the wool of English sheep. Dover was the chief mart
for this export; in the itinerary of the canons of Laon
we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over
the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales,
which were deposited in a warehouse built for that special
purpose till they could be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the
Flemings had almost a monopoly of this weaving trade,
although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at Huntingdon,
Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen
were already beginning to emulate their example; it may,
on the other hand, point to a Flemish element in the
population of these towns. In the time of William the
Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen
had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in
the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous
and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans
and English. It may have been partly to allay this
jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony
to their character as active and trustworthy members of the
state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of
holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was
the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm,
planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of
South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The
experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all
direct communication with England, there must have seemed
little chance that these colonists could hold their own
against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is
matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire
remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little
England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the
Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather
than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and
industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion
between England and the Low Countries, which in later
days was to exercise an important influence on the life of
both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater
settlements—one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth—which
were to work a revolution in English industry.
A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different
position from both the Fleming and the Norman.
These were the Jews. Their first appearance in England
is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who brought
over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were
special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they
play a less conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find
them at Lincoln, Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be
no doubt that they were already established in most of the
chief English towns. They formed, however, no part of the
townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he
was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or
for evil, save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll
and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means of
accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be
seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but
which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care against
all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew
usually appears is that of a money-lender—an occupation in
which the scruples of the Church forbade Christians to engage,
lest they should be contaminated with the sin of usury.
Fettered by no such scruples, the Hebrew money-lenders
drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless contributed
to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means
for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would
have been possible without such aid. But, except in this
indirect way, their presence contributed nothing to the
political developement of the towns; and in their social
developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter exempt from the
jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as from
that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from
the Christian community around it, had no part at all.
Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the
general manner of life was much the same in all ranks of
society. The domestic arrangements of the castle or manor-house
differed little from those of the citizen’s dwelling. In
both the accommodation usually consisted merely of a hall,
a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure of
cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall
was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for
the whole household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with
hay or rushes;[158] a fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in
its centre, or in a wide recess at one end; and round the
fire were ranged in due order the tables and benches at
which the family, guests and servants all assembled for
meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend
Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but
one daily repast—the mid-day dinner—and those who
wished to ape courtly manners followed his example; the
practice, however, found little favour with the mass of the
people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess, and preferred
their four meals a day according to ancient English
custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted
his business or conversed with his friends; and it was
in the hall too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared
and the wooden shutters which closed the unglazed windows
safely barred,[160] guests and servants, divided at most by a
curtain drawn across the room, lay down to sleep in the
glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used at once as bedroom
and private sitting-room by the master and mistress of
the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving as
a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate
ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of
S. Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which
a burgher-mother rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a
dainty silken coverlet.[165] The whole house, whether in town
or country, was commonly of wood.[166] With open hearths
and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably altogether
lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns
were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert
Becket’s house was burnt over his head several times, and
in each case a large part of London shared in the destruction.[167]
But the buildings thus easily destroyed were as
easily replaced; while the cost of a stone house was beyond
the means of any but the great nobles, unless it were here
and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was
no other building material to be had except wood or rubble,
for the nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into
general use was a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes
used for roofing, the majority of houses, even in great cities
like London, were covered with thatch.[169] All the architectural
energy of the time spent itself in two channels—military
and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was as yet a
very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied
its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the
stone wall of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness
and solidity, was often nothing more than a shell, the space
inside it being divided by wooden partitions into rooms
covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even where the keep
was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or elegance
was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important
purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity
which gives to the remains of our early castles a grandeur of
their own, and strikes the imagination far more impressively
than the elaborate fortifications of later times. But it left
no scope to the finer fancies of the architect. His feeling
for artistic decoration, his love of beauty, of harmonious
light and shade, had free play only in his work for the
Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury
and elegance had to find expression chiefly in minor matters,
and especially in dress. During the last reign the extravagance
of attire among the nobles had been carried to a
pitch which called forth the energetic remonstrances of serious
men; prelate after prelate thundered against the unseemly
fashions—the long hair curled and scented like a
woman’s, the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes
and loose flowing garments which rendered all manly exercises
impossible.[170] After the Red King’s death a reforming
party, headed by the new sovereign and his friend Robert
of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return to the more
rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a close-fitting
tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet,
thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk,
then as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their
neighbours from beyond the Channel. Among the rural
population, however, foreign fashions were slow to penetrate;
and the English countryman went on tilling his fields
clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the
ordinary costume of all classes of men among his forefathers,
and which has scarcely yet gone out of use among his
descendants.
The life of the English country folk had changed since
the first days of the Norman settlement almost as little as
their dress. The final transformation, now everywhere complete,
of the ancient township into the feudal manor was
but the last step in a process which had begun at least as
far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house
of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now
developed, was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the
home-farm, the lord’s demesne land, cultivated partly by
free tenants, partly by the customary labour due from the
villeins whose cottages clustered on its border, and whose
holdings, with a tract of common pasture and common
woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the
portion thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed
in large open fields in strips of an acre or half an
acre in extent, each man holding a certain number of strips
scattered one in one field and one in another; while in proportion
to the total amount of land which he thus held he
contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the heavy
plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common.
On the estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings
were mostly of virgates or half-virgates—that is, land
to the extent of some thirty or fifteen acres, and furnishing
in the former case two oxen, in the latter one ox, to the
common plough team, which usually consisted of four; those
belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight.
Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of
the common pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well
as of the common woodland where he fed his pigs on the
oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for fuel and other
household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land,
but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage
with or without a garden. Whatever the extent and
character of their holding, they held it in consideration of
certain services due to the lord, discharged partly by labour
upon his demesne land, partly by customary payments in
money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes on
particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173]
The superintendence of all these matters was in the hands
of the reeve or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with
the regulation of its labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock,
the ingathering of its dues, the letting of its unoccupied
land, and the general account of its revenues.
