It may seem a far cry from the Frankish inquests of the ninth century to the juries and the representative assemblies of the twentieth, but the development is continuous, and it leads through Normandy. In this sense the English-speaking countries are all heirs of the early Normans and of the Norman kings who, all unconsciously, provided for the extension and the perpetuation of the Norman methods of trial. At such points Norman history merges in that of England, the British Empire, and the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The chief events in the history of the Norman empire are treated in the general works of Miss K. L. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings (London, 1887); Sir J. H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire (London, 1903); G. B. Adams, History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (London, 1905); H. W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins (London, 1905). There is a brief biography of Henry the Second by Mrs. J. R. Green (London, 1888; reprinted, 1903); and a more recent one by L. F. Salzmann (Boston, etc., 1914). A notable characterization of Henry and his work is given by William Stubbs, in the introduction to his edition of Benedict of Peterborough, II (London, 1867), reprinted in his Historical Introductions (London, 1902), pp. 89–172. For the continental aspects of the reign see F. M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy (Manchester, 1913); and his articles in the English Historical Review, XXI, XXII (1906–07). Cf. A. Cartellieri, Die Machtstellung Heinrichs II. von England, in Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher, VIII, pp. 269–83 (1898); F. Hardegen, Imperialpolitik König Heinrichs II. von England (Heidelberg, 1905). The fullest account of Irish affairs is G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (Oxford, 1911).
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The best general accounts of constitutional and legal matters are those of Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, I (last edition, Oxford, 1903), corrected by various special studies of J. H. Round, to be found chiefly in his Feudal England (London, 1895; reprinted, 1909) and Commune of London (Westminster, 1899); and by Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (second edition, London, 1898). The results of recent investigation are incorporated in the studies and notes appended to the French translation of Stubbs by Petit-Dutaillis (Paris, 1907); this supplementary material is translated into English by W. E. Rhodes (Manchester, 1911). There are admirable studies of the chancery in L. Delisle. Recueil des actes de Henri II concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, introduction (Paris, 1909); and of the exchequer in R. L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1912). See also Hubert Hall, Court Life under the Plantagenets (London, 1890; reprinted, 1902). For the more distinctively Norman side of the government see Haskins, “The Government of Normandy under Henry II,” in American Historical Review, XX, pp. 24–42, 277–91 (1914–15); and earlier papers on “The Early Norman Jury,” ibid., VIII, pp. 613–40 (1903); “The Administration of Normandy under Henry I,” in English Historical Review, XXIV, pp. 209–31 (1909); “Normandy under Geoffrey Plantagenet,” ibid., XXVII, pp. 417–44 (1912); Delisle, Des revenus publics en Normandie au XIIe siècle, in Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, X-XIII (1848–52); Valin, Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, supplemented by R. de Fréville, “Étude sur l’organisation judiciaire en Normandie aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in Nouvelle Revue historique de droit, 1912, pp. 681–736. The best general account of Norman law is still that of H. Brunner, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte (Berlin, 1872).
V
NORMANDY AND FRANCE
In July, 1189, Henry II lay dying in his castle at Chinon. Abandoned and attacked by his sons, driven from LeMans and Tours by Philip of France and forced to a humiliating peace, sick in body and broken in spirit, the aged king made his way to the old stronghold of the Angevin counts in the valley of the Vienne. Cursing the faithless Richard as he gave him the enforced kiss of peace at Colombières, he had fixed his hopes on his youngest son John till the schedule was brought him of those who had thrown off their allegiance. “Sire,” said the clerk who read the document to the fever-tossed king, “may Christ help me, the first here written is Count John, your son.” “What,” cried the king, starting up from his bed, “John, my very heart, my best beloved, for whose advancement I have brought upon me all this misery? Now let all things go as they will; I care no more for myself nor for anything in this world.” Two days later he died, cursing his sons, cursing the day he had been born, repeating constantly, “Shame on a conquered king.” Deserted by all save his illegitimate son Geoffrey, who received his father’s blessing and his signet ring marked with the leopard of England, Henry was plundered by his attendants of gold and furnishings and apparel, just as William the Conqueror had been despoiled in the hour of his death at Rouen, till some one in pity threw over the royal corpse the short cloak, or ‘curt mantle,’ by which men called him. Two days later he was laid away quietly in the nunnery of Fontevrault, where a later age was to rob his tomb of all save the noble recumbent figure by which it is still marked. Thus passed away the greatest ruler of his age; thus began the collapse of the Norman empire.
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Strikingly dramatic both in its public and private aspects, the end of Henry II offers material fit for a Greek tragedy, and we may, if we choose, imagine an Æschylus or a Sophocles painting the rapidity of his rise, the hybris of his splendor, and the crushing nemesis of his fall. Even the Promethean touch is not lacking in the withdrawal of Henry’s unconquered soul from God, as he looked back in flight at the burning city of Le Mans: “My God, since to crown my confusion and increase my disgrace, thou hast taken from me so vilely the town which on earth I have loved best, where I was born and bred, and where my father lies buried and the body of St. Julian too, I will have my revenge on thee also; I will of a surety withdraw from thee that thing that thou lovest best in me.”[40] Henry’s life needs no blasphemous closing in order to furnish inexhaustible material for moralizing, and in a period like the Middle Ages, given over as none other to moral lessons, it served to point many a tale of the crimes and fate of evil-doers. That vain and entertaining Welshman, Gerald de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, in whom a recent writer thinks he has discovered the proto-journalist,[41] found in Henry’s career the basis for a considerable book devoted to the Instruction of Princes. But whereas the ways of the gods are dark and unsearchable to the Greek tragedians, they have no mystery for Gerald. Henry’s punishment was due to his violations of religion, first in his marriage with Eleanor, the divorced wife of his feudal lord Louis VII, second in his quarrel with Archbishop Becket and the oppression of the church which followed, and third and worst of all, in his failure to take part in a crusade. The hammer of the church, Henry was born for destruction. The modern world is more cautious in the matter of explaining the inexplicable, and more prone to seek human causes when they can be found, yet the collapse of the Plantagenet empire is not the hardest of the historian’s problems. Something he will ascribe to larger forces of development, something he can hardly fail to attribute to the character of Henry’s sons and to his policy in dealing with them.
Henry II is not the only case in history of a king who could rule every house but his own, of a father who was shrewd and stern in his dealings with the world but swayed by unrequited affection and ill-timed weakness in dealing with his children. Knowing other men, he did not know his sons, and his grave errors in dealing with them were errors of public policy, since they concerned the government of his dominions and the succession to the throne. Even those who had no sympathy for Henry had little to say to excuse the character and the unfilial conduct of his sons. “From the Devil we come, and to the Devil we return,” Richard was reported to have said; and none cared to contradict him. Of the four lawful sons who grew to maturity, the eldest was Henry, crowned king by his father in 1170, and hence generally known as the Young King. Handsome and agreeable, prodigal in largesse, a patron of knightly sports and especially of the tournaments which were then coming into fashion, the Young King enjoyed great popularity in his lifetime and after his early death was mourned as a peer of Hector and Achilles and enshrined as a hero of courtly romance. Yet for all this there was no substantial foundation. He was faithless, ungrateful, utterly selfish, a thorn in his father’s side and a constant source of weakness to the empire. Married at the age of five to the daughter of Louis VII, he became the instrument of the French king in his intrigues against Henry II and the rallying point of feudal reaction and personal jealousy. King in name though not in fact, having been crowned merely as a means of securing the succession, Prince Henry craved at least an under-kingdom of his own, and on two occasions, in 1173 and again in 1183, led serious and widespread revolts against his father, the evil results of which were not undone by his death-bed repentance in the midst of the second uprising. In this revolt of 1183 he had with him his younger brother Geoffrey, duke of Brittany, ‘the son of perdition,’ equally false and treacherous, without even the redeeming virtue of popularity. Fortunately Geoffrey also died before his father.