The History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (1066-1216)

by George Burton Adams

The greater part of the time of his stay abroad Henry spent in passing about from one point to another in his various provinces, after the usual custom of the medieval sovereign. In Eleanor's lands he could exert much less direct authority than in England or Normandy; the feudal baron of the south was more independent of his lord; but the opposition which was later to be so disastrous had not yet developed, and the year went by with nothing to record. Soon after his coming to Normandy he had an interview with Louis VII who then accepted his homage both for his father's and his wife's inheritance. If Louis had at one time intended to dispute the right of Eleanor to marry without his consent, he could not afford to continue that policy, so strong was Henry now. It was the part of wisdom to accept what could not be prevented, to arrange some way of living in peace with his rival, and to wait the chances of the future.

It is in connexion with this expedition to Normandy that there first appears in the reign of Henry II the financial levy known as "scutage"—a form of taxation destined to have a great influence on the financial and military history of England, and perhaps even a greater on its constitutional history. The invention of this tax was formerly attributed to the statesmanship of the young king, but we now know that it goes back at least to the time of his grandfather. The term "scutage" may be roughly translated "shield money," and, as the word implies, it was a tax assessed on the knight's fee, and was in theory a money payment accepted or exacted by the king in place of the military service due him under the feudal arrangements. The suggestion of such a commutation no doubt arose in connexion with the Church baronies, whose holders would find many reasons against personal service in the field, especially in the prohibition of the canon law, and who in most cases preferred not to enfeoff on their lands knights enough to meet their military obligations to the king. In such cases, when called on for the service, they would be obliged to hire the required number of knights, and the suggestion that they should pay the necessary sum to the king and let him find the soldiers would be a natural one and probably agreeable to both sides. The scutage of the present year does not seem to have gone beyond this practice. It was confined to Church lands, and the wider application of the principle, which is what we may attribute to Henry II or to some minister of his, was not attempted.

Returning to England in April, 1157, Henry took up again the work which had been interrupted by the demands of his brother Geoffrey. He was ready now to fly at higher game. Stephen's son William, whose great possessions in England and Normandy his father had tried so carefully to secure in the treaty which surrendered his rights to the crown, was compelled to give up his castles, and Hugh Bigod was no longer spared but was forced to do the same. David of Scotland had died before the death of Stephen, and his kingdom had fallen to his grandson Malcolm IV. The new king had too many troubles at home to make it wise for him to try to defend the gains which his grandfather had won from England, and before the close of this year he met Henry at Chester and gave up his claim on the northern counties, received the earldom of Huntingdon, and did homage to his cousin, but for what, whether for his earldom or his kingdom, was not clearly stated. Wales Stephen had practically abandoned, but Henry had no mind to do this, and a campaign during the summer in which there was some sharp fighting forced Owen, the prince of North Wales, to become his man, restored the defensive works of the district, and protected the Marcher lords in their occupation. The Christmas court was held at Lincoln; but warned perhaps by the recent ill luck of Stephen in defying the local superstition, Henry did not attempt to wear his crown in the city. Crown wearing and ceremony in general were distasteful to him, and at the next Easter festival at Worcester, together with the queen, he formally renounced the practice.

Half of the year 1158 Henry spent in England, but the work which lay before him at his accession was now done. Much work of importance and many events of interest concern the island kingdom in the later years of the reign, but these arise from new occasions and belong to a new age. The age of Stephen was at an end, the Norman absolutism was once more established, and the influence of the time of anarchy and weakness was felt no longer. It was probably the death of his brother and the question of the occupation of Nantes that led Henry to cross to Normandy in August. He went first of all, however, to meet the king of France near Gisors. There it was agreed that Henry's son Henry, now by the death of his eldest brother recognized as heir to the throne, should marry Louis's daughter Margaret. The children were still both infants, but the arrangement was made less for their sakes than for peace between their fathers and for substantial advantages which Henry hoped to gain. First he desired Louis's permission to take possession of Nantes, and later, on the actual marriage of the children, was to come the restoration of the Norman Vexin which Henry's father had been obliged to give up to France in the troubles of his time. Protected in this way from the only opposition which he had to fear, Henry had no difficulty in forcing his way into Nantes and in compelling the count of Britanny to recognize his possession. This diplomatic success had been prepared, possibly secured, by a brilliant embassy undertaken shortly before by Henry's chancellor Thomas Becket. One of the biographers of the future saint, one indeed who dwells less upon his spiritual life and miracles than on his external history, rejoices in the details of this magnificent journey, the gorgeous display, the lavish expenditure, the royal generosity, which seem intended to impress the French court with the wealth of England and the greatness of his master, but which lead us to suspect the chancellor of a natural delight in the splendours of the world.

With his feet firmly planted in Britanny, in a position where he could easily take advantage of any future turn of events to extend his power, Henry next turned his attention to the south where an even greater opportunity seemed to offer. The great county of Toulouse stretched from the south-eastern borders of Eleanor's lands towards the Mediterranean and the Rhone over a large part of that quarter of France. A claim of some sort to this county, the exact nature of which we cannot now decide from the scanty and inconsistent accounts of the case which remain to us, had come down to Eleanor from the last two dukes of Aquitaine, her father and grandfather. The claim had at any rate seemed good enough to Louis VII while he was still the husband of the heiress to be pushed, but he had not succeeded in establishing it. The rights of Eleanor were now in the hands of Henry and, after consulting with his barons, he determined to enforce them in a military campaign in the summer of 1159.

