Now, judged by the most exacting standards, the chancery of Henry II had reached a high degree of perfection. It has quite recently been the subject of an elaborate study by the most eminent mediævalist of our time, the late Léopold Delisle, who cannot restrain his admiration for its regularity, its accuracy and finish, and the extraordinary range and rapidity of its work. The documents issued in the name of Henry II during his long reign of thirty-five years, says Delisle,[31] “both for his English and his continental possessions, are all drawn up on the same plan in identical formulæ and expressed with irreproachable precision in a simple, clear, and correct style, which is also remarkably uniform save for a small number of pieces which show the hand of others than the royal officers.” If the judgment of this master required support, I should be glad to confirm it from the personal examination of some hundreds of Henry’s charters and writs. Such uniformity, it should be observed, is evidence not only of the extent and technical attainments of the chancery but of substantially similar administrative conditions throughout the various dominions to which these documents are addressed: officers, functions, legal and administrative procedure are everywhere very much alike. Moreover, a study of these charters reveals another fact of fundamental importance. Even more significant than uniformity of procedure in a chancery is the type of document issued, for since the strength of government lies not in legislation but in administration, a sure index of a state’s efficiency will be found in the extent and character of its administrative correspondence. This test places the Norman empire far in advance of any of its contemporaries. Every payment from the treasury, every allowance of an account, every summons to the army, every executive command or prohibition, was made by formal royal writ—per breve regis, as we read page after page in the account rolls. Of the many thousands of such writs issued in Henry’s reign, exceedingly few have come down to us, but no one can read these, terse, direct, trained down to bone and muscle, without realizing the keen minds and the clear-cut administrative methods which they represent. Take an example:[32]
H. Dei gratia rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum et Aquitanorum et comes Andegavorum R. thesaurario et Willelmo Malduit et Warino filio Giroldi camerariis suis salutem.
Liberate de thesauro meo XXV marcas fratribus Cartusie de illis L marcis quas do eis annuatim per cartam meam.
Teste Willelmo de Sancte Marie Ecclesia. Apud Westmoster.
The purpose of these writs might, of course, vary—seize A of this land; do right to B for that tenement; secure C in his possession; bring your knights to such a place at such a time; summon twelve men to decide D’s right;—but each has its appropriate form, which is always crisp and exact. All speak the language of a strong, businesslike administration which expected as a matter of course prompt and implicit obedience throughout its broad dominions.
If such a system be given enough time, it will inevitably exert a strong and persistent influence in favor of centralization and uniformity, and it would be interesting to know just what was accomplished in these directions during the half century of the Norman empire’s existence. The parting advice which Henry had received from his father Geoffrey was to avoid the transfer of customs and institutions from one part of his realm to another, and the wisdom of the warning was obvious under feudal conditions, if not in all imperial governments. But there is a difference between the field of local custom and the institutions of administration, and while even in matters of feudal law there is some evidence of a generalization of certain reforms in the rules of succession, in the conduct of government it was impossible to keep the different parts of the empire in water-tight compartments so long as there was a common administration and frequent interchange of officials between different regions. We must remember that Henry was a constant experimenter, and that if a thing worked well in one place it was likely to be tried in another. Thus the Assize of Arms and the ordinance for the crusading tithe were first promulgated for his continental dominions, while the great English inquest of knights’ fees in 1166 preceded by six years the parallel Norman measure. The great struggle with Becket over the church courts seems to have had a Norman prologue. The chronological order in any given case might well be a matter of chance; but in administrative matters the influence is likely to have travelled from the older and better organized to the newer and more loosely knit dominions, from England, Normandy, and Anjou on the one hand to Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony on the other.
* * * * *
Of Henry’s hereditary territories, Anjou seems the least important from the point of view of constitutional influence. Much smaller in area than either Normandy or England, it was a compact and comparatively centralized state long before Henry’s accession, but the opportunity for immediate action on the count’s part simplified its government to a point where its experience was of no great value under Anglo-Norman conditions. Certainly no Angevin influence is traceable in the field of finance, and none seems probable in the administration of justice. In the case of Normandy and England the resemblance of institutions is closest, and a host of interesting problems present themselves which carry us back to the effects of the Norman Conquest and even further.
It is, of course, one of the fundamental problems of English history how far the government of England was Normanized in the century following the Conquest. To a French scholar like Boutmy everything begins anew in 1066, when “the line which the whole history of political institutions has subsequently followed was traced and defined.”[33] To Freeman, on the other hand, the changes then introduced were temporary and not fundamental. He is never tired of repeating that the old English are the real English; progress comes by going back to the principles of the Anglo-Saxon period and casting aside innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times; “we have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things, we have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation.”[34] The trend of present scholarly opinion lies between these extremes. It refuses to throw away the Anglo-Saxon period, whose institutions we are just beginning to read aright; but it rejects its idealization at Freeman’s hands, who, it has been said, saw all things “through a mist of moots and witans” and not as they really were, and it finds more truth in Carlyle’s remark that the pot-bellied equanimity of the Anglo-Saxon needed the drilling and discipline of a century of Norman tyranny.[35]
Whether he was needed much or little, the Norman drill-master came and did his work, and when he had finished the two countries were in many respects alike. He left his mark on the English language and on English literature, which were submerged for three centuries under the French of the court, the castle, and the town, and in the process were permanently modified into a mixed speech. He left his mark on architecture in the great cathedrals of the Norman bishops and the massive castles with their Norman keeps. He made England a feudal society, however far it may have gone in that direction before, and its law, from that day to this, a feudal law. And he remade the central government under the strong hand of a masterful dynasty which compelled its subjects to will what the king willed. Whatever permanence we may assign to Anglo-Saxon local institutions,—and we cannot help granting them this in considerable measure,—it is not now held that there was any notable Anglo-Saxon influence upon the central administration. At best England before the Conquest was a loose aggregation of tribal commonwealths divided by local feeling and by the jealousies of the great earls, and its kingship did not grow stronger with process of time. The national assembly of wise men, whose persistence Freeman labored in vain to prove, became the feudal council of the Norman barons, and this council, the curia regis, and the royal household which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration.