Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes, but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions.

Henry II of England

Worse from his point of view was to follow; for Eleanor made immediate use of her freedom to marry Henry, Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years her junior, but the most important tenant-in-chief of the King of France and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king’s most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was a grandson of Henry I, and had in 1154 succeeded the feeble Stephen, of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another chapter.[16]

Before dealing with the results of Henry’s marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine it is well to note his work as King of England, for this was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks he undertook. In character Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen. Where the other had wavered he pressed forward, utterly determined to be master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons, and levelled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture and oppress their neighbours. He also took from them the crown lands which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the chief offices of state he replaced them as quickly as he could by men of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed a Londoner, Thomas Becket, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; but the impetuous choice proved one of his few mistakes.

Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would fidget impatiently or draw pictures during Mass, commending the priest who read fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to patching his old clothes for want of something more interesting to do.

FRANCE
in the reign of HENRY II

Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work was slipshod. He had plenty of foresight, and did not content himself with destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart.

Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation Henry summoned them frequently to his Magnum Concilium, or ‘Great Council’, and asked their advice. When they objected to serving with their followers in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of ‘Scutage’, or ‘Shield-money’, a tax paid by the barons in order to escape military service abroad. With the funds that ‘scutage’ supplied Henry could hire mercenary troops, while the feudal barons lost a military training-ground.

Besides consulting his ‘Great Council’, destined to develop into our national parliament, Henry strengthened the Curia Regis, or ‘King’s Court’, that his grandfather, Henry I, had established to deal with questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal authority; but Henry, besides establishing a central Court of Justice to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new trial, greatly improved and extended the system of ‘Itinerant Justices’ whose circuits through the country to hold ‘Pleas of the Crown’ had been instituted by Henry I.