Relations between Rufus and Anselm. Of these three the first on the list must claim the precedence. The relations between Rufus and Anselm involve the whole civil and ecclesiastical policy of the reign. Working of the new ideas. The dispute between King and Primate was the outcome of all that had been working in silence while the Red King was winning castles in Normandy, receiving the homage of Scotland, and enlarging the bounds of England. During those years one side of the results of the Norman Conquest was put into formal shape. Between the fall of Rochester and the restoration of Carlisle, new ideas, new claims, had come to their full growth. New position of the King. Those ideas, those claims, had made the kingship of William the Red something marked by not a few points of difference from the kingship either of the Confessor or of the Conqueror. Ecclesiastical position of the Conqueror. Nowhere does the difference between the elder and the younger William stand forth more clearly than in their dealings with the spiritual power. No king, as I have often shown, was more truly Supreme Governor of the Church within his realm than was the Conqueror of England, her defender against the claims of Rome. William and Lanfranc. But William the Great sought and found his fellow-worker in all things in an archbishop likeminded with himself. We can hardly conceive the reign of the Conqueror without the primacy of Lanfranc. Opposite conduct of Rufus. But the great object of William the Red was to avoid the restraints which could not fail to be placed upon his self-will, if he had one standing at his side whose place it was to be at once the chief shepherd of the English Church and the tribune of the English people. Vacancy of the see of Canterbury. 1089–1093. For three years and more from the death of Lanfranc the see of Canterbury remained vacant. Such a vacancy was without precedent; but it was designed itself to become a precedent. It was by no accident, from no momentary cause, that William delayed the appointment of any successor to his old guardian and counsellor. Its policy. It was part of a deliberate policy affecting the whole ecclesiastical and civil institutions of the realm. Influence of Randolf Flambard. And that policy, there can be little doubt, was the device of a single subtle and malignant genius by whom the whole internal administration of the Red King’s reign was guided.

§ 1. The Administration of Randolf Flambard.
1089–1099.

The chief minister, if we may so call him, of William Rufus, during these years, and indeed to the end of his reign, was that Randolf Flambard or Passeflambard of whom we have already heard.[904] Early history of Flambard. His early history is not easy to trace, beyond the general fact that he rose to power by the same path by which so many others rose in his day, by service in the King’s chapel and chancery.[905] Said to have been settled in England T. R. E. It has been generally thought that he was settled in England as early as the days of Eadward; but it may be doubted whether the evidence bears out this belief. And the course of his life is certainly easier to understand, if we do not bring him into England so soon, or attribute to him so great a length of life, as we must do if we look on him as having been already a land-owner in England before the Conquest.[906] Said to have been in the service of Bishop Maurice [Bishop of London 1086–1107]. On the other hand, if we accept the story which makes him pass to the King’s service from the service of Maurice Bishop of London, he must have been the King’s clerk for so short a time before the death of the Conqueror as hardly to give room for the usual stages of official promotion. Another version places him in the King’s service from his earliest years.[907] Perhaps we may guess that the name of the Bishop of London is wrongly given, and that Flambard had really been in the service of one of Maurice’s predecessors, of Hugh of Orival or of the more famous William. Said to have held the deanery of Twinham. His reason for leaving his episcopal patron is said to have been that a deanery which he held was taken from him, a story which oddly connects itself with another, according to which he was at one time dean or other head of the canons of Twinham—​better known as Christchurch—​in Hampshire.[908] Preferments held by the clerks of kings and bishops. The story, true or false, like the earlier life of Thomas of London, illustrates the way in which the highest ecclesiastical preferments short of bishoprics and abbeys were held by these clerical servants of kings and bishops. Clerical they often were only in the widest sense; they were sometimes merely tonsured, and they seldom took priest’s orders till they were themselves promoted to bishoprics.[909] Flambard a priest. Randolf Flambard however was a priest;[910] he could therefore discharge the duties of his deanery in person, if he ever troubled himself to go near it. Character of Flambard. Otherwise there was very little of the churchman, or indeed of the Christian, about the future Bishop of Durham and builder of Saint Cuthberht’s nave. At all events it was wholly by his personal qualities, such as they were, that Randolf Flambard made his way to the highest places in Church and State. In his day the Church supplied the readiest opening for the service of the State, and service to the State was again rewarded by all but the highest honours of the Church.

