Henry the Second

by Alice Stopford Green

The political complications with which Henry was surrounded were still further confused by a new question which now arose, and which was to threaten the peace of Europe for eighteen years. On the death of the English Pope, Hadrian IV., on the 1st of September 1159, two rivals, Alexander III. and Victor IV., disputed the see of Rome, and the strife between the Empire and the Papacy, now nearly one hundred years old, broke out afresh on a far greater scale than in the time of Gregory. Frederick Barbarossa asserted the imperial right of judging between the rivals, and declared Victor pope, supported by the princes of the Empire and by the kings of Hungary, Bohemia, and Denmark. Alexander claimed the aid of the French king—the traditional defender of the Church and protector of the Popes; and after the strife had raged for nearly three years, he fled in 1162 to France. In the great schism Henry joined the side of Louis in support of Alexander and of the orthodox cause; the two kings met at Chouzy, near Blois, to do honour to the Pope; they walked on either side of his horse and held his reins. The meeting marked a great triumph for Alexander; the union of the Teutonic nations against the policy of Rome was to be delayed for three centuries and a half. It marked, too, the highest point of Henry's success. He had checked the Emperor's schemes; he had won the gratitude of both Louis and the Pope; he had defeated the plots of the House of Blois, and shown how easily any alliance between France and Champagne might be broken to pieces by his military power and his astute diplomacy. He had rounded off his dominions; he had conquered the county of Cahors; he had recovered the Vexin and the border castles of Fréteval and Amboise; the fiefs of William of Boulogne had passed into his hands on William's death; he was master of Nantes and Dol, and lord of Britanny; he had been appointed Protector of Flanders.

At this moment, indeed, Henry stood only second to the Emperor among the princes of Christendom, and his aim seems to have been to rival in some sort the Empire of the West, and to reign as an over-king, with sub-kings of his various provinces, and England as one of them, around him. He was connected with all the great ruling houses. His eldest son was married to the daughter of the King of France; the baby Richard, eighteen months old, was betrothed during the war of Toulouse to a daughter of the King of Aragon. He was himself a distant kinsman of the Emperor. He was head of the house of the Norman kings in Sicily. He was nearest heir of the kings of Jerusalem. Through his wife he was head of the house of Antioch, and claimed to be head of the house of Tripoli. Already in these first years of his reign the glory of the English king had been acknowledged by ambassadors from the Emperor, from the King of Jerusalem, from Norway, from Sweden, from the Moorish kings of Valencia and Murcia, bearing the gifts of an Eastern world—gold, silk, horses, and camels. England was forced out of her old isolation; her interest in the world without was suddenly awakened. English scholars thronged the foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers, scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad. The influence of English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time when Englishmen played so great apart abroad. English statesmen and bishops were set over the conduct of affairs in Provence, in Sicily, in Gascony, in Britanny, in Normandy. English archbishops and bishops and abbots held some of the highest posts in France, in Anjou, in Flanders, in Portugal, in Italy, in Sicily. Henry himself welcomed trained men from Normandy or Sicily or wherever he could find them, to help in his work of administration; but in England foreigners were not greatly welcomed in any place of power, and his court was, with but one or two exceptions, made up of men who, of whatever descent they might be, looked on themselves as Englishmen, and bore the impress of English training. The mass of Englishmen meanwhile looked after their own affairs and cared nothing about foreign wars fought by Brabançon mercenaries, and paid for by foreign gold. But if they had nothing to win from all these wars, they were none the less at last drawn into the political alliances and sympathies of their master. Shut out as she was by her narrow strip of sea from any real concern in the military movements of the continental peoples, England was still dragged by the policy of her Angevin rulers into all the complications of European politics. The friendships and the hatreds of her king settled who were to be the allies and who the foes of England, and practically fixed the course of her foreign policy for seven hundred years. A traditional sympathy lingered on from Henry's days with Germany, Italy, Sicily, and Spain; but the connection with Anjou forced England into a hostility with France which had no real ground in English feeling or English interests; the national hatred took a deeper character when the feudal nobles clung to the support of the French king against the English sovereign and the English people, and "generation handed on to generation an enmity whose origin had long been forgotten." From the disastrous Crusade of 1191, "from the siege of Acre," to use the words of Dr. Stubbs, "and the battle of Arsouf to the siege of Sebastopol and the battles of the Crimea, English and French armies never met again except as enemies."

CHAPTER III

THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND

The building up of his mighty empire was not the only task which filled the first years of Henry's reign. Side by side with this went on another work of peaceful internal administration which we can but dimly trace in the dearth of all written records, but which was ultimately to prove of far greater significance than the imperial schemes that in the eyes of his contemporaries took so much larger proportions and shone with so much brighter lustre.

The restoration of outward order had not been difficult, for the anarchy of Stephen's reign, terrible as it was, had only passed over the surface of the national life and had been vanquished by a single effort. But the new ruler of England had to begin his work of administration not only amid the temporary difficulties of a general disorganization, but amid the more permanent difficulties of a time of transition, when society was seeking to order itself anew in its passage from the medieval to the modern world; and his victory over the most obvious and aggressive forms of disorder was the least part of his task. Through all the time of anarchy powerful forces had been steadily at work with which the king had now to reckon. A new temper and new aspirations had been kindled by the troubles of the last years. The deposition of Stephen, the elections of Matilda and of Henry, had been so many formal declarations that the king ruled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if he broke his contract he justly forfeited his authority. The routine of silent and submissive councils had been broken through, and the earliest signs of discussion and deliberation had discovered themselves, while the Church, exerting in its assemblies an authority which the late king had helplessly laid down, formed a new and effective centre of organized resistance to tyranny in the future Even the rising towns had seized the moment when the central administration was paralysed to extend their own privileges, and to acquire large powers of self-government which were to prove the fruitful sources of liberty for the whole people.

