A great baron, in ancient times, considered himself as a kind of sovereign within his territory; and was attended by courtiers and dependents more zealously attached to him than the ministers of state and the great officers were commonly to THEIR sovereign. He often maintained in his court the parade of royalty, by establishing a justiciary, constable, mareschal, chamberlain, seneschal, and chancellor, and assigning to each of these officers a separate province and command. He was usually very assiduous in exercising his jurisdiction; and took such delight in that image of sovereignty, that it was found necessary to restrain his activity, and prohibit him by law from holding courts too frequently [z]. It is not to be doubted, but the example, set him by the prince of a mercenary and sordid extortion, would be faithfully copied, and that all his good and bad offices, his justice and injustice, were equally put to sale. He had the power, with the king's consent, to exact talliages even from the free citizens who lived within his barony; and as his necessities made him rapacious, his authority was usually found to be more oppressive and tyrannical than that of the sovereign [a]. He was ever engaged in hereditary or personal animosities or confederacies with his neighbours, and often gave protection to all desperate adventurers and criminals, who could be useful in serving his violent purposes. He was able alone, in times of tranquillity, to obstruct the execution of justice within his territories; and by combining with a few malecontent barons of high rank and power, he could throw the state into convulsions. And, on the whole, though the royal authority was confined within bounds, and often within very narrow ones, yet the check was irregular, and frequently the source of great disorders; nor was it derived from the liberty of the people, but from the military power of many petty tyrants, who were equally dangerous to the prince and oppressive to the subject. [FN [z] Dugd. Jurid. Orig. p. 26. [a] Madox, Hist. of the Exch. p. 520.]
[MN The Church.] The power of the church was another rampart against royal authority; but this defence was also the cause of many mischiefs and inconveniences. The dignified clergy, perhaps, were not so prone to immediate violence as the barons; but as they pretended to a total independence on the state, and could always cover themselves with the appearances of religion, they proved, in one respect, an obstruction to the settlement of the kingdom, and to the regular execution of the laws. The policy of the Conqueror was in this particular liable to some exception. He augmented the superstitious veneration for Rome, to which that age was so much inclined; and he broke those bands of connexion, which, in the Saxon times, had preserved an union between the lay and the clerical orders. He prohibited the bishops from sitting in the county courts; he allowed ecclesiastical causes to be tried in spiritual courts only ; and he so much exalted the power of the clergy, that of sixty thousand two hundred and fifteen knights' fees, into which he divided England, he placed no less than twenty- eight thousand and fifteen under the church [c]. [FN Char. Will. apud Wilkins, p. 230. Spellm. Conc. vol. ii. p. 14. [c] Spellm. Gloss. in verb. MANUS MORTUA. We are not to imagine, as some have done, that the church possessed lands in this proportion, but only that they and their vassals enjoyed such a proportionable part of the landed property.]
[MN Civil laws.] The right of primogeniture was introduced with the feudal law: an institution which is hurtful, by producing and maintaining an unequal division of private property; but is advantageous, in another respect, by accustoming the people to a preference in favour of the eldest son, and thereby preventing a partition or disputed succession in the monarchy. The Normans introduced the use of surnames, which tend to preserve the knowledge of families and pedigrees. They abolished none of the old absurd methods of trial by the cross or ordeal; and they added a new absurdity, the trial by single combat [d], which became a regular part of jurisprudence, and was conducted with all the order, method, devotion, and solemnity imaginable [e]. The ideas of chivalry also seem to have been imported by the Normans: no traces of those fantastic notions are to be found among the plain and rustic Saxons. [FN [d] LL. Will. cap. 68. [e] Spellm. Gloss. in verb. CAMPUS. The last instance of these duels was in the 15th of Eliz. So long did that absurdity remain.]
[MN Manners.] The feudal institutions, by raising the military tenants to a kind of sovereign dignity, by rendering personal strength and valour requisite, and by making every knight and baron his own protector and avenger, begat that martial pride and sense of honour, which, being cultivated and embellished by the poets and romance-writers of the age, ended in chivalry. The virtuous knight fought not only in his own quarrel, but in that of the innocent, of the helpless, and, above all, of the fair, whom he supposed to be for ever under the guardianship of his valiant arm. The uncourteous knight who, from his castle, exercised robbery on travellers, and committed violence on virgins, was the object of his perpetual indignation; and he put him to death, without scruple, or trial, or appeal, whenever he met with him. The great independence of men made personal honour and fidelity the chief tie among them; and rendered it the capital virtue of every true knight, or genuine professor of chivalry. The solemnities of single combat, as established by law, banished the notion of every thing unfair or unequal in rencounters; and maintained an appearance of courtesy between the combatants till the moment of their engagement. The credulity of the age grafted on this stock the notion of giants, enchanters, dragons, spells [f], and a thousand wonders, which still multiplied during the time of the crusades; when men, returning from so great a distance, used the liberty of imposing every fiction on their believing audience. These ideas of chivalry infected the writings, conversation, and behaviour of men, during some ages; and even after they were, in a great measure, banished by the revival of learning, they left modern GALLANTRY and the POINT OF HONOUR, which still maintain their influence, and are the genuine offspring of those ancient affectations. [FN [f] In all legal single combats, it was part of the champion's oath, that he carried not about him any herb, spell, or enchantment, by which he might procure victory. Dugd. Orig. Jurid. p. 82.]
The concession of the great charter, or rather its full establishment, (for there was a considerable interval of time between the one and the other,) gave rise, by degrees, to a new species of government, and introduced some order and justice into the administration. The ensuing scenes of our history are therefore somewhat different from the preceding. Yet the great charter contained no establishment of new courts, magistrates, or senates, nor abolition of the old. It introduced no new distribution of the powers of the commonwealth, and no innovation in the political or public law of the kingdom. It only guarded, and that merely by verbal clauses, against such tyrannical practices as are incompatible with civilized government, and, if they become very frequent, are incompatible with all government. The barbarous license of the kings, and perhaps of the nobles, was thenceforth somewhat more restrained: men acquired some more security for their properties and their liberties: and government approached a little nearer to that end for which it was originally instituted, the distribution of justice, and the equal protection of the citizens. Acts of violence and iniquity in the crown, which before were only deemed injurious to individuals, and were hazardous chiefly in proportion to the number, power, and dignity of the persons affected by them, were now regarded, in some degree, as public injuries, and as infringements of a charter calculated for general security. And thus the establishment of the great charter, without seeming anywise to innovate in the distribution of political power, became a kind of epoch in the constitution.
CHAPTER XII.
HENRY III.
SETTLEMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT.—GENERAL PACIFICATION.—DEATH OF THE PROTECTOR.—SOME COMMOTIONS.—HUBERT DE BURGH DISPLACED.—THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER MINISTER.—KINGS PARTIALITY TO FOREIGNERS.— GRIEVANCES.—ECCLESIASTICAL GRIEVANCES.—EARL OF CORNWALL ELECTED KING OF THE ROMANS.—DISCONTENT OF THE BARONS.—SIMON DE MOUNTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER.—PROVISIONS OF OXFORD.USURPATION OF THE BARONS.—PRINCE EDWARD.—CIVIL WARS OF THE BARONS.—REFERENCE TO THE KING OF FRANCE.— RENEWAL OF THE CIVIL WARS.—BATTLE OF LEWES.—HOUSE OF COMMONS.— BATTLE OF EVESHAM AND DEATH OF LEICESTER.—SETTLEMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT.—DEATH—AND CHARACTER OF THE KING.—MISCELLANEOUS TRANSACTIONS OF THIS REIGN.
[MN 1216.] Most sciences, in proportion as they increase and improve, invent methods by which they facilitate their reasonings; and, employing general theorems, are enabled to comprehend, in a few propositions, a great number of inferences and conclusions. History also, being a collection of facts which are multiplying without end, is obliged to adopt such arts of abridgment, to retain the more material events, and to drop all the minute circumstances, which are only interesting during the time, or to the persons engaged in the transactions. This truth is no where more evident than with regard to the reign upon which we are going to enter. What mortal could have the patience to write or read a long detail of such frivolous events as those with which it is filled, or attend to a tedious narrative which would follow, through a series of fifty-six years, the caprices and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? The chief reason why Protestant writers have been so anxious to spread out the incidents of this reign is, in order to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of the court of Rome; and to prove that the great dignitaries of the Catholic church, while they pretended to have nothing in view but the salvation of souls, had bent all their attention to the acquisition of riches, and were restrained by no sense of justice or of honour in the pursuit of that great object [a]. But this conclusion would readily be allowed them, though it were not illustrated by such a detail of uninteresting incidents; and follows, indeed, by an evident necessity, from the very situation in which that church was placed with regard to the rest of Europe. For, besides that ecclesiastical power, as it can always cover its operations under a cloak of sanctity, and attacks men on the side where they dare not employ their reason, lies less under control than civil government; besides this general cause, I say, the pope and his courtiers were foreigners to most of the churches which they governed; they could not possibly have any other object than to pillage the provinces for present gain; and as they lived at a distance, they would be little awed by shame or remorse, in employing every lucrative expedient which was suggested to them. England being one of the most remote provinces attached to the Romish hierarchy, as well as the most prone to superstition, felt severely during this reign, while its patience was not yet fully exhausted, the influence of these causes; and we shall often have occasion to touch cursorily upon such incidents. But we shall not attempt to comprehend every transaction transmitted to us; and, till the end of the reign, when the events become more memorable, we shall not always observe an exact chronological order in our narration. [FN [a] M. Paris, p. 623.]
[MN Settlement of the government.] The Earl of Pembroke, who, at the time of John's death, was Mareschal of England, was, by his office, at the head of the armies, and consequently, during a state of civil wars and convulsions, at the head of the government; and it happened fortunately for the young monarch and for the nation, that the power could not have been intrusted into more able and more faithful hands. This nobleman, who had maintained his loyalty unshaken to John, during the lowest fortune of that monarch, determined to support the authority of the infant prince; nor was he dismayed at the number and violence of his enemies. Sensible that Henry, agreeably to the prejudices of the times, would not be deemed a sovereign till crowned and anointed by a churchman, he immediately carried the young prince to Gloucester, [MN 1216. 28th Oct.] where the ceremony of coronation was performed, in the presence of Gualo, the legate, and of a few noblemen, by the Bishops of Winchester and Bath . As the concurrence of the papal authority was requisite to support the tottering throne, Henry was obliged to swear fealty to the pope, and renew that homage to which his father had already subjected the kingdom [c]; and in order to enlarge the authority of Pembroke, and to give him a more regular and legal title to it, a general council of the barons was soon after summoned at Bristol, [MN 11th Nov.] where that nobleman was chosen protector of the realm. [FN M. Paris, p. 200. Hist. Croyl. cont. p. 474. W. Heming. p. 562 Trivet, p. 168. [c] M. Paris, p. 200.]