His parents. The man who was practically to rule England had at least little advantage on the score of birth. He is set before us as the son of a low-born priest in the diocese of Bayeux and of a mother who bore the character of a witch, and who was reported to have lost an eye through the agency of the powers with which she was too familiar.[911] Handsome in person, ready of wit, free of speech and of hand, unlearned, loose of life, clever and unscrupulous in business of every kind, he made friends and he made enemies; but he rose. The name Flambard. The surname which cleaves to him in various shapes and spellings is said to have been given to him in the court of the Conqueror by the dispenser Robert, because he pushed himself on at the expense of his betters, like a burning flame.[912] His financial skill. But his genius lay most of all in the direction of finance, in days when finance meant to transfer, by whatever means, the greatest amount of the subject’s money into the coffers of the King. Mention of him in the Conqueror’s reign. One story describes him as sent on such an errand by the Conqueror into the lands of his future bishopric, and as smitten for his crime by the wonder-working hand of Saint Cuthberht himself.[913] There is every reason to believe that he had a hand in drawing up the Great Survey.[914] His share in Domesday. But, while William the Great lived, he seems not to have risen to any high place. Towards the end of his reign the Conqueror did begin to give away bishoprics to his own clerks,[915] but still hardly to such clerks as Randolf Flambard. Nor did the Conqueror need a minister, in the sense of needing one who should in some sort fill his place and exercise his powers. The elder William could rule his kingdom himself, or at most with the advice of the special counsellor whom ancient custom gave him in the person of Lanfranc. His rise under Rufus. But the younger William, sultan-like in his mood, needed, like other sultans, the help of a vizier. And he found the fittest of all viziers for his purpose in the supple clerk from the Bessin.

The reign of Flambard seems to have begun as soon as Lanfranc was gone. He thoroughly suited the Red King’s views. He was ready to gather in wealth for his master from every quarter; he knew how to squeeze the most out of rich and poor; when a tax of a certain amount was decreed, he knew how to make it bring in double its nominal value.[916] He alone thoroughly knew his art; no one else, said the laughing King, cared so little whose hatred he brought on himself, so that he only pleased his master.[917] His alleged new Domesday. He stands charged in one account of his deeds with declaring the Great Survey to be drawn up on principles not favourable enough to the royal hoard, and with causing it to be supplanted by a new inquisition which made the Red King richer than his father.[918] This story is very doubtful; but it is thoroughly in character. His official position. In any case Flambard rose to the highest measure both of power and of official dignity that was open to him. His office and its duties are described in various ways; in that age official titles and functions were less accurately distinguished than they were a little later.[919] He holds the Justiciarship. But there seems no doubt that Flambard, the lawyer whom none could withstand,[920] held the formal office of Justiciar. Till his time that post had not, as a distinct office, reached the full measure of its greatness. Growth of the office under him. It was Flambard himself who raised it to the height of power and dignity which accompanied it when it was held by Roger of Salisbury and Randolf of Glanville. He was to the post of Justiciar what Thomas of London two generations later was to the post of Chancellor; he was the man who knew how to magnify his office.[921] His “driving” of the Gemóts. In that office “he drave all the King’s gemóts over all England.”[922] The King’s thegns who had come to the local assembly on the King’s errand in the days of Æthelred and Cnut[923] had now grown into a mighty and terrible power. How Flambard drave the gemóts we learn elsewhere. He was fierce alike to the suppliant and to the rebel.[924] Suppliant and rebel alike were in his eyes useful only as means for further filling the mighty chest at Winchester. He loses his land for the New Forest. Strangely enough, he himself, clerk and Norman as he was, had found neither birth nor order protect him when the Conqueror had needed a part of his land for the creation of the New Forest.[925] His zeal for the King’s interests. On the principle that man is ever most ready to inflict on others the wrongs which he has borne himself, Flambard, who himself in some sort ranked among the disinherited, was of all ministers of the royal will the most eager to draw the heritage of every man, without respect to birth or order, into the hands of the master whom he served too faithfully.

But we shall altogether misunderstand both Flambard and his master, if we take either of them for vulgar spoilers, living as it were from hand to mouth, and casually grasping any sources of gain which chanced to be thrown in their way. His changes and exactions systematic. Whatever Flambard did he did according to rule and system; nay more, he did it according to the severest rules of logic. Amidst the vague declamations which set him before us as the general robber of all men, we light on particular facts and phrases which give us the clue to the real nature of his doings. His alleged spoliation of the rich. It is worth notice that, in more than one picture, the rich are enlarged on as the special victims of his extortions; in one the Ætheling Henry himself is spoken of as having suffered deeply at his hands.[926] His dealings with the Ætheling Henry. We may guess that this has some special reference to the way in which Henry was defrauded of the lands of his mother, a business in which Flambard is likely enough to have had a share.[927] These references to the wrongs done to the rich have their significance; they point to a cunningly devised system of Flambard’s, by which, the greater a man’s estate was, the more surely was he marked for extortion. The legislation of Flambard, if we can call that legislation which seems never to have been set down in any formal statute,[928] was not at all of the kind which catches the small flies and lets the large ones get through. Witness of the Chronicle. As we have seen in some other cases,[929] a seemingly casual expression of our native Chronicler is the best record of a matter of no small constitutional importance. The King to be every man’s heir. The Red King “would be ilk man’s heir, ordered and lewd.”[930] In those words lay the whole root of the matter. The great work of the Flambard’s lasting burthens and exactions.administration of Flambard, the great work of the reign of Rufus, was to put in order a system of rules by which the King might be the heir of every man. Those few words, which might seem to have dropped from the Chronicler in a moment of embittered sarcasm, do indeed set forth the formal beginning of a series of burthens and exactions under which Englishmen, and preeminently the rich and noble among Englishmen, groaned for not much less than six hundred years after Flambard’s days.

