Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

The emperors, the heads of the Holy Roman Empire, were the chief secular rulers in the Middle Ages, and were in theory the sovereigns of Christendom. But in the era of the Crusades, the kingdoms of England and France began to be prominent. In them, moreover, we see beginnings of an order of things not embraced in the mediaeval system. In France, steps are taken towards a compact monarchy. In England, there are laid the foundations of free representative government.

CONNECTION OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE.—For a long time the fortunes of England and of France are linked together. The kings of the French, with their capital at Paris, had been often obliged to contend with their powerful liegemen, the dukes of Normandy, at Rouen. When the Norman duke became king of England, he had an independent dominion added to the great fief on the other side of the channel. It sometimes looked as if England and France would be united under one sovereignty, so close did their relations become.

DEATH OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.—It was while William the Conqueror, angry with the king of the French, was burning Mantes, in the border-land between Normandy and France, that, by the stumbling of his horse in the ashes, he was thrown forward upon the iron pommel of his saddle, and received the hurt which ended, in the next month, in his death (Sept., 1087). On his death-bed he was smitten with remorse for his unjust conquest of England, and for his bloody deeds there. He would not dare to appoint a successor: it belonged, he said, to the Almighty to do that; but he hoped that his son William might succeed him. The burial service at Caen, in the church which he had built, was interrupted by Ascelin, a knight, who raised his voice to protest against the interment, for the reason that the duke had wrongfully seized from his father the ground on which the church stood. The family of William made a settlement with Ascelin on the spot by paying a sum of money, and the service proceeded. The whole ground was afterwards paid for. William had left money for the rebuilding of the churches which he had burned at Mantes. He gave his treasures to the poor and to the churches in his dominions. These circumstances illustrate in a striking way how, in the Middle Ages, ruthless violence was mingled with power of conscience and a sense of righteous obligation.

WILLIAM RUFUS.—William the Conqueror was succeeded by his son, William Rufus (1087-1100), who was as able a man as his father. He promised to be liberal, and to lay no unjust taxes; but he proved to be—especially after the death of the good Lanfranc, the archbishop of Canterbury—a vicious and irreligious king. The Norman nobles would have preferred to have his brother Robert, who was duke of Normandy, for their king; but the English stood by William. He left bishoprics and abbacies vacant that he might seize the revenues. One of his good deeds was the appointment of the holy and learned Anselm to succeed Lanfranc; but he quarreled with Anselm, who withdrew from the kingdom. Normandy, which he had tried to wrest from his elder brother Robert, was mortgaged to him by the latter, in order that he might set out upon the first Crusade. That duchy came thus into the king's possession. William, while hunting in the New Forest, was killed, if not accidentally, then either, as it was charged, by Walter Tyrrel, one of the party, or by some one who had been robbed of his home when the New Forest was made. He was found in the agonies of death, pierced by an arrow shot from a cross-bow.

HENRY I. OF ENGLAND (1100-1135): LOUIS VI. (the FAT) OF FRANCE (1108-1137): LOUIS VII. (1137-1180).—Henry was the youngest son of the Conqueror. His wife was English, and was a great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside. Her name was Edith, but she assumed the Norman name of Matilda. Her mother Margaret, wife of Malcolm of Scotland, was of the stock of the West Saxon kings. Thus the blood of Alfred, as well as of William the Conqueror, flowed in the veins of the later English kings. In the absence of his older brother Robert, who was in Jerusalem, he took the crown, and put forth a Charter of Liberties, promising the Church to respect its rights, and giving privileges to his vassals which they in turn were to extend to their own vassals. Robert came back from the Holy Land, and tried to wrest England from his brother. He failed in the attempt. After this, Henry got possession of Normandy by the victory of Tinchebrai in 1106, and kept Robert a prisoner in Cardiff Castle until his death (1135). Louis the Fat, king of France, espoused the cause of William of Clito, son of Robert, but was beaten in 1119 at Brenneville. Peace was made between the two kings; but in 1124 Henry of England combined with his son-in-law, Henry V. of Germany, for the invasion of France. Louis called upon his vassals, who gathered in such force that the emperor abandoned the scheme. Louis then undertook to chastise those great vassals who had not responded to his summons. William, the duke of Aquitane, seeing the power of the suzerain, came into his camp, and offered him his homage. Louis inflicted a brutal punishment in Flanders, where the count, Charles the Good, had been assassinated in 1127, and which had failed to furnish its contingent in 1124. He obliged the Flemish lords to elect as their count, William Clito, whose rule, however, they presently cast off. Louis the Fat united his son Louis in marriage with Eleanor, the only daughter of William (X.), the duke of Aquitaine, and thus paved the way for a direct control over the South. The duchy of Aquitaine included Gascony and other districts, and the suzerainty over Auvergne, Périgord, etc. Louis the VII. (1137-1180) was not able to preserve the dominion, extending from the north to the south of France, which he inherited. He plunged into a dispute with Pope Innocent II. in relation to the church of Bourges, where he claimed the right to name the archbishop. St. Bernard took the side of the Pope. Suger, abbot of St. Denis, an able minister, the counselor of the last king, supported Louis. The king attacked the lands of Theobald of Champagne, who sided with the Pope, and in his wrath burned the parish church of Vitry, with hundreds of poor people who had taken refuge in it. His own remorse and the excommunication of the Pope moved him to do penance by departing on a Crusade. Suger, not liking the risk which the monarchy incurred through the absence of the king, opposed the project. St. Bernard encouraged it. The Crusade failed of any important result; but it helped to infuse a national spirit into the French soldiers, who fought side by side with the army of the emperor, Conrad III. On his return, on the alleged ground that Eleanor was too near of kin, he divorced her, and rendered back her dowry (1152).

LOUIS VII. OF FRANCE (1137-1180): STEPHEN (1135-1154) AND HENRY II. of ENGLAND (1154-1189).—The king of England, Henry I., after the death of his son by shipwreck, declared his daughter Matilda his heir. She was the widow of Henry V., the emperor of Germany. In 1127 she married Geoffrey, count of Anjou, surnamed Plantagenet on account of his habit of wearing a sprig of broom (genet) in his bonnet. Henry left Matilda, whom he called the "Empress," under the charge of his nephew, Stephen of Blois, who got himself elected king by the barons or great landowners,—as there was no law regulating the succession of the crown,—and was crowned at Westminster. They had sworn, however, to support Matilda. Her uncle David, king of Scots, took up her cause; but the Scots were defeated at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. England was thrown into utter disorder by these circumstances: some of the barons fought on one side, and some on the other. There were thieves along the highways, and the barons in their castles were no better than the thieves. The empress landed in England in 1139, to recover her rights. In the civil war that ensued, Stephen was taken prisoner (1141); but Matilda, whose imperious temper made her unpopular in London, was driven out of the city. Stephen was released in exchange for the Earl of Gloucester. Matilda was at one time in great peril, but contrived to escape in a winter night from Oxford Castle (1142). In 1153 peace was made, by which Stephen was to retain the kingdom, but was to be succeeded by Matilda's eldest son.

CRUELTY OF THE NOBLES.—In the time of Stephen and Matilda, the barons, released from the strong hand of his predecessor, were guilty of atrocities which made the people mourn the loss of Henry.

"They built strong castles, and filled them with armed men. From these they rode out as robbers, as a wild beast goes forth from its den. 'They fought among themselves with deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile of counties they destroyed almost all the provision of bread.' Whatever money or valuable goods they found, they carried off. They burnt houses and sacked towns, If they suspected any one of concealing his wealth, they carried him off to their castle; and there they tortured him, to make him confess where his money was. 'They hanged up men by their feet, and smoked them with foul smoke. Some were hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and burning things were hung on to their feet. They put knotted strings about men's heads, and twisted them till they went to the brain. They put men into prisons where adders and snakes and toads were crawling, and so they tormented them. Some they put into a chest short and narrow, and not deep, and that had sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all their limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and grim things called rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to carry. It was thus made: it was fastened to a beam, and had a sharp iron to go about a man's neck and throat, so that he might noways sit or lie or sleep; but he bore all the iron. Many thousands they starved with hunger.' The unhappy sufferers had no one to help them. Stephen and Matilda were too busy with their own quarrel to do justice to their subjects. Poor men cried to Heaven, but they got no answer. 'Men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.'"

DOMINIONS OF HENRY II.—Henry, the son of the empress and of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, was the first of the Angevin kings of England. They had Saxon blood in their veins, but were neither Norman nor Saxon, except in the female line. It was eighty-eight years since the Conquest; and, although the higher classes talked French, almost every one of their number was of mixed descent. The line between Saxon and Norman was becoming effaced. A vassal of the king of France, Henry held so many fiefs that he was stronger than the king himself, and all the other crown vassals taken together. From his father he had Anjou; from his mother, Normandy and Maine; the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine he received by Eleanor, the divorced wife of Louis VII., whom he married. Later, by marrying one of his sons to the heiress of Brittany, that district, the nominal fief of Normandy, came practically under his dominion. He was a strong-willed man, who reduced the barons to subjection, and pulled down the castles which had been built without the king's leave. It might seem probable that the possessor of so great power would absorb the little monarchy of France. But this was prevented by long-continued discord in England,—discord in the royal family, between the king and the clergy, and, later, between the king and the barons. On the Continent, the king of England required a great and united force to break the feudal bonds which grew stronger between the king of France and the French provinces of England. We shall soon see how France enlarged her territory, and how the English dominion on the Continent was greatly reduced.

REFORMS OF HENRY.—In order to control the barons, he arranged with them to pay money in lieu of military service. In this way they were weakened. At the same time, he encouraged the small landowners to exercise themselves in arms, which would prepare them for self-defense and to assist the king. Moreover, he sent judges through the land to hear causes. They were to ask a certain number of men in the county as to the merits of the cases coming before them. These men took an oath to tell the truth. They gradually adopted the custom of hearing the evidence of others before giving to the judges their verdict,—that is, their declaration of the truth (from vere dictum). Out of this custom grew the jury system.