Under his orders every villein was bound to do a certain
amount of “week-work”—to plough, sow, or reap, or otherwise
labour on the demesne land a certain number of days
every week; generally the obligation, on every virgate held in
villenage, was for two or three days a week throughout the
year, sometimes with an extra day at harvest-tide. The
customary dues and services varied with the special custom
of each manor; they consisted partly of payments either in
kind or money, or both, and partly of services such as
hewing, carting, and drying wood, cutting turf, making
thatch, making malt, mowing and carrying hay, putting up
fences, providing ploughs and labour for a specified length
of time at particular seasons, ploughing, sowing, harrowing
and reaping a given extent of the demesne land. Some of
the rents were paid by the discharge of a special duty; the
cowherds, oxherds, shepherds, swineherds, usually held a
piece of land “by their service,” that is, in consideration
of their charge over the flocks and herds of the lord; sometimes
we find a further labour-rent paid by their wives, who
winnow and reap so much corn on the demesne.[174] Many
of the cotters doubtless held their little dwellings on a
similar tenure, by virtue of their offices as the indispensable
craftsmen of the village community, such as the blacksmith,
the carpenter, or the wheelwright. The mill, too, an
important institution on every large manor, paid a fixed
money rent, and sometimes a tribute of fish from the mill-stream.[175]
We may draw some illustrations of the life of these
rural communities from the “Black Book” of Peterborough,
in which the manors belonging to the abbey were described
about the year 1125. On the manor of Thorp there were
twelve “full villeins” holding eleven acres each, and working
on the demesne three days a week; there were also six half
villeins who did the like in proportion to their holdings.
All these paid of custom ten shillings annually, besides five
sheep for eating, ten ells of linen cloth, ten porringers, and
two hundred loaves for the love-feast of S. Peter; moreover
they all ploughed sixteen acres and a half for their lord.
Six bordarii paid seven shillings a year; and they all
rendered twenty-two bushels of oats for their share of the
dead wood, twenty-two loaves, sixty-four hens, and one
hundred and sixty eggs.[176] At Colingham twenty villeins
worked each one day a week, and three boon-days in
August; they brought sixty waggon-loads of wood to the
manor-house, dug and carried twenty loads of turf and
twenty of thatch, harrowed all the winter-ploughing, and
paid annually four pounds in money. There were also
fifty sokemen who paid twelve pounds a year, ploughed,
harrowed and reaped eighteen acres, besides ploughing with
their own ploughs three times in Lent; each of them worked
three days in August, and served of custom six times a year
in driving the deer for the abbot’s hunting.[177] At Easton
twenty-one villeins holding a virgate each worked twice a
week throughout the year and three boon-days in August;
they had twelve ploughs with which they worked once in
winter and once in spring, and then harrowed; they
ploughed fifteen acres and three roods, whereof five acres and
one rood were to be sown with their own seed; in spring
they had to plough ten acres and a half and sow twenty and
a half with their own seed; in summer, for fifteen days, they
had to do whatsoever the lord commanded. They also
made seventy-three bushels of malt from the lord’s barley;
and they paid seventeen shillings and sixpence a year. A
man named Toli held one virgate at a rent of five shillings
a year; and eleven sokemen held thirteen virgates and a
half by a payment of twelve shillings, two days’ work in
summer and winter, and fifteen days in summer at the lord’s
bidding. The miller, with a holding of six acres of arable
land and two of meadow, rendered one mark of silver to
the lord.[178]
Fisherton, again, supplies illustrations of a great variety of
services. On this manor there were twenty-six “full villeins,”
twelve “half villeins,” one “cotsetus” and three “bordarii.” The
full villeins worked two days a week, the half villeins one day,
throughout the year; the four cottagers worked one day a
week in August, their food being supplied by the lord. The
villeins had among them nine ploughs, which were all
brought into requisition once in winter and three times in
spring. The full villeins carted a load of wood, the half
villeins in proportion; the full villeins moreover ploughed
and harrowed of custom an acre in spring, and half an acre
in winter; they also lent their ploughs once in summer for
fallowing. At Pentecost the lord received one penny for
every villein plough-ox. Each full villein paid twopence at
Martinmas and thirty-two pence on the four quarter-days;
the half villeins paid half the sum. Every one of them gave
a hen at Christmas. The mill brought three shillings a
year, the fishing five shillings. Land enough for twelve full
villeins lay unoccupied; the reeve had to discharge its dues
out of his own purse, and hire it out at the best rent he
could get. There were twenty sokemen, holding three
ploughlands, and lending their ploughs once in winter, twice
in spring, and once for fallowing; each of them reaped one
acre, and did two days bene-work in August; at hay-harvest
they gave of custom three days’ work, one for
mowing, one for turning the hay, and one for carrying it;
each gave a hen at Christmas, and they all paid four pounds
a quarter. On the demesne were three ploughs, each with
a team of eight oxen; these were under the care of five
ox-herds, who held five acres each, and whose wives reaped
one day a week in August, the lord supplying their food.[179]
At Oundle we get a glimpse not only of the rural township,
but of the little dependent town growing up on it. “In
Oundle are four hides paying geld to the king. Of these
hides, twenty-five men hold twenty virgates, and pay of
custom twenty shillings a year, forty hens, and two hundred
eggs. The men of the township have nine ploughs; from
Michaelmas to Martinmas they find ploughs for the lord’s
use once a week, and from Martinmas to Easter once a
fortnight, and ten acres fallow. Each virgate owes three
days’ work a week. There are ten bordarii, who work one
day a week; and fifteen burghers, who pay thirty shillings.
The market of the township renders four pounds and three
shillings. A mill with one virgate renders forty shillings
and two hundred eels. The abbot holds the wood in his own
hand. The men of the township, with six herdsmen, pay
five shillings a year poll-tax. The church of this township
belongs to the altar of the abbey of Borough.”[180]
Services such as these were doubtless an irksome and a
heavy burthen; to modern ideas of independence, the life of
the rural population was the degraded life of serfdom. But
there was another side to the system. The lord had his
duties as well as the villein; the villein had his rights as
well as the lord. When their work for the lord was done
and their customary dues were paid, the villagers were free
to make their own arrangements one with another for the
yoking of their oxen to the common ploughs and the tillage
of the common fields; and the rest of their time and produce
of their labour was theirs to do with as they would,
subject merely to such restrictions as to grinding at the
lord’s mill, or obtaining his license for the sale of cattle, as
were necessary for maintaining the integrity of the estate.