By the end of June the attacking forces were gathering in the south. The young king of Scotland was there as the vassal of the king of England and was knighted by his lord. Allies were secured of the lords to the east and south, especially the assistance of Raymond Berenger who was Count of Barcelona and husband of the queen of Aragon, and who had extensive claims and interests in the valley of the Rhone. His daughter was to be married to Henry's son Richard, who had been born a few months before. Negotiations and interviews with the king of France led to no result, and at the last moment Louis threw himself into Toulouse and prepared to stand a siege with the Count, Raymond V, whose rights he now looked at from an entirely different point of view. This act of the king led to a result which he probably did not anticipate. Apparently the feudal spirit of Henry could not reconcile itself to a direct attack on the person of his suzerain. He withdrew from the siege, and the expedition resulted only in the occupation of some of the minor towns of the county. Here Thomas the chancellor appears again in his worldly character. He had led to the war a body of knights said to have been 700 in number, the finest and best-equipped contingent in the field. Henry's chivalry in refusing to fight his suzerain seemed to him the height of folly, and he protested loudly against it. This chivalry indeed did not prevent the vassal from attacking some of his lord's castles in the north, but no important results were gained, and peace was soon made between them.

Far more important in permanent consequences than the campaign itself were the means which the king took to raise the money to pay for it. It was at this time, so far as our present evidence goes and unless a precedent had been made in a small way in a scutage of 1157 for the campaign in Wales, that the principle of scutage was extended from ecclesiastical to lay tenants in chief. Robert of Torigny, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, tells us that Henry, having regard to the length and difficulty of the way, and not wishing to vex the country knights and the mass of burgesses and rustics, took from each knight's fee in Normandy sixty shillings Angevin (fifteen English), and from all other persons in Normandy and in England and in all his other lands what he thought best, and led into the field with him the chief barons with a few of their men and a great number of paid knights.

Our knowledge of the treasury accounts of this period is not sufficient to enable us to explain every detail of this taxation, but it is sufficient to enable us to say that the statement of the abbot is in general accurate. The tax on the English knight's fee was heavier than that on the Norman; payment does not seem to have been actually required from all persons outside the strict feudal bond, nor within it for that matter; and the exact relationship between payment and service in the field we cannot determine. Two things, however, of interest in the history of taxation in relation both to earlier and later times seem clear. In the first place a new form of land-tax had been discovered of special application to the feudal community, capable of transforming a limited and somewhat uncertain personal service into a far more satisfactory money payment, capable also of considerable extension and, in the hands of an absolute king, of an arbitrary development which apparently some forms of feudal finance had already undergone. This was something new,—that is, it was as new as anything ever is in constitutional history. It was the application of an old process to a new use. In the second place large sums of money were raised, in a purely arbitrary way, it would seem, both as to persons paying and sums paid, from members of the non-feudal community and also from some tenants in chief who at the same time paid scutage. These payments appear to have rested on the feudal principle of the gracious or voluntary aid and to have been called "dona," though the people of that time were in general more accurate in the distinctions they made between things than in the use of the terms applied to them. There was nothing new about this form of taxation. Glimpses which we get here and there of feudalism in operation lead us to suspect that, in small matters and with much irregularity of application to persons, it was in not infrequent use. These particular payments, pressing as they did heavily on the Church and exciting its vigorous objection, carry us back with some interest to the beginning of troubles between Anselm and the Red King over a point of the same kind.

In theory and in strict law these "gifts" were voluntary, both as to whether they should be made at all and as to their amount, but under a sovereign so strong as Henry II or William Rufus, the king must be satisfied. Church writers complained, with much if not entire justice, that this tax was "contrary to ancient custom and due liberty," and they accused Thomas the chancellor of suggesting it. As a matter of fact this tax was less important in the history of taxation than the extension of the principle of scutage which accompanied it. The contribution which it made to the future was not so much in the form of the tax as in the precedent of arbitrary taxation, established in an important instance of taxation at the will of the king. This precedent carried over and applied to scutage in its new form becomes in the reign of Henry's son one of the chief causes of revolutionary changes, and thus constitutes "the scutage of Toulouse" of 1159, if we include under that term the double taxation of the year, one of the great steps forward of the reign of Henry.

At the close of the Toulouse campaign an incident of some interest occurred in the death of Stephen's son William and the ending of the male line of Stephen's succession. His Norman county of Mortain was at once taken in hand by Henry as an escheated fief, and was not filled again until it was given years afterwards to his youngest son. To Boulogne Henry had no right, but he could not afford to allow his influence in the county to decline, though the danger of its passing under the influence of Louis VII was slight. Stephen's only living descendant was his daughter Mary, now Abbess of Romsey. The pope consented to her marriage to a son of the Count of Flanders, and Boulogne remained in the circle of influence in which it had been fixed by Henry I. The wide personal possessions of William in England were apparently added to the royal domain which had already increased so greatly since the death of Stephen.