Henry’s first manifesto was published before Thomas entered his service. Immediately after his coronation he issued a charter setting forth the broad principles of his intended policy:—the restoration and confirmation of all liberties and customs in Church and state as settled by his grandfather.[1330] The actual wording of the charter was hardly more explicit than that of Stephen’s; but the marked omission of all reference to Stephen was in itself a significant indication that the return to an earlier and better order of things was intended to be something more than a phrase. On Christmas-day the king held his court at Bermondsey, and with the counsel of the assembled barons set himself to enforce at once the provisions of the treaty of Wallingford which Stephen had proved incapable of executing. Peremptory orders were issued for the expulsion of the Flemish mercenaries and the demolition of the unlicensed castles.[1331] The effect was magical. The Flemings saw at once that their day was over, and vanished like an army of spectres, so suddenly that folk marvelled whither they could have gone.[1332] The razing of the castles was necessarily a less rapid process, but it was accomplished without delay and without disturbance.[1333] These preliminary obstacles being cleared out of the way, the next step was to re-assert the rights of the Crown by abolishing the fiscal earldoms[1334] and reclaiming the demesne lands and fortresses which had passed into private hands during the anarchy. Henry proclaimed his determination clearly and firmly; all alienations of royal revenue and royal property made during the late reign were declared null and void; all occupiers of crown lands and castles were summoned to surrender them at once, and the charters of donation from Stephen whereby they attempted to justify their occupation were treated simply as waste paper.[1335] There was one at least of the usurping barons to whom Henry knew that he must carry his summons in person if he meant it to be obeyed: William of Aumale, the lord of Holderness, whose father had once aspired to the crown, whom Stephen had made earl of York, and who ruled like an almost independent chieftain in Yorkshire, where he held the royal castle of Scarborough and was in no mind to give it up. As soon as the festival season was over Henry began to move northward; by the end of January he was at York, and William of Aumale was at his feet, making complete surrender of Scarborough and of all his other castles.[1336] Another great northern baron, William Peverel of the Peak, had been scared into a monastery by the mere rumour of the king’s approach;[1337] he had been concerned two years before in an attempt to poison Henry’s earliest English ally, Earl Ralf of Chester; he knew that he was a doomed man,[1338] and when the king turned southward again after receiving the surrender of Scarborough, he dared not trust even his monastic tonsure to save him from his doom, but fled the country and left all his fiefs to his sovereign’s mercy.[1339]

After such an exhibition of Henry’s powers of coercion on the two chief nobles of the north, lesser men were not likely to venture upon defiance; the occupiers of crown lands passed from rage to terror and dismay, and began sullenly to make restitution.[1340] The grantees of Stephen, however, soon proved to be the least part of the difficulty. Several of the royal fortresses were held by partizans of the Empress, who had won them either while warring against Stephen in her behalf, or by a grant from their imperial mistress in her brief day of power; and they not unnaturally resented the king’s attempt to deprive them of what they looked upon as the well-earned rewards of their service to his mother and himself. Henry, however, had made up his mind that there must be no distinction of parties or of persons; all irregularities, no matter whence they proceeded, must be suppressed; every root of rebellion must be cut off, and every ground of suspicion removed.[1341] Early in March he called another council in London,[1342] confirmed the peace and renewed the old customs of the realm,[1343] and again summoned all holders of royal castles to give an account of their usurpations.[1344] The two mightiest barons of the west revolted at once; Roger of Hereford, the son of Matilda’s faithful Miles, hurried away from court to fortify his castles of Hereford and Gloucester against the king, and made common cause with Hugh of Mortemer, the lord of Cleobury and