While they owed suit and service to their lord, he was bound
by his own interest as well as by law and duty to guard
them against external interference, oppression, or injury;
the extent of his rights over them, no less than of their
duties to him, was defined by a strict and minute code
of custom to which long prescription gave all and more than
all the force of law, and law itself could occasionally step in
to avenge the wronged villein even upon his lord; Alfred of
Cheaffword is recorded in the Pipe Roll as having paid
a fine of forty shillings for scourging a rustic of his own.[181]
The villein’s life was not harder than that of the poor free
man; it was quite as secure from wrong, and far more
secure from want. The majority of the cultivators were
indeed tied to their land; but their land was equally tied to
them; the lord was bound to furnish each little bundle
of acre-strips with its proper outfit of plough-oxen, to provide
each tenant with his little cottage, and to see that the
heritage passed on to the next generation, just as the manor
itself, and with it the tenants and their services, passed from
father to son in the case of a lay proprietor, or from one
generation of monks to another in a case like that of
Peterborough. Even if a villein failed in his dues, the worst
punishment that could befall him was the seizure of his
little household goods; eviction was out of the question.
The serfdom of the villein was after all only the lowest
link in a chain of feudal interdependence which ended only
with the king himself. If the “rustics” possessed their
homesteads only on condition of work done at the lord’s
bidding and for his benefit, the knight held his “fee” and
the baron his “honour” only on condition of a service to
the king, less laborious indeed, but more dangerous, and in
reality not a whit more morally elevating. If they had to
ask their lord’s leave for giving a daughter in marriage, the
first baron of the realm had to ask a like permission of the
king, and to pay for it too. If their persons and their
services could be transferred by the lord to another owner
together with the soil which they tilled, the same principle
really applied to every grade of feudal society; Count
William of Evreux only stated a simple fact in grotesque
language when he complained that his homage and his
services had been made over together with the overlordship
of his county by Robert Curthose to Henry I., with no more
regard to his own will than if he had been a horse or an
ox.[182] The mere gift of personal freedom, when it meant the
uprooting of all local and social ties and the withdrawal
of all accustomed means of sustenance, would have been
in itself but a doubtful boon. There were, however, at
least three ways in which freedom might be attained.
Sometimes the lord on his death-bed, or in penance for
some great sin, would be moved by the Church’s influence
to enfranchise some of his serfs. Sometimes a rustic might
flee to one of the chartered towns, and if for the space of
a year and a day he could find shelter under its protecting
customs from the pursuit of his lord’s justice, he was thenceforth
a free burgher. And there was a greater city of
refuge whose protection was readier and surer still. The
Church had but to lay her consecrating hands upon a man,
and he was free at once. To ordain a villein or admit him
as a monk without his lord’s consent was indeed forbidden;
but the consecration once bestowed was valid nevertheless;
and the storm of indignation which met the endeavour of
Henry II. to enforce the prohibition shows that it had long
been almost a dead letter.
If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of
Henry I. were to be judged solely from her highest official
representatives, it would certainly appear to have been at a
low ebb. S. Anselm had lived just long enough to accomplish
the settlement of the investitures, but not to direct its
working or experience its results. On his death early in
1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as
to keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The
supreme direction of affairs in the Church as well as in the
state was thus left in the hands of the party represented by
Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy and that of his master
was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion than that of
Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in a
moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees
were no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s
benefit; the most sacred offices of the Church were no
longer openly sold to the highest bidder; but they were
made appendages to the great offices of the state; the
Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid
of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of
secular government. The system had undoubted advantages
in a worldly point of view. A great deal of the most important
political and administrative work was of a nature
which, in the condition of society then existing, required the
services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover, a
man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and
standing, so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to
the temptations and corruptions of place and power than a
layman surrounded with personal and social ties and open
to all sorts of personal and social ambitions, and could thus
be safely intrusted with a freedom of action and authority
such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial and
family influence might have led to the most dangerous
results. On these and similar grounds Henry made a
practice of choosing his chief ministers from the ranks of
the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics upon them,
by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring
a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of
their temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to
the state the services of a more able, vigorous and honest
set of administrators than could have been obtained by any
other means; but from another side the system lay open to
grave objection. The men whom it set over the dioceses
of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior
intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral
character, men whom it would be most unjust to compare
for a moment with the hirelings who bought their sees of
William Rufus. But they were essentially of the world,
worldly; their minds and their hearts were both alike fixed
on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer or
justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop
of Ely or Salisbury. And as were the bishops, so were the
priests. When once it became clear that the main road to
ecclesiastical preferment lay through the temporal service of
the crown, the whole body of secular clergy turned into a
nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their highest
point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence
which they still retained passed altogether away. But the
Church’s life was not in her bishops and her priests; it
was in her humble, faithful laity. Down below the dull
utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of the times,” the finer
sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay buried but
not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of
enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and
then of the monks of Citeaux.
Of the two religious movements which at this time
stirred the depths of English society, the earlier, that of the
Austin canons, was in its origin not monastic but secular.
It arose, in fact, out of a protest against monasticism.
About the middle of the eleventh century an attempt had
been made to redress the balance between the regular and
secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and
consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by
their own fault, already to a great extent lost. Some
earnest and thoughtful spirits, distressed at once by the
abuse of monastic privileges and by the general decay of
ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform by the establishment
of a stricter and better organized discipline in those
cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges
of secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the
eighth century by Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the
members of his own chapter, and generally followed in the
collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model adopted by
cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward the
Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of
Wells and Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop
Thomas of York under the latter, severally attempted
to enforce it upon their canons, but without success. The
English clergy were accustomed to the full enjoyment not
only of their separate property but of their separate houses;
many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men
and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required
them to break up their homes and submit to community of
table and dwelling, was naturally resented as an attempt to
curtail their liberty and bring them under monastic restraint.
