During the winter the barons had kept up their negotiations with Louis, and an agreement had finally been made. They had pledged themselves to do homage to Louis and accept him as king, and had sent to France twenty-four hostages "of the noblest of the land" in pledge of their fidelity. Louis in return sent over small bodies of men to their aid and promised himself to follow in person in the spring. To this step the barons were indeed driven, unless they were prepared to submit, because of the strength the king had gained since the signing of the charter and their own comparative weakness. Why this change had taken place so soon after the barons had been all-powerful cannot now be fully explained, but so far as we can see the opinion of a contemporary that they would have been overcome but for the aid of the French is correct. Against the invasion of Louis, John had two lines of defence, the pope and the fleet. Innocent, who had once favoured a transfer of the English crown to Louis, must now oppose it. When he learned how far preparations for the expedition had gone, he sent a legate, Cardinal Gualo, to France to forbid any further step. Gualo was received by Philip and his son at Melun on April 25. There before the king and the court the case was argued between the cardinal and a knight representing Louis, as if it were a suit at law to be decided in the ordinary way. Louis's case was skilfully constructed to deprive the legate of his ground of interference, but his assertions were falsehoods or misrepresentations. John had been condemned to death for the murder of Arthur—the first occasion on which we hear of this—and afterwards rejected by the barons of England for his many crimes, and they were making war on him to expel him from the kingdom. John had surrendered the kingdom to the pope without the consent of the barons, and if he could not legally do this, he could by the attempt create a vacancy, which the barons had filled by the choice of Louis. The legate, apparently unable to meet these unexpected arguments, asserted that John was a crusader and therefore under the protection of the apostolic see. For Louis it was answered that John had been making war on him long before he took the cross and had continued to do so since, so that Louis had a right to go on with the war. The legate had no answer to this, though it was false, but he prohibited Louis from going and his father from allowing him to go. Louis, denying the right of his father to interfere with his claims in a land not subject to the king of France, and sending an embassy to argue his case before the pope, went on with his preparations. Philip Augustus carefully avoided anything that would bring him into open conflict with Innocent and threw the whole responsibility on his son.
Louis landed in England in the Isle of Thanet on May 21. John had collected a large and strong fleet to prevent his crossing, but a storm just at the moment had dispersed it and left the enemy a clear passage. John, then at Canterbury, first thought to attack the French with his land forces, but fearing that his hired troops would be less loyal to a mere paymaster than to the heir and representative of their suzerain in France, he fell back and left the way open for Louis's advance to London. Soon after landing, Louis sent forward a letter to the Abbot of St. Augustine's in Canterbury, who, he feared, was about to excommunicate him. In this letter which was possibly intended also for general circulation, he repeated the arguments used against the legate with some additional points of the same sort, and explained the hereditary claim of his wife and his own right by the choice of the barons. The document is a peculiar mixture of fact and falsehood, but it was well calculated to impose on persons to whom the minor details of history would certainly be unknown. Rochester castle fell into the hands of the French with no real resistance; and on June 2, Louis was welcomed in London with great rejoicing, and at once received the homage of the barons and of the mayor. Louis's arrival seemed to turn the tide for the moment against the king. He retreated into the west, while the barons took the field once more, and with the French gained many successes in the east and north, particularly against towns and castles. On June 25, Louis occupied Winchester. Barons who had been until now faithful to the king began to come in and join the French as their rapid advance threatened their estates; among them was even John's brother, the Earl of Salisbury. Early in July Worcester was captured and Exeter threatened, and John was forced back to the borders of Wales. This marks, however, the limit of Louis's success. Instead of pushing his advance rapidly forward against the one important enemy, the king himself, he turned aside to undertake some difficult sieges, and made the further mistake of angering the English barons by showing too great favour to his French companions. Dover castle seemed to the military judgment of the French particularly important as "key of England," and for more than three months Louis gave himself up to the effort to take it.
For the first of these months, till the end of August, John remained inactive on the borders of Wales. The death of Innocent III made no change in the situation. His successor Honorius III continued his English policy. With the beginning of September the king advanced as if to raise the siege of Windsor, but gave up the attempt and passed on east into Cambridgeshire, ravaging horribly the lands of his enemies. The barons pursued him, and he fell back on Lincoln from which as a centre he raided the surrounding country for more than a fortnight. On October 9, he marched eastwards again to Lynn which, like most of the towns, was favourable to him, and there he brought on a dysentery by overeating. From that time his physical decline was rapid. His violent passions, utterly unbridled, tore him to pieces more and more fiercely as he recognized his own loss of strength and learned of one misfortune after another. He would not rest, and he would not listen to counsel. On the 11th he went on to Wisbech, and on the next day he insisted on crossing the Wash, without knowing the crossing or regarding the tide. He himself passed in safety, but he lost a part of his troops and all his baggage with his booty, money, and jewels. At night at Swineshead abbey, hot with anger and grief, and feverish from his illness, he gave way to his appetite again, as always, and ate to excess of peaches and new cider. After a rest of a day he pushed on with difficulty to Sleaford. There messengers reached him from his garrison in Dover asking his permission to surrender if he could not relieve them at once, and the news brought on a new passion of anger. He insisted on going one stage further to Newark, although he had already recognized that his end was near. There three days later, on the 19th of October, he died. The teachings of the Church which he had slighted and despised during his life he listened to as his end drew near, and he confessed and received the communion. He designated his son Henry, now nine years old, as his heir, and especially recommended him to the care of the Earl of Pembroke, and appointed thirteen persons by name to settle his affairs and to distribute his property according to general directions which he left. At his desire he was buried in Worcester cathedral and in the habit of a monk.
It has already been suggested that the reigns of Richard and John form a period of transition to a new age. That period closes and the new age opens with the granting of the Great Charter and the attempted revolution which followed. The reign of John was the culmination of a long tendency in English history, most rapid since the accession of his father, towards the establishment of an absolutism in which the rights of all classes would disappear and the arbitrary will of the king be supreme. The story of his reign should reveal how very near that result was of accomplishment. A monarchy had been forming in the last three reigns, and very rapidly in the reign of John, capable of crushing any ordinary opposition, disregarding public opinion and traditional rights, possessing in the new judicial system, if regarded as an organ of the king's will alone, an engine of centralization, punishment, and extortion, of irresistible force, and developing rapidly in financial matters complete independence of all controlling principles. Though the barons were acting rather from personal and selfish motives, freedom for all classes depended on the speedy checking of this steady drift of two generations. The reigns of Richard and John may be called transitional because it is in them that the barons came to see clearly the principles on which successful resistance could be founded and the absolutist tendency checked. The embodiment of these principles in permanent form in the Great Charter to be accepted by the sovereign and enforced in practice, introduces an age, the age of constitutional growth, new in the history of England, and in the form and importance of its results new in the history of the world.
APPENDIX ON AUTHORITIES 1066-1216
While the material on which the history of any period of the Middle Ages is based is scanty as compared with the abundant supply at the service of the writer of modern history, the number of the original sources for the Norman and early Angevin period is so great as to render impossible any attempt to characterize them all in this place. The more important or more typical chroniclers have been selected to give an idea of the nature of the material on which the narrative rests.
The medieval chronicler did not content himself with writing the history of his own time. He was usually ambitious to write a general history from the beginning of the world or from the Christian era at least, and in comparatively few cases began with the origin of his own land. For a knowledge of times before his own he had to depend on his predecessors in the same line, and often for long periods together the new book would be only an exact copy or a condensation of an older one. If several earlier writers were at hand, the new text might be a composite one, resting on them all, but really adding nothing to our knowledge. As the writer drew nearer to his own time, local tradition or the documents preserved in his monastery might give him information on new points or fuller information on others. On such matters his narrative becomes an independent authority of more or less value, and much that is important has been preserved to us in such additions to the earlier sources. Sometimes for a longer or shorter period before his own day the writer may be using materials all of which have been lost to us, and in such a case he is for our purposes an original and independent authority, although in reality he is not strictly original. Then follows a period, sometimes a long one, sometimes only a very few years, in which his narrative is contemporary and written from his own knowledge or from strictly first-hand materials. This is usually the most valuable portion for the modern writer of history.
A large mass of material of great value cannot be described here. It is made up of records primarily of value for constitutional history, charters, writs, laws, and documentary material of all kinds, from which often new facts are obtained for narrative history or light of great value thrown on doubtful points, especially of chronology or of the history of individuals. Of such a kind are the various monastic cartularies, law-books like Glanvill's, records like the Patent, Close, and Charter Rolls, collections of letters, and modern collections of documents like T. Rymer's Foedera or J.H. Round's Calendar of Documents Preserved in France.
The Saxon Chronicle (with translation by B. Thorpe in the Rolls Series (1861), or C. Plummer's Two Saxon Chronicles, 1892-99) continues during the first part of this period with its earlier characteristics unchanged, though more full than for all but the last of the preceding age. The Conquest had no effect on its language, and it continued to be written in English until the end. The Worcester chronicle closes with the year 1079, while the Peterborough book goes on to the coronation of Henry II in 1154. Practically a contemporary record for the whole period, though not preserved to us in a strictly contemporary form throughout, it is of especial value for the indications it gives of the feelings of the English at a time when they were not often recorded.
William, called of Poitiers, though a Norman, chaplain of William I and Archdeacon of Lisieux, wrote a biography of the king, Gesta Willelmi Duels Normannorum et Regis Anglice (in Migne's Patrologia Latina,149), of much value for the period immediately following the Conquest. It has been thought that he was not present at the battle of Hastings, but the account of William's movements between the battle and his coronation contains several indications of first—hand knowledge, matters of detail likely to be noted by an eye—witness; and though he was a strong partisan and panegyrist of the king, his statements of what happened may generally be accepted. His comments and opinions, however, must be used with the greatest caution. His work originally ended in 1071, but the last part is now wanting, and it ends abruptly in the spring of 1067. The entire book was used, however, by Orderic Vitalis as one of the chief sources of his narrative, and in that form we probably have all the main facts it contained.