CHAPTER XV.
The Later History.
1. The Norman Kings.—William Rufus began his reign as a Norman king of England only; Robert held the duchy of Normandy. But William got, first part and then the whole, of Normandy into his hands, and he afterwards warred with France. Here then is the beginning of our French wars, wars which the French writers from the very beginning speak of as wars of the English against the French. William Rufus’ reign was one of great oppression and wrong, and in his time, under his minister Randolf Flambard, the new customs about the holding of land got put into a definite shape. At his death in 1100 Normandy and England were again separated for a while, for Robert again took his duchy, while Henry was chosen King of the English. As he was the only one of the Conqueror’s children who was in any sense English, the native English were strongly for him, and helped him to keep the crown, when the Normans again wished for Robert. This is the last time that we hear of the English and Normans in England acting as separate classes of people. The reign of Henry, which lasted till 1135, was the time in which the two races were gradually joined together. Henry also pleased the English by marrying Edith or Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm King of Scots and Margaret the sister of the Ætheling Edgar. Thus his children sprang in the female line from the old kings. Then Robert ruled Normandy so ill that many of his own people wished to get rid of him; so in 1106 King Henry won the duchy at the battle of Tinchebrai. This was just forty years after William the Great had won England, and men began to say that things were now turned round. Henry’s son, William the Ætheling, died before him. He therefore wished his crown to go to his daughter Matilda, the widow of the Emperor Henry the Fifth, whom he married to Count Geoffrey of Anjou. For the rule to pass to a woman was a strange thing both in England and in Normandy. So when Henry died, men chose his sister’s son Stephen of Blois. Stephen was much loved by men of all races, but he had not strength to reign in those times. The friends of the Empress rose up against him, and through the whole of Stephen’s days, till 1154, there was such a time as England never saw before or since. All law vanished, and there was nothing but bloodshed and plunder. Meanwhile Count Geoffrey conquered Normandy. At last it was settled that Stephen should keep the crown for life, but that the son of Geoffrey and Matilda, Henry, now Duke of the Normans, should reign after him.
2. Henry of Anjou.—Duke Henry soon succeeded Stephen, and with him a new time began. He inherited Normandy and Anjou; he took England by the agreement with Stephen; and before he became king he had married Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, who brought with her all south-western Gaul. Thus the King of the English became a great prince on the mainland, and was far more powerful in Gaul than his lord the King of the French. Normandy and England alike became parts of a vast dominion, the ruler of which was in no way either Norman or English except by female descent. Yet, as he was English by female descent, men tried to see in him a representative of the old kings. In this state of things all the natives of England, of whatever race, began to draw closer together, and still more so under Henry’s sons, when a fashion set in of favouring men who were altogether strangers, neither English nor Norman. This reign was the time of the famous Archbishop Thomas, son of Gilbert Becket. He was born of Norman parents in England in Henry the First’s reign, and he was the first man born in the land who became archbishop after the Conquest. We are most concerned with him here, because he shows how the two races were now joined together. Thomas throughout feels and speaks as an Englishman, and everybody looks on him as such. Henry the Second was one of our greatest kings, the first since the Conquest who was really a lawgiver. A great deal of our later law dates from his time, and it is all law made for an united nation, without distinction of Normans and English. It is not clear whether Henry himself spoke English; but he certainly understood it, and it was commonly spoken by men of both races in his time. Henry also increased the greatness of his kingdom by establishing a fuller supremacy over Scotland and by beginning the conquest of Ireland.
3. The Sons of Henry.—After Henry in 1189 came his son Richard. He was born in England, but he was really the least English of all our kings. He was only twice in England during his reign, both times for a very little while. He first came to be crowned, and afterwards in 1194 he came to take his crown again. For he went to the crusade, and on his way back he was kept in prison by the Emperor Henry the Sixth. To him he did homage for something, as Harold did to William, and some say that it was for the crown of England that he did homage. The rest of his reign he was chiefly fighting in Gaul; but while he was away, England was ruled by his ministers. His first chief minister was his chancellor William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely. He came from Normandy, and he despised and mocked Englishmen in every way. But the name of Englishman now took in all men born in the land, and we find another bishop, also born in Normandy, speaking of it as a strange and shameful thing that Bishop William could speak no English. So the nation, under the King’s brother Earl John, rose and drove out the foreign chancellor. In the later part of Richard’s reign the land was better ruled by his minister Archbishop Hubert. On Richard’s death in 1199 Earl John succeeded quietly in Normandy, and was then elected King in England. But in Anjou the notion of hereditary right had taken deeper root, and there men were for Richard’s nephew Arthur, because his father Geoffrey was John’s elder brother. In England a nephew had always been passed over in such cases, and John’s election was quite lawful. King Philip of France took Arthur’s side, but Arthur was taken by John and, there is little doubt, was murdered by him in 1202. Then Philip gathered a court of peers and declared that John had by this crime forfeited all the lands that he held of the crown of France. To carry out this decree Philip, in 1203–4, conquered all continental Normandy; only the islands clave to their duke, and they have stayed with the English kings ever since. So our Queen still holds the true Normandy, the land which remained Norman, while the rest of the duchy became French. Philip also took Anjou and the other Angevin lands; but not Aquitaine, the duchy of Queen Eleanor, who was still living. Thus John and his successors lost continental Normandy, but kept Aquitaine.