Lanfranc soon found that the only way to get rid of the old
lax system was to get rid of the canons altogether; accordingly,
from some few cathedrals the secular clerks were once
again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced by
monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization
in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of
churches the canons were influential enough to resist expulsion
as well as reform, and to maintain the old fashion with
its merits and its abuses, its good and evil sides, all alike
undisturbed and unrestrained. On the Continent, too, the
rule of Chrodegang proved unequal to the needs of the
time. Those who had the attainment of its object really at
heart ended by taking a lesson from their rivals and challenging
the monks with their own weapons. Towards the
beginning of the twelfth century the attempts at canonical
reform issued in the foundation of what was virtually a new
religious order, that of the Augustinians or Canons Regular
of the order of S. Augustine. Like the monks and unlike
the secular canons, from whom they were carefully distinguished,
they had not only their table and dwelling but all
things in common, and were bound by a vow to the observance
of their rule, grounded upon a passage in one of the
letters of that great father of the Latin Church from whom
they took their name.[183] Their scheme was a compromise
between the old-fashioned system of canons and that of the
monastic confraternities; but a compromise leaning strongly
towards the monastic side, tending more and more towards
it with every fresh developement, and distinguished from it
chiefly by a certain simplicity and elasticity of organization
which gave scope for an almost unlimited variety in the
adjustment of the relations between the active and the contemplative
life of the members of the order, thus enabling it
to adapt itself to the most dissimilar temperaments and to
the most diverse spheres of religious activity.
The Austin canons, as they were commonly called,
made their way across the Channel at the beginning of
Henry’s reign. The circumstances of their earliest settlement
illustrate the intimate connexion between the religious
and the national revival in England. Their first priory was
founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda—“Maude
the good queen,” as they gratefully called her—in the soke
of Aldgate, just within the eastern wall of London. Part of
its endowment was furnished by the estates of an old English
cnihtengild whose members surrendered their property for
the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated
to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name,
was a native of Kent who had studied in Gaul under S.
Anselm; through Anselm he was enabled to bring the
Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda, whose confessor
he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds
on the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his
library; how the starving brotherhood set out a row of
empty plates in the refectory to attract the sympathy of the
citizens who were taking their Sunday stroll round the
suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of the new
building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to
bring a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory
were never empty again[184]—is a story which need not be
repeated in detail. Some fifteen years later Rahere the
king’s minstrel threw up his post at court to become the
head of an Austin priory which he built on a plot of waste
marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He
dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached
to it an hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every
day—so tradition told—Alfhun, the master of the hospital,
went about the city as the Little Sisters of the Poor do to
this day, begging in the shops and markets for help towards
the support of the sick folk under his care. Most likely he
was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to prove
him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian
house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood
devoted themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious
scholar—born in the very year in which their house
was founded, 1117—is known to us already as Thomas the
son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of England,
Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons
of the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in
“making Christ his heir”—devoting to God’s service the
heritage which had been destined for his boy, and founding
the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire on the spot where the
lad had expired.[186] Before the close of Henry’s reign the
Austin canons had acquired such importance that two of
their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the
primacy of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the
metropolitan chair of Canterbury was still too vividly haunted
by memories of S. Anselm for Henry and Roger to venture
on trying to fill it from the ranks of the latter’s party; they
gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan, Ralf, bishop of
Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his election
was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed
by Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a
non-monastic primate. Not daring, however, to go the full
length of appointing one of themselves, they took a middle
course and chose a canon regular, William of Corbeil, prior
of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The strict monastic
party counted the new sort of canons very little better than
the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly
blameless churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional
timidity and shrinking from political responsibilities which
made him powerless to stem the tide of worldliness among
his suffragans, though he at least kept the metropolitan chair
itself safe from contaminating influences. The case of the
other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting one.
Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects
by his general preference for foreign churchmen, had
nevertheless chosen for his own spiritual adviser a priest
whose name, Eadwulf, shows him to have been of English
origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian house at
Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left
England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor
to a bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following
out a cherished plan of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked
bishop of Lincoln to be relieved of part of his enormous
diocese by the establishment of a new see with the
great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its
chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of
York in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose
see was fixed at Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop;
naturally enough he constituted his chapter on the principles
of his own order; and Carlisle, the last English bishopric
founded before the Reformation, was also the only one whose
cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order
of S. Augustine.[190]
Meanwhile a mightier influence than theirs was regenerating
all the Churches of the West—our own among the
number. Its root was in a Burgundian wilderness; but the
seed from which it sprang was of English birth. Harding
was an Englishman who spent his boyhood in the monastery
of Sherborne in Dorset, till he was seized with a passion for
wandering and for study which led him first to Scotland,
then to Gaul, and at last to Rome. It chanced that on his
return thence, passing through the duchy of Burgundy, he
stopped at the abbey of Molêmes. As he saw the ways
and habits familiar to his childhood reproduced in those of
the monks, the wanderer’s heart yearned for the peaceful
life which he had forsaken; he took the vows, and became
a brother of the house. But when, with the zeal of a convert,
he began to look more closely into his monastic obligations,
he perceived that the practice of Molêmes, and indeed
of most other monasteries, fell very far short of the strict
rule of S. Benedict. He remonstrated with his brethren till
they had no rest in their minds. At last, after long and
anxious debates in the chapter, the abbot determined to go
to the root of the matter, and appointed two brethren, whose
learning was equalled by their piety, to examine diligently
the original rule and declare what they found in it. The
result of their investigations justified Harding’s reproaches
and caused a schism in the convent. The majority refused
to alter their accustomed ways; finding they were not to
be reformed, the zealous minority, consisting of Robert the
abbot, Harding himself (or Stephen, as he was called in
religion), and sixteen others equally “stiff-necked in their
holy obstinacy,” left Molêmes, and sought a new abode in
the wilderness. The site which they chose—in the diocese
of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from Dijon—was no happy
valley, no “green retreat” such as the earlier Benedictine
founders had been wont to select. It was a dismal swamp
overgrown with brushwood, a forlorn, dreary, unhealthy spot,
from whose marshy character the new house took its name
of “the Cistern”—Cistellum, commonly called Citeaux.
There the little band set to work in 1098 to carry into
practice their views of monastic duty. The brotherhood of
Molêmes, left without a head by their abbot’s desertion, presently
appealed to the archbishop of Lyons and the Pope,
and after some negotiation Robert, willingly or unwillingly,
returned to his former post. His departure gave a shock to
the foundations of the new community; zeal was already
growing cold, and of those who had followed him out from
Molêmes all save eight followed him back again. Those
eight—“few in number, but a host in merit”—at once chose
their prior Alberic to be abbot in Robert’s stead, while the
true founder, Stephen Harding, undertook the duties of
prior. Upon Alberic’s death in 1110 Stephen became
abbot in his turn, and under him the little cistern in the
wilderness became a fountain whose waters flowed out far
and wide through the land. Three-and-twenty daughter-houses
were brought to completion during his life-time.