We see everywhere, in fact, signs of the great contest which in one form or another runs through the whole of the twelfth century, and gives its main interest in our eyes to the English history of the time,—the struggle between the iron organization of medieval feudalism and those nascent forces of modern civilization which were fated in the end to shatter and supersede it. In spite of the cry of lamentation which the chroniclers carry down to us over the misery of a land stricken by plague and famine and rapine, it is still plain that even through the terrible years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was fast growing into power,—the middle class of burghers and traders, who desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance of mercenary soldiers marked everywhere the development of peaceful industries. Amid all the confusion of civil war the industrial activities of the country had developed with bewildering rapidity; while knights and barons led their foreign hirelings to mutual slaughter, monks and canons were raising their religious houses in all the waste places of the land, and silently laying the foundations of English enterprise and English commerce. To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among the swamps of Lincolnshire. A hundred and fifteen monasteries were built during the nineteen years of Stephen's reign, more than had been founded in the whole previous century; a hundred and thirteen were added to these during the reign of Henry. In half a century sixty-four religious houses were built in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone. Monastery and priory, in which the decorated Romanesque was giving way to the first-pointed architecture, towered above the wretched mud-hovels in which the whole of the population below the class of barons crowded; their churches were distinguished by the rare and novel luxury of glass windows, which, as they caught the red light of the setting sun, startled the peasant with omens of coming ill. Multitudes of men were busied in raising the vast pile of buildings which made up a religious house,—cloisters, dormitories, chapels, hospitals, granaries, barns, storehouses, whose foundations when all else is gone still show in the rugged surface of some modern field. Regular and secular clergy were alike spurred on in their work by jealous rivalry. Archbishop Roger of York was at the opening of Henry's reign building his beautiful church at Ripon, of whose rich decoration traces still remain, while he gave scant sympathy and encouragement to the Cistercian monks still busy with the austere mass of buildings which they had raised at Fountains almost within sight of the Ripon towers.

We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land brought to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and knight's chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting. They thanked Heaven for the "blessings of fatness and fleeces," as foreign weavers sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their treasure-houses. The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact, fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards modern Europe,—the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence the raw material for commerce was supplied. In vain the Church by its canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased "that many people laying aside business practised usury almost openly."

Nor were the towns behindhand in activity. As yet, indeed, the little boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary of liberties—for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town. They were buying from the lord, in whose "demesne" they lay, permission to gather wood in the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their services in harvest-time for "reap-silver," and of their bondage to the lord's mill for "multure-penny." Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"—that is, to a jury of its own or its freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds; and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole body of its burghers—that is, of those who held land within its walls. The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign "Commune." Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers, goldsmiths, pepperers, clothiers, and pilgrims appeared in London, York, Gloucester, Nottingham, even in little boroughs such as that of St. Edmunds; while in distant Cornwall, Totnes, Lidford, and Bodmin set up their gilds. How Henry regarded the movement it is hard to say. The gilds had to pay, as everything had to pay, to the needy Treasury; but otherwise they were not interfered with, and went on steadily increasing in power and numbers.

Prosperity brought with it the struggle for supremacy, and the history of nations was rehearsed on a petty stage, with equal passions if with less glory. A thriving village or township would begin to encroach on the common land of its weaker neighbours, would try to seize some of its rights of pannage in the forest, or fishing in the stream. But its most strenuous efforts were given to secure the exclusive right of trading. Free trade between village and village in England was then, in fact, as much unknown as free trade at this day between the countries of modern Europe. Producer, merchant, manufacturer saw in "protection" his only hope of wealth or security. Jealously enclosed within its own borders, each borough watched the progress of its neighbours "with anxious suspicion." If one of them dared defiantly to set up a right to make and sell its own bread and ale, or if it bought a charter granting the right to a market, it found itself surrounded by foes. The new market was clearly an injury to the rights of a neighbouring abbot or baron or town gild, or it lessened the profits of the "king's market" in some borough on the royal demesne. Then began a war, half legal, half of lawless violence. Perhaps the village came off victorious, and kept its new market on condition that it should never change the day without a royal order (unless in deference to the governing religious feeling of the time, it should change it from Sunday to a week day). Perhaps, on the other hand, it saw its charter vanish, and all the money it had cost with it, its butchers' and bakers' stalls shattered, its scales carried off, its ovens destroyed, the "tumbril" for the correction of fraudulent baker or brewer destroyed. Of such a strife we have an instance in the fight which the burghers of Wallingford carried on with their neighbours. They first sought to crush the rising prosperity of Abingdon by declaring that its fair was an illegal innovation, and that in old days nothing might be sold in the town save bread and ale. Oxford, which had had a long quarrel with Abingdon over boat cargoes and river tolls, readily joined in the attack, but ultimately by the king's judgment Abingdon was declared to have had right to a "full market", and Wallingford was discomfited. A little later its wrath was kindled afresh by the men of Crowmarsh, who, instead of coming to the Wallingford market, actually began to make their own bread and ale—by what warrant no one knew, said the Wallingford bakers and brewers. Crowmarsh held out through the later years of Henry's reign and Richard's, had a sore struggle under John, and at last under Henry III. saw the officers of justice come down upon them a second time, and make a general wreck of ovens and "tumbril," while the weights were carried off to triumphant Wallingford.