The Feudal Tenures. In short the “unrighteousness” ordained by William Rufus and Randolf Flambard[931] are no other than those Abolished 1660. feudal tenures and feudal burthens which even the Parliament which elected Charles the Second, in the midst of its self-abasement and betrayal of its own ancient rights, declared to have been “much more burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom than they have been beneficial to the king.”[932] Assuredly they were as burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom in the eleventh century as they were in the seventeenth; but assuredly they were found in the eleventh century to be highly beneficial to the King, or they would not have been ordained by Rufus and Flambard. Tenure in chivalry. We have reached the age of chivalry; and tenure in chivalry, with all its mean and pettifogging incidents, was put into a systematic form for the special benefit of the coffers of the king who was before all things the good knight, the preux chevalier, the probus miles. The King “would be the heir of ilk man, ordered and lewd.” Wardship. To that end the estate of the minor heir was to be made a prey; he was himself to be begged and granted and sold Marriage. like an ox or an ass;[933] the heiress, maid or widow, was in the like sort to be begged and granted, sold into unwilling wedlock, or else forced to pay the price which a chivalrous tenure demanded for the right either to remain unmarried or to marry according to her own will. Dealings with bishoprics and abbeys. The bishopric or the abbey was to be left without a pastor, and its lands were to be let to farm for the King’s profit, because the King would be the heir of the priest as well as of the layman. Agency of Flambard in systematizing the feudal tenures. That all this, in its fully developed and systematic form, was the work of Randolf Flambard, I hope I may now assume. I have argued the point at some length elsewhere,[934] and I need not now do more than pass lightly over some of the main points. The evidence. Certain tendencies, certain customs, of which, under the Conqueror and even before the Conqueror, Henry’s charters. we see the germs, but only the germs, appear at the accession of Henry the First as firmly established rules, which Henry does not promise wholly to abolish, while he does promise to redress their abuses. It follows that they had put on their systematic shape in the intermediate time, that is, during the reign of Rufus. One of these abuses, that which for obvious reasons was most largely dwelled on by our authorities, namely the new way of dealing with ecclesiastical property, is distinctly spoken of as a novelty, and a novelty of Flambard’s devising. The obvious inference is that the whole system, a system which logically hangs together in the most perfect way, was the device of the same subtle and malignant brain. Importance of seemingly casual phrases. And having got thus far, we are now enabled to see the full force of those seemingly casual expressions in the writers of the time of which I have already spoken. It was the royal claims of relief, of wardship, and marriage, systematically and mercilessly enforced, no less than the royal claim to enjoy the fruits of vacant ecclesiastical benefices, which are branded in Latin as the injustitiæ of Rufus and Flambard, and which in our own tongue take the shape of the King’s claim to be the heir of every man.

