Henry the Second

by Alice Stopford Green

The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in 1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in 1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity. A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the Dialogus, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time—a work which some scholars say is included in the Gesta Henrici II that was once connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of Otia Imperialia for the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the king, was the brilliant historian of the Irish conquest and the mighty deeds of his cousins, the Fitz Geralds and Fitz Stephens. "In process of time when the work was completed, not willing to hide his candle under a bushel, but to place it on a candlestick that it might give light to all, he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and famous English clergy were at that time to be found. And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and as each division occupied a day, the reading lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town, on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their pupils as were of fame and note, on the third day the rest of the scholars with the milites, townsmen, and many burgesses. It was a costly and noble act; the authentic and ancient times of poesy were thus in some measure renewed, and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."

Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to tell "the doings of the people." He declared his intention to use common and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales, of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of folk-lore or of classical learning or of Bible phrases, which might serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church was illustrated in his Speculum Ecclesiae, a bitter satire on the monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and vice which disgraced the Church inspired the Apocalypse and the Confession of Bishop Goliath, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor, justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated independently of Rome. His Courtier's Triflings, suggested by John of Salisbury's Polycraticus, is the only book which actually bears his name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir and quickening of men's minds—a stir which found expression in other works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of Ralph Niger, and in the violent attacks on the monks by Nigellus.

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole country shared in the movement. Good classical learning might be had in England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies. Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools, such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the __Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto, always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham, of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital. Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author of a Latin poem on the Troy Story, and of a poetic history of the first crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.

Even the feudal nobles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread beyond the class of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher. Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155 dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a book which came afterwards to be called the Brut d'Engleterre, and was one of the sources of the first important English poem, Layamon's Brut. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told in the Roman de Rou the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas—poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics of thought and feeling. Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them.

CHAPTER XI

THE DEATH OF HENRY

In the last nine years of Henry's reign his work lay elsewhere than in his English kingdom. They were years spent in a passionate effort to hold together the unwieldy empire he had so laboriously built up. On the death of Louis in 1180 the peaceful and timid traditions of his reign were cast aside by the warlike Philip, who had from childhood cherished a violent hatred against Henry, and who was bent on the destruction of rival powers, and the triumph of the monarchy in France. Henry's absorbing care, on the other hand, was to prevent war; and during the next four years he constantly forced reconciliation on the warring princes of France. "All who loved peace rejoiced at his coming," the chroniclers constantly repeat. "He had faith in the Lord, that if he crossed over he could make peace." "As though always at his coming peace should certainly be made."

But in Britanny and in Aquitaine there was no peace. The sons whom he had set over his provinces had already revolted in 1173. In 1177 fresh troubles broke out, and from that time their history was one of unbroken revolt against their father and strife amongst themselves. "Dost thou not know," Geoffrey once answered a messenger of his father's, sent to urge him to peace, "that it is our proper nature, planted in us by inheritance from our ancestors, that none of us should love the other, but that ever brother should strive against brother, and son against father. I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our hereditary right, nor vainly seek to rob us of our nature!" In 1182 Henry sought once more to define the authority of his sons, and to assert the unity of the Empire under his own supremacy by ordering Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their brother for Aquitaine and Britanny. Richard's passionate refusal struck the first open blow at his father's imperial schemes, and war at once broke out. The nobles of Aquitaine, weary of the severe rule of Richard, had long plotted to set in his place his gentler brother Henry, and the young king, along with Geoffrey, lent himself openly to the conspiracy. In 1183 they called for help from Flanders, France, and Normandy, and a general revolt seemed on the point of breaking out, like that of ten years before. Henry II. was forced to march himself into Aquitaine. But in a war with his sons he was no longer the same man as when he fought with French king or rebel barons. His political sagacity and his passionate love of his children fought an unequal battle. Duped by every show of affection, he was at their mercy in intrigue. Twice peaceful embassies, which he sent to Henry and Geoffrey, were slain before their eyes without protest. As he himself talked with them they coolly saw one of their archers shoot at him and wound his horse. The younger Henry pretended to make peace with his father, sitting at meat with him, and eating out of the same dish, that Geoffrey might have time to ravage the land unhindered. Geoffrey successfully adopted the same device in order to plunder the churches of Limoges. The wretched strife was only closed at last by the death of the younger Henry in 1183.

His death, however, only opened new anxieties. Richard now claimed to take his brother's place as heir to the imperial dignity, while at the same time he exercised undivided lordship over an important state a position which the king had again and again refused to Henry. Geoffrey, whose over-lord the young king had been, sought to rule Britanny as a dependent of Philip, and his plots in Paris with the French king were only ended by his death in 1185. Philip, on his part, demanded, at the death of the young king, the restoration of Margaret's dowry, the Vexin and Gisors; when Geoffrey died he claimed to be formally recognized as suzerain of Britanny, and guardian of his infant; he demanded that Richard should do homage directly to him as sovereign lord of Aquitaine, and determined to assert his rights over the lands so long debated of Berri and Auvergne. For the last years of Henry's reign disputes raged round these points, and more than once war was only averted by the excitement which swept over Europe at the disastrous news from the Holy Land.

After the death of the young king a precarious peace was established in Aquitaine, and Henry returned to England. In March 1185 he received at Reading the patriarch of Jerusalem and the master of the Hospital, bearing the standard of the kings of the Holy Land, with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, of the tower of David, and of the city of Jerusalem. "Behold the keys of the kingdom," said the patriarch Heracles with a burst of tears, "which the king and princes of the land have ordered me to give to thee, because it is in thee alone, after God, that they have hope and confidence of salvation." The king reverently received them before the weeping assembly, but handed them back to the safekeeping of the patriarch till he could consult with his barons. He had long been pledged to join the holy war; he had renewed his vow in 1177 and 1181. But it was a heavy burden to be now charged with the crown of Jerusalem. Since the days of his grandfather, Fulk of Anjou, the last strong king of Jerusalem, there had been swift decay. Three of his successors were minors; Antone was a leper; the fifth was repudiated by every one of his vassals. The last forty years had been marked by continual disaster. The armies of the Moslem were closing in fast on every side. A passion of sympathy was everywhere roused by the sorrows of the Holy City. All England, it was said, desired the crusade, and Henry's prudent counting of the cost struck coldly on the excited temper of the time. Gerald of Wales officiously took on himself, in the middle of a hunting party, to congratulate the king on the honour done to him and his kingdom, since the patriarch had passed by the lands of emperors and kings to seek out the English sovereign. Talk of this kind before all the court at such a critical moment much displeased the prudent king, and he answered in his biting way, "If the patriarch, or any other men come to me, they seek rather their own than my gain." The unabashed Gerald still went on, "Thou shouldst think it thy highest gain and honour, king, that thou alone art chosen before all the sovereigns of the earth for so great a service to Christ." "Thus bravely," retorted Henry, "the clergy provoke us to arms and dangers, since they themselves receive no blow in the battle, nor bear any burden which they may avoid!"