The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

Against the application of the term ‘empire’ to the dominion of Henry II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—from one point of view neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked, yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor will the government of the Norman-Angevin ruler square with the modern definition of an empire as “a state formed by the rule of one state over other states.”[27] His various dominions, if we except Ireland, were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord—very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. It is an empire only in the broader and looser sense of the word, a great composite state, larger than a mere kingdom and imperial in extent if not in organization.

That Henry’s realm was in extent imperial can easily be seen from the map. It extended from Scotland to the frontier of Spain, as the empire of his contemporary Frederick I extended from the Baltic and the North Sea to central Italy. And if the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy which made up Frederick’s empire covered in the aggregate more territory, the actual authority of the ruler, whether in army, justice, or finance, was decidedly less than in the Anglo-Norman state. Henry had a stronger army, a larger revenue, a more centralized government. Moreover, the Norman empire was less artificial than it seems to us at first sight, accustomed as we are to the associations of the modern map. There was, especially with mediæval methods of communication, nothing anomalous in a state which straddled the English Channel: Normandy was nearer England than was Ireland; it was quite as easy to go from London to Rouen as from London to York. The geographical bonds were also strong between Henry’s continental dominions, for the roads of the twelfth century did not radiate from Paris, but followed mainly the old Roman lines, and from Rouen there was direct and easy connection with LeMans, Tours, Poitiers, and Bordeaux. In the matter of race, too, we must beware of being misled by our modern ideas. The English nation was at most only the vaguest sort of a conception, the French nation did not exist till the fifteenth century, and personal loyalty to the lord of many different lands was a natural expression of the conditions of the age. It is contrary to our prejudices that a single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic fisherman of the Breton coast,—the ‘Pêcheur d’Islande’ of a later day,—the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine, and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades foreshadow the d’Artagnan of the Three Musketeers and the ‘cadets de Gascogne’ of Cyrano de Bergerac. But it was little harder to rule these diverse lands from London or Rouen than from Paris; it was for the time being as easy to make them part of a Norman empire as of a French kingdom. Over the various languages and dialects ran the Latin of law and government and the French of the court and of affairs; while in political matters these countries were, as we shall see, quite capable of united action.

Let us call to mind how the empire of Henry II was formed. At the death of the Conqueror in 1087 the lands which he had brought together and ruled with such good peace were divided between his two eldest sons, Robert receiving Normandy and William the Red, England. Save for William’s regency over Normandy during his brother’s absence on the Crusade, the two countries remained separate during his reign, and were united once more only in 1106 when William’s successor, his younger brother Henry I, after defeating and deposing Robert at Tinchebrai, ruled as duke of Normandy and king of England. This was the inheritance which, after the death of Prince William in the White Ship, Henry sought to hand down to his daughter Matilda, but which passed for the most part to his nephew Stephen of Blois. Stephen, however, never gained a firm hold in England and soon lost Normandy to Matilda’s husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom it was conquered and ruled in the name of his son Henry, later Henry II. Crowned duke of Normandy in 1150, Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou in the following year, and at Stephen’s death in 1154 became king of England. Meanwhile, in 1152, he had contracted a marriage of the greatest political importance with Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, whose union with the French king Louis VII had just been annulled by the Pope; an alliance which made him master of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony and therewith of two-thirds of France. Apart from certain adjustments in central France, the only addition to these territories made during Henry’s reign was the conquest of eastern Ireland in the years following 1169. Into these Irish campaigns and their consequences for the whole later history of the island we cannot attempt to go. Let me only point out that the leading spirits were Norman, except so far as they were Irish exiles, and that the names which now make their appearance in Irish annals are Norman names—the Lacys and the Clares, the Fitzgeralds and the de Courcys, as Irish before long as the Irish themselves.

Substantially, then, the empire of Henry II remained in extent as he found it at his accession to the English throne at the age of twenty-one; it was not created by him but inherited or annexed by marriage. Accordingly it is not as a conqueror but as a ruler that he can lay claim to greatness. But although Henry attempted little in the way of acquiring new territory, he did much to consolidate his possessions and to extend his European power and influence. His daughters were married to the greatest princes of their time, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, King Alphonso VIII of Castile, King William II of Sicily. He made an alliance with the ruler of Provence and planned a marriage with the house of Savoy that would have given him control of the passes into Italy. He took his part in the struggle of Pope and anti-Pope, of Pope and Emperor; he corresponded with the emperor of Constantinople, refused the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and died on the eve of his departure on a crusade. No one could lay claim to greater influence upon the international affairs of his time.

Occupying this international position, Henry must not be viewed, as he generally is, merely as an English king. He was born and educated on the Continent, began to reign on the Continent, and spent a large part of his life in his continental dominions. He ruled more territory outside of England than in, and his continental lands had at least as large a place as England in his policy. It is perhaps too much to say, in modern phrase, that he ‘thought imperially,’ but he certainly did not think nationally; and when his latest biographer speaks of Henry’s continental campaigns as “foreign affairs,”[28] he is thinking insularly, for Normandy, Anjou, Gascony even, were no more foreign than England itself. Henry is not a national figure, either English or French; he is international, if not cosmopolitan. Only from the point of view of later times can we associate him peculiarly with English history, when after the collapse of the Norman empire under his sons, the permanent influence of his work continued to be felt most fully in England.

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

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

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

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