One of the earliest was Pontigny, founded in 1114, and
destined in after-days to become inseparably associated with
the name of another English saint. Next year there went
forth another Cistercian colony, whose glory was soon to
eclipse that of the mother-house itself. Its leader was a
young monk called Bernard, and the place of its settlement
was named Clairvaux.[191]
From Burgundy and Champagne the “White Monks,”
as the Cistercians were called from the colour of their habit,
soon spread over France and Normandy. In 1128 they
crossed the sea and made an entrance into their founder’s
native land; William Giffard, bishop of Winchester, founded
the abbey of Waverley in Surrey for twelve monks from the
Cistercian house of Aumône in Normandy.[192] The movement
spread rapidly in all directions. In 1131 Walter Lespec
the founder of Kirkham, zealous in every good work, established
in the heart of the Yorkshire wolds a “daughter of
S. Bernard,” the abbey of Rievaux;[193] far away on the Welsh
border, in the valley of the Wye, Tintern was founded in
the same year by Walter de Clare.[194] The story of another
famous Yorkshire house, Fountains, is a curious repetition
of that of Citeaux itself. Thirteen monks of the Benedictine
convent of S. Mary at York, fired by the example of
the newly-established brotherhood at Rievaux, determined,
like Stephen Harding and his friends at Molêmes, to go
forth into the wilderness where they might follow the Cistercian
rule in freedom. But when they asked their abbot’s
leave to depart it was sternly refused. Archbishop Thurstan,
to whom they appealed for support, came in person to plead
their cause with the abbot, and was so insolently received
that after a stormy scene in the chapter-house he laid the
convent under interdict, and walked out followed by the
zealous thirteen “with nothing but the clothes on their
backs.” The warmly-sympathizing primate gave them a
temporary shelter in his own home; at Christmas he
bestowed upon them for their dwelling a lonely valley called
Skeldale, near Ripon, “full of thorns and enclosed by rocks,”
and for their maintenance the little township of Sutton.
They at once chose one of their number, Richard by name,
as abbot, and went forth under his guidance to settle in
their new abode, although the cold of a Yorkshire winter
was at its bitterest, and they had not where to lay their
heads. In the middle of the valley stood a great elm—“thick
and leafy as elms are wont to be.”[195] That tree was
the original abbey of our Lady of Fountains. Its spreading
branches formed a roof to shelter the little band of monks;
“their bread was supplied to them by the archbishop, their
drink by the streamlet which ran through the valley,” and
which, as in the case of Citeaux, suggested a name for the
future house. In this primitive dwelling they fulfilled their
religious exercises in peace and contentment till the winter
was past, when they began to think of constructing a more
substantial abode. They had no mind to follow their own
inspirations and set up an independent rule of their own;
in all humility they wrote to S. Bernard (who since the
death of S. Stephen Harding was universally looked up to
as the head of the Cistercian order), telling him all their
story, and beseeching him to receive them as his children.
Bernard answered by sending to them, with a letter full of
joyous welcome and hearty sympathy, his friend and confidant,
Godfrey, to instruct them in the Cistercian rule.
They had now been joined by ten more brethren. But the
elm-tree was still their only shelter, and their means of subsistence
were as slender as at the first. Presently there
came a famine in the land; they were reduced to eke out
their scanty store of bread with leaves and stewed herbs.
When they had just given away their two last loaves—one
to the workmen engaged on the building, the other to a
passing pilgrim—this supreme act of charity and faith was
rewarded with a supply sent them by the lord of Knaresborough,
Eustace Fitz-John. At last, after struggling on
bravely for two years, they found it impossible to continue
where they were, with numbers constantly increasing and
means at a standstill; so the abbot went to Clairvaux and
begged that some place might be assigned to them there.
S. Bernard granted the request; but when Abbot Richard
came back to fetch the rest of the brotherhood he found that
all was changed. Hugh, dean of York, had just made over
himself and all his property to Fountains. It was the turn
of the tide; other donations began to flow in; soon they
poured. Five years after its own rise the “Fountain” sent
out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants
speedily covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood
cherish their beloved elm-tree as a witness to the lowly
beginnings whence had sprung the mightiest Cistercian
house in England. It bore a yet more touching witness
four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old age,
the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious
spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.[196]
The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from
that of the earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines
was, so to say, in the world though not of it. They sought
tranquillity and retirement, but not solitude; the site of an
abbey was chosen with a careful eye to the natural resources
of the place, its accessibility, and the advantages which it
offered for cultivation and production of all kinds. A
Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed
was intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay
population, either a cluster of rural settlements, or, not
unfrequently, a busy, thriving town. But by the close of
the tenth century, although the palmy days of the Benedictine
fathers as the guardians of art and literature were in
part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled
for five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators
and civilizers of Europe, was well-nigh accomplished;
and the position into which they had unavoidably drifted
as owners of vast landed property protected by special
privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On
the one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads
upon the Church in general was creeping even into the
cloister. On the other, the monasteries were growing rich
and powerful at the expense of the parochial and diocesan
organization. The laity were too apt, while showering their
pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to leave
those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for;
and the growing habit of diverting the tithes of various
estates and districts to the endowment of some abbey with
which they were quite unconnected was already becoming a
distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of the Cistercians
was a direct protest. They refused to have anything
to do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no
right to them; their houses were of the plainest possible
construction: even in their churches scarcely an ornament
was admitted to soften the stern grandeur of the architecture;
there were no broidered hangings, no delicate paintings,
no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with
enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for
the most solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate
than the simple white surplice or alb; and their ordinary
habit, made from the wool of their flocks, was not black like
that of the Benedictines, but the natural white or gray,
for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to men
who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as
well as the deceitfulness of riches.[197] Their aim was to be
simply voices crying in the wilderness—a wilderness wherein
they were resolved to dwell, as much as possible, alone.
Their rule absolutely forbade the erection of a house even
of their own order within a certain distance of another.
But the cry that came forth from the depth of their solitude
thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence
spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined
the order. It was the leaven of that influence, more than
all others, which worked on and on through the nineteen
years of anarchy that followed Henry’s death till it had
leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church, and made
her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state
and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had
been half a century in existence, William of Malmesbury,
himself a member of one of the most ancient and famous of
English Benedictine abbeys, could describe it as the unanimously
acknowledged type of the monastic profession, the
ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad to the
negligent, and a model to all.[198]
How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had
penetrated among the people we see in the story of S.
Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror
or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in
the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents,
Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on
the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They
were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned,
upright folk, who taught their three children to say
the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and brought them up in
the fear of God; other education they could give them
none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary
fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry
were almost unknown, and the population subsisted
chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves
on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever
the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered
thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for
himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden
with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead
upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide;
press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher
and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his
shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose
even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land
with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had
brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he
began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging
from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk
as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom
and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of
this life he became associated with some merchants in the
neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the
local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading
centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews
in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering
into partnership with some other young men, acquired a
fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the
ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him
captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood
by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face
of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and
keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper,
fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful
merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not
wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the
fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe
his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt
at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the
storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out
for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed
to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever
his business took him—Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark—he
sought out the holy places of the land and made
his offerings there. One of the places he visited most
frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from
thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old
home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne,
there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life
which he was already longing to imitate. At last he
took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On
his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a
rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of
his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the
thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not
prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he
threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage,
first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came
home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go
back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the
Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At
a period when religious men of greater experience in this
world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations
over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she
still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she
had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was
in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria,
with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty
forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that
Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought
it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western
borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its
conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there
in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a
kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he
fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of
lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly
to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he
remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his
death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again,
first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a
hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution
of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the
territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham
and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting
the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his
penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly
sitting as a scholar among the children in the church
of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a
Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is
not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part
of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the
little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was
to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When
asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown
crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become
cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he
was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the
chief object of his devotion—S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His
choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to
his comrade: “Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!”
Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin—a farthing—to
lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had
reached the end of his wanderings.
Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the
traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely
country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow
where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy
ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and
the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made
by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in
Godric’s day the place was wilder still. The road which now
leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the
feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river;
the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and
nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil
hanging over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant
herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit
a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped
in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little
hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at
once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out
with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing
the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few
hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight
nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at
the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing for miles through the
woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints
seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern
self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the
Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up
to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the
winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the
waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older
asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he
wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the
Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who
denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of
birds and beasts and the company of angels.” Noxious
reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and
crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground
at night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than
the crowing of a cock.” The woods of Finchale were
thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival
he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he
took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression was
confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down
for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The
toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played
harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow
of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they
disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was
at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots
of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter
about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long
hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about
seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home
in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation
at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from
the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had
hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day
after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of
the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through
the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and
the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name
to the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices
sounded in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother
came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own
English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to
shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to
dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was
admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of
Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of
Godric’s life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age;
while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to
seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances,
temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham
but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]
It was in 1122—two years after the wreck of the White
Ship—that Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there
sixty years. He is the last of the old English saints; his
long life, beginning probably before the Conqueror’s death
and ending only seven years before that of Henry II., is
a link between the religious life of the earlier England
which had passed away and that of the newer England
which was arising in its place. The spiritual side of the
revival was in truth closely connected with its national side.
All the foreign influences which the Norman conquest had
brought to bear upon the English Church had failed to
stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather, she
was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One
of the most striking signs of the times was the renewal of
reverence for those older English saints whose latest successor
was striving to bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s
patrimony. Normans and English hushed their differences
before the grave of the Confessor; Lanfranc was forced to
acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At Canterbury itself
the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm was
still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced
by Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal
for discipline or their passion for architectural display, worked
in the same direction. It was in the old minster of S.
Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had placed the Benedictine
colony whose settlement helped to bring about the
appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of
another early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury
reared his abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of
London planted the Austin canons at Chiche over the shrine
of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury planted them at
Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation of a
bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S.
Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two
of the very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William
of S. Calais and Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour
that art could devise or wealth procure, was one vast monument
to the honour of S. Cuthbert. Literary activity was
re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive precentors
of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up
into more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S.
Dunstan. Eadmer’s best inspiration came to him indeed
from a nearer source; his most valuable work is the history
of his own time, which he grouped, as in a picture, around
the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was
doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of
sympathy which extended far beyond his local associations
at Canterbury. The saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid
and Oswald, found in him a new biographer. In the
northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks were busy
at Durham with the story of their own church and its patron,
Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot of
Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost
every church of importance in central and southern England
was throwing open its archives to the eager researches, and
contributing its memorials of early Mercian and West-Saxon
saints to swell the hagiological collections of a young monk
at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.
There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England
where the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had
never died out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for
more than a century the depository of the sole contemporary
edition of the English Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national
history continued to be recorded in the national tongue
down to the early years of Henry I. In the middle of his
reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in consequence
of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed
their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from
Worcester, and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with
additions from local history and other sources. It is only
in their version that the earliest Chronicle of Worcester has
been preserved to us. But they did more than transcribe
the story of the past. When the copyist had brought his
work down to the latest event of his own day—the sinking
of the White Ship in 1120—another scribe carried on the
annals of Peterborough and of England for ten more years,
in the native speech of the land; and when he laid down
his pen it was taken up by yet another English writer whose
notices of contemporary history, irregular and fragmentary
though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the darkness
of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death
of the first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]
Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work
at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic
interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly
alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had
ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of
England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was
to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting
and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English
but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical
school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a
Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of
the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent
party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the
annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations,
whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted
only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our
early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh
hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence
proves how true was the instinct which led him—patriot of
the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole
tone of his work shows him to have been—to clothe the
ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of
increasing their popularity. If English history has in one
way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of
gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last
English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium
at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence
that the national and literary tradition of the school of
Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth
of the land, and inspired a new generation of English
historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing
together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on
growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with the
chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his
own work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s
birth in 848 and Florence’s own death in 1118; and from
Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another
local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation
of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after
1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began
to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt
from the same source his method of dealing with the English
Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly
used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a
finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or
Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an
old West-Saxon monastery.
William of Malmesbury was born some three or four
years before the Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little
town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One
of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English.[204]
They early destined their son to a literary career; “My
father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if I turned aside
to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil
my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to
make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I
was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not
in honour show myself disinclined.” It is plain that submission
to the father’s wishes cost no great effort to the boy.
As he tells us himself, “Reading was the pleasure whose
charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing
years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of
such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient
greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung
about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an
Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought
retirement from the world in the forest which at that time
covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf,
however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those
days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western
world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable,
could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the
disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage
grew into a school, and the school into a religious
community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the
most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon
learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its
birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the
forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his
later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury;
its Latin literature was moulded by the learning
which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore’s school
at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern
England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon
kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon
the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman.
It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of
the Danish wars; and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth
and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop,
Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat
of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of
the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike
character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced
the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon
the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp
of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin,
alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures
which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and
showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning
the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their
resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting
them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town,
with the mocking comment: “Whosoever is mightiest among
them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however, fell
in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died,
and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work
of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have
been in full career when William entered the abbey-school.[206]
The bent of the lad’s mind showed itself in the subjects
which he chose for special study out of the general course
taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give point to
our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which
cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer
heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of
moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because
it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our
minds to virtuous living;—and especially into history, which,
preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone
by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is
good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his
studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot.
Godfrey’s darling scheme was the formation of a library;
and when at length he found time and means to attempt its
execution, it was William who became his most energetic
assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,”
he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind
none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far
outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own
diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost
to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who
now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]
It is not difficult to guess in what department of the
library William took the deepest interest. Half Norman as
he was by descent, the chosen literary assistant of a Norman
abbot,[209] it was natural that his first endeavour should be to
“collect, at his own expense, some histories of foreign
nations.” As he pondered over them in the quiet cloisters
of the old English monastery which by this time had
become his home, the question arose—could nothing be
found among our own people worthy of the remembrance
of posterity?[210] He had but to look around him, and the
question answered itself. To the antiquary and the scholar
Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every step
brought him face to face with some memory of the glories
of Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm
sprang. To Ealdhelm’s own fame indeed even the prejudices
of Abbot Warin had been forced to yield, and a new translation
of the saint’s relics in 1078 had been followed by
a fresh outburst of popular devotion and a fresh influx
of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival brought
together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of
his miraculous powers, and—as generally happened in such
cases—of low jesters seeking only to make their profit out
of the amusement which they afforded to the gaping multitude.
The punishment of one of these, who was smitten
with frenzy and only cured after three days’ intercession on
the part of the monks, during which he lay chained before
the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of
William’s childhood.[211] In the vestiary of the abbey-church
he beheld with wonder and awe the chasuble which, as
a quaint legend told, the saint in his pious abstraction
of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and whose unusual
length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall stately
form.[212] Among the older literary treasures which served as
a nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less
reverence on a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some
foreign merchants at Dover when he visited Kent for his
consecration.[213] The muniment-chest was full of charters
granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine, Ælfred
and Eadward, Æthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself
a golden crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and
several reliquaries containing the bones of early Gaulish
saints were shown as Æthelstan’s gifts, and the king himself
lay buried beneath the tower.[214] On the left of the high altar,
facing S. Ealdhelm’s shrine, stood a tomb which in William’s
day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar of wider
though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself—John
Scotus, who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to
have established a school under Ælfred’s protection at Malmesbury,
and to have been there pricked to death by his
pupils with their styles in the little church of S. Laurence.[215]
The scanty traces of a vineyard on the hill-side which
sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a
visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the
Danish kings there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury
a stranger of whom the brotherhood knew no more
than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that his name
was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits,
and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love;
his whole time was spent in prayer and in the cultivation
of the vineyard which he planted with his own hands for
the benefit of the community; and only when at the point of
death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from the scrip
which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the
astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in
his Eastern home.[216]
Under the influence of surroundings such as these
William began his studies in English history. But he was
brought to a standstill at the very threshold for lack of a
guide. From the death of Bæda to his own day, he could
not by the most diligent researches discover a single English
writer worthy of the name of historian. “There are indeed
certain records of antiquity in the native tongue, arranged
according to the years of our Lord after the manner of a
chronicle, whereby the times which have gone by since that
great man (Bæda) have been rescued from complete oblivion.
For of Æthelweard, a noble and illustrious man who set
himself to expound those chronicles in Latin, it is better to
say nothing; his aim indeed would be quite to my mind,
if his style were not unbearable to my taste.”[217] The work
of Florence was probably as yet altogether unpublished; it
was certainly not yet finished, nor does it appear to have
been heard of at Malmesbury. That of Eadmer, whose first
edition—ending at the death of Anselm—must have been
the last new book of the day, received from William a just
tribute of praise, both as to its subject-matter and its style;
but it was essentially what its title imported, a History of
Recent Events; the introductory sketch prefixed to it was
a mere outline, and, starting as it did only from Eadgar’s
accession, still left between its beginning and Bæda’s death
a yawning chasm of more than two centuries which the
young student at Malmesbury saw no means of bridging
over save by his own labour.[218] “So, as I could not be
satisfied with what I found written of old, I began to
scribble myself.”[219]
Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of
William’s first historical work, the Gesta Regum Anglorum
or Acts of the English Kings, followed a few years later by a
companion volume devoted to the acts of the bishops. He
was stirred by the same impulse of revived national sentiment
which stirred Florence of Worcester to undertake his
version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very
differently on two different minds. William’s Gesta Regum
were first published in 1120, two years after the death of
Florence. The work of Florence, although he never mentions
it, had doubtless reached him by this time, and must
certainly have been well known to him before he issued his
revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the Chronicle
had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked
upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself
a loftier aim. In his own acceptation of the word, he is the
first English historian since Bæda; he is in truth the
founder of a new school of historical composition. William’s
temper, as displayed in his works, might form the subject of
a curious psychological study. It is a temper which, in
many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the
world in our own day than to a monk of the twelfth century.
He has none of the narrowness of the cloister; he
has little of the prejudices common to his profession or his
age; he has still less prejudice of race. The Norman and
the English blood in his veins seem completely to neutralize
each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only
of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his
violent English sympathies, William calmly balances the one
side against the other, and criticizes them both with the
judicial impartiality of a spectator to whom the matter has a
purely philosophical interest. The whole bent of his mind
indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than political.
With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its
composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his
readers quite as much as to instruct them. He utterly discards
the old arrangement of events “by the years of our
Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance of chronology
on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them in
the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight
of his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with
dry political details, always seizing an opportunity to break
in upon their monotony with some curious illustration, some
romantic episode, some quaint legend, or—when he reaches
his own time—some personal scandal which he tells with
all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of
story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst
of his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales,
sometimes of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating
to a student bent only upon following the main thread of
the history. But in William of Malmesbury the main thread
is often of less real value than the mass of varied adornment
and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is no
Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval
historians who can vie with him in the telling of a story.
His long and frequent digressions into foreign affairs are
often of great intrinsic value, and they show a depth of
insight into the history of other nations and a cosmopolitan
breadth of thought and feeling quite without
parallel in his time. His penetration into individual
characters, his power of seizing upon their main features
and sketching them to the life in a few rapid skilful
strokes—as in his pictures of the Norman kings or of the
Angevin counts—has perhaps not many rivals at any time.
Even when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves,
there is a value in the light which they throw upon
the writer’s own temper or on that of the age in which he
lived. Not a few of them have a further interest as
fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature
whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians,
we might never have known. The Norman
conquest had doomed to gradual extinction a vast growth
of unwritten popular verse which, making its way with the
wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and
cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of
England for four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were
numbered. He had managed to hold his ground against
the growing hostility of the Church; but the coming of
the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence.
His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who
sat in the seat of his former patrons; jongleur and
ménestrel from over sea had taken in the king’s court
and the baron’s castle the place which the gleeman had
once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only
the common people still hailed his appearance as a
welcome break in the monotonous drudgery of their daily
life. Before his day was quite over, however, the new
school of patriotic historians had arisen; and they plunged
into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which
he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose
stores they might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines
of the structure which they were building up on
the meagre foundations of the Chronicle. Florence was
the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process.
William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay
at his own door: a simple English ballad which the
country-folk around Malmesbury in his day still chanted
as they went about their work was the spell by which
S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first
to his singing and then to his preaching, four hundred
years before.[220] The same spell of song, handed on from
generation to generation, and passing from the gleeman’s
lips into the pages of the twelfth century historians
with William at their head, has transformed the story
of the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that
too often only serves to darken the true character of
the period which it professes to illustrate. What it does
illustrate is not the tenth century but the twelfth. It
helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national
revival towards the national past, by showing us the England
of Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not
as it actually was, but as it appeared to the England of
Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,—to the England of Florence
of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William of
Malmesbury.
We must not take William as an average specimen of
the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age
and in any circumstances he would probably have been a
man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings
were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and
those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the
fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man
as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them,
and could find in them full scope for the developement of his
powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession
which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal
experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied
and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be
obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance
with William is enough to dispel all notions of the
medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm,
knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could
learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the
narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A
community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant
relations with every rank and class of society all over
the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and
bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born
pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with
relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the
marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his
curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions,
like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the
monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book
from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or
to submit some literary question to the judgement of the
great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the
political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the
social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or
other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe
shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and
freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world,
fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual
dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat
among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council,
whom they treated almost as an equal, and whom they
came, with a train of secular clerks and lay followers, to
visit and consult on matters of Church or state or of their
own personal interests. If the king himself chanced to pass
that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the
monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman
kings were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of
his own eyes, at any rate from that of his friend Abbot
Godfrey; his portrait of Henry I. was in all likelihood
painted from life as the king paid his devotions before S.
Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table in the
refectory, or—quite as probably—as William, in his turn, sat
in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his
friend and patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester,
if not actually with the king himself. The hospitality of
the abbey was repaid by that which greeted its brethren
wherever they went, on business for their house or for themselves.
The monk went in and out of castle or town, court
or camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William,
indeed, might be sure of a welcome anywhere; and William,
indefatigable as a student, was almost equally so as a
traveller. The little sketches of town and country which
illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the Gesta
Pontificum must have been made on the spot. He had seen
the marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down
the legend of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of
the martyrdom;[222] he had seen with his own eyes the Roman
walls of Carlisle, and heard with his own ears the rough
Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as it was to a southerner,
he yet learned enough to catch from some northern gleeman
the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of
Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt,
wandered with delight up that vale of Severn which he
paints in such glowing colours, and been drawn to write the
life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of his church and his tomb at
Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was the garner in
which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from
one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted
and set in order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that
absolute security from outward disturbance and worldly
care, which to the modern student is but a hopeless dream.
The new intellectual movement, however, was by no
means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their
share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and
their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it
was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman
courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224]
Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome
at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his
youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His
tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had
received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education
as was probably given to few women of her time; and in
her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond
sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of
poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless
charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and
poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new
feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of
Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a
warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury
dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an
equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the
“Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the
library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and
suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is
no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no
mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity;
Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar,
urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a
History of the English in emulation of the Gesta Regum.
Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the
time. Natural science had its followers, among them the
king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical
fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of
lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts
collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary”
of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a
patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A
scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his
researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh
century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours
and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own,
but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering
in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way
to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece
and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of
Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call
Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to
England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published
his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop
William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his
travels. He next opened a school, apparently in Normandy,
for the diffusion of the scientific lore which he had acquired in
the East. He had picked up, among other things, an
Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which
he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding
mathematicians for centuries after. But his teaching of the
physical science of the East was vehemently opposed by
western scholars; his own nephew, who had been one of his
pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was in the
shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put
forth, under the title of Quæstiones Naturales, a plea for a
more free inquiry into the principles of natural science,
instead of the blind following of old authorities which had
hitherto contented the scholars of the West.[229] In the last
years of Henry’s reign he seems to have returned once more
to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows how daring
was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen,
and how vast was the range of study and experience now
thrown open to English scholars. We see that England was
already within reach of that wider world of which her
Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.
What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual
developement was, to borrow a phrase from the
Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like
his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the
political and administrative system by which that peace was
preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the
three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray—the
brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time
in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the
sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England,
indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême
in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never
broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh
border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the
Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the
see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in
Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes
and people twice provoked him to march into their country,
the danger from them was never great enough to mar the
general security of the realm. From Scotland there was
still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander
and David, were the brothers of the good queen
Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in
Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was
very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110
saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of
a train of complications in which England seemed at the
moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles
between the king and the barons, but which in the end
exercised an important influence on the course of her after
history by bringing her into contact with the power of
Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to
pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We
must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history
to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our
own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we
must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth
century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out
the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of
the house of Anjou.