This last pithy phrase takes in all the new claims which were now set up over all lands, whether held by spiritual or temporal owners, and, in some cases at least, over personal property also. All the “unrighteousnesses,” all “the evil customs,” which the charter of Henry promises to reform[935] come under this one head. Flambard’s theory of land-holding. In Flambard’s system of tenure there could be no such thing as an ancient eðel or allod, held of no lord, and burthened only with such payments or duties as the law might lay upon its owner. With him all land was in the strictest sense loanland.[936] The owner had at most a life-interest in it; at his death it fell back to the king, for the king was to be the heir of every man. Relief and redemption. The king might grant it to the son of the last owner; but, if so, it was by a fresh grant,[937] for which the new grantee had to pay. And the terms of Henry’s charter imply that the payment was arbitrary and extortionate. Henry promises that the heir of a tenant-in-chief shall not be constrained to redeem—​to buy back—​his father’s lands as had been done in his brother’s time; he shall relieve them by a just and lawful relief.[938] Under Rufus then it was held that the land had, by the former holder’s death, actually passed to the king, as the common heir of all men, and that, if the son or other representative of the former holder wished to possess it, he must, in the strictest sense, buy it back from the king. Henry acknowledges the rights of the heir, while still maintaining the theory of the fresh grant. The heir is not to redeem—​to buy back—​his father’s land; he is merely to relieve it—​to take it up again, and he is to pay only the sum prescribed by legal custom, the equivalent of the ancient heriot or the modern succession-duty. So it is with personal property. Dealings with men’s wills. The Red King, it is plain, claimed to be the heir of men’s money, as well as of their land. For one of Henry’s promised reforms is that the wills of his barons and others his men shall stand good, that their money shall go to the purposes to which they may have bequeathed it, and that, if they die without wills, their wives, children, kinsfolk, or lawful men, shall dispose of it as they may think best for the dead man’s soul.[939] Such a reform could not have been needed unless William Rufus had been in the habit of interfering with men’s free right of bequest. Older theory of wills. And it might have been plausibly argued that the right of bequest was no natural right of man, that the most ancient legal doctrine both of Rome and of England was that a will was an exceptional act, which needed the confirmation of the sovereign power. If such a doctrine had anyhow come to the knowledge of Flambard, it would assuredly seem to him a natural inference that no such confirmation should be granted save at such a price as the king might see fit to demand.

Wardship. But of all the devices of Flambard, there was one which, it would seem, was specially his own, one which was at once the most oppressive of all and that which followed most logically from the nature of feudal tenure. This was the lord’s right of wardship. This claim starts from the undoubted doctrine that the fief is after all only a conditional possession of its holder, that he holds it only on the terms of discharging the military service which is due from it. Nothing was easier than to argue that, when the fief passed to an heir who was from his youth incapable of discharging that service, the fief should go back into the lord’s hands till the heir had reached the time of life when he could discharge it. The abuses and oppressions which such a right led to need hardly be dwelled on; they are written in every page of our legal history from the days of Rufus to the days of Charles the First. Nothing now enriches an estate like a long minority; in those times the heir, when at last he came into possession, found his estate impoverished in every way by the temporary occupation of the king or of the king’s favourite to whom the wardship had been granted or sold. Its logical character. Yet it cannot be denied that the argument by which the right of wardship was established was, as a piece of legal argument, quite unanswerable. And of all the feudal exactions certainly none was more profitable. Its oppressive working. The tenant-in-chief who died, perhaps fighting in the king’s cause, and who left an infant son behind him, had the comfort of thinking that his estate would, perhaps for the next twenty years, go to enrich the coffers of his sovereign. On this head Henry speaks less clearly than he speaks on some other points; but his words certainly seem to imply that the wardship of the tenant-in-chief was to go, not to the king, but to the mother or to some kinsman.[940] If so, either Henry himself or his successors thought better of the matter. The right of wardship, as a privilege of the king or other lord, appears in full force in the law-book of Randolf of Glanville.[941]

Extent of Flambard’s changes. When we attribute all these exactions and “unrighteousnesses” to the device of Flambard, it is of course not meant that they were altogether unheard of either before his day or beyond the lands over which his influence reached. Traces of these claims, or of some of them, are to be found wherever and whenever feudal notions about the tenure of land had crept in. All that is meant is that claims which were vaguely growing up were put by Flambard into a distinct and systematic shape. What William the Great did on occasion, for reasons of state, William the Red did as a matter of course, as an ordinary means of making money.[942] Wardship and marriage special to England and Normandy. And it is significant that two of the most oppressive of these claims, that of wardship and the kindred claim of marriage, were, in their fully developed shape, peculiar or nearly so to the lands where Rufus reigned and Flambard governed, to the English kingdom and the Norman duchy.[943] The two sides of feudalism. I have said elsewhere that, of the two sides of feudalism, our Norman kings carefully shut out the side which tended to weaken the royal power, and carefully fostered the side which tended to strengthen it.[944] Both sides of this process were busily at work during the reign of Rufus. The great law of the Conqueror, the law of Salisbury, which decreed that duty to the king should come before all other duties, was practically tried and practically confirmed in the struggle which showed that no man in England was strong enough to stand against the king.[945] England in what sense feudal. England was not to become feudal in the sense in which Germany and France became feudal. But in all those points where the doctrines of feudal tenure could be turned to the king’s enrichment, England became of all lands the most feudal. Flambard the lawgiver of English feudalism. Enactor of no statute, author of no code or law-book, Randolf Flambard was in effect the lawgiver of feudalism, so far as that misleading word has any meaning at all on English soil.