4. Effects of the loss of Normandy.—This final separation of England and Normandy marks one of the chief stages in our story. If any un-English feelings still lingered in the heart of any Englishman of Norman descent, they quite died out now that England was the only country of all Englishmen, and Normandy had become a foreign and hostile land. While the first Angevin kings held their great dominion in Gaul, though England was their greatest and highest possession, we cannot say that it was in any way the head or centre, or that their other lands were dependencies of England. But now that the King of England held only the duchy of Aquitaine in the further part of Gaul, that duchy was distinctly a dependency of England, and it was always leading our kings into quarrels with France. Thus the rivalry between England and France, which began out of the union between England and Normandy, went on after Normandy was again joined to France. Thus both the foreign and the domestic position of England was fixed by the loss of Normandy. It is henceforth again a kingdom inhabited by an united English people, but a kingdom holding a large distant dependency as a fief of the French crown, and made thereby the special rival of France.
5. The Nation and the Kings.—It may seem strange that, just at this moment, when the chief outward signs of the Norman Conquest were swept away, and when the Normans in England had become thoroughly good Englishmen, things should in one point seem to go back. The thirteenth century, to which we have now come, is the time when the French tongue came into use for official documents. In old times men had used either English or Latin. After the Conquest English gradually died out, and for a while we have Latin only. Now French gradually comes in, and we have Latin and French. Thus, just when the English tongue was again coming to the front, it was again driven back. But this increased use of French was a mere fashion, owing very much to the great influence which France and the French tongue had just then over all parts of Europe. And now that the whole nation was united, it was a mere fashion, and not a badge of conquest. But while the nation got more English, the kings got more foreign. John (1199–1216) filled the land with foreign mercenaries, and became the man of the Pope. The nation wrung the Great Charter from him, and this marks a great stage. Long after the Conquest, whenever there was any bad rule, men called for the law of King Edward. But now we hear no more of the law of King Edward; the Great Charter gave all that had been asked for under that name. Under John’s son Henry the Third (1216–1272), the land was eaten up by strangers and plundered by the Popes. Then the nation joined together more than ever under Earl Simon of Montfort. Oddly enough, he was by birth a Frenchman in the strictest sense; but he inherited English estates, and he became a good Englishman, like King Cnut and Archbishop Anselm. Under him and under the next king Edward, (1272–1307) our national assemblies, now called Parliaments, began to take their present shape, with an elective House of Commons chosen by the shires and towns.
6. King Edward the First.—King Edward, the greatest of our later kings, and the first since the Conquest who bore an English name, was in his own day called Edward the Third or Fourth, as he really was; but afterwards he came to be called Edward the First, as the first of the name since the Conquest. Now at last we had a really English king, whose object was the greatness of England at home and abroad. He established the supremacy of England over Wales and Scotland more thoroughly than ever. Wales was now joined to England and was gradually incorporated with it; but the subjection of Scotland led to its complete independence. Like Henry the Second, King Edward was a great lawgiver; and from his day we may say that we had got back again our old laws and freedom in shapes better suited to the times. All signs of the Norman Conquest may now be said to have passed away, except the use of the French tongue. King Edward spoke English well, and much English was written in his time; and, when he was at war with France, he gave out that the French king wished to invade England and wipe out the English tongue. Still French went on as a fashion, and became more than ever the language of official writings.
7. The Wars with France.—The last traces of French influence in England were finally got rid of during the great war with France which began under Edward the First’s grandson Edward the Third (1327–1377). He claimed the crown of France through his mother, and a long war followed, which in 1360 was ended by the peace of Bretigny. By this Edward gave up his claim to France, but he kept the duchy of Aquitaine, the town of Calais which he had conquered, and the county of Ponthieu, not as fiefs of the crown of France, but as wholly independent dominions. Then the French broke the peace; the war began again, and England lost nearly everything except Calais, Bourdeaux, and Bayonne. But under Henry the Fifth (1413–1422) the war again began with vigour. He conquered Normandy, and made a peace by which he was to succeed to the crown of France. He died just too soon for this; but his son Henry the Sixth (1422–1460) succeeded in name to France as well as to England, and was crowned at Paris. But in his day the English were driven, first out of France, then out of Normandy, and then out of Aquitaine (1453); so that England lost both the old inheritance and the new conquest. Nothing was kept but Edward the Third’s conquest of Calais, which was not lost till 1558. These long wars became more and more, national wars of England against France. Edward the Third indeed, who had been brought up by a French mother, seems to have acted less as an English king than as a French prince claiming the French crown. But the war was quite national on the part of his subjects, and Henry the Fifth was an English king in every sense. These long wars with France naturally gave a blow to the use of French at home, as being the speech of the enemy. English quite gained the upper hand again in the course of the fourteenth century. Henry the Fifth even had ministers who could not speak French, and who therefore, in a conference with the French ministers, demanded that they should use Latin, as the common language of Western Christendom. Yet such is the power of habit that acts of parliament were written in French till quite late in the fifteenth century, and on some solemn occasions, as when the Queen gives her assent to an act of parliament, the French tongue is used still.
8. Summary.—Thus all things, the reign of Henry the First, the Angevin dominion and the break-up of that dominion, the un-English reigns of John and Henry the Third and the English reign of Edward the First, the long war with France, its victories and its defeats, all helped, in their several ways, to undo foreign influences in England and to make the land more and more English. We have in fact advanced by going back. All the best changes in our laws, institutions, and customs, have been really returns, under new forms, to our oldest ways of all. We have thus got rid of the effects of the Norman Conquest; but it has been by the help of the Norman Conquest itself that we have been able to get rid of them. The Conquest did in short give the old life and the old freedom a new start. It hindered them from dying out or going to sleep. Men had always something to strive for and struggle against; and so we were able to keep and to reform without ever destroying and building up afresh. All this came of the special nature of the Norman Conquest of England as it was explained at the beginning. But the work was greatly helped by the fact that the Normans were after all disguised kinsmen, and it was helped still more by the personal character of their leader, by the strong will and far-seeing wisdom of William the Great himself.
Oxford: Printed at the Clarendon Press by Horace Hart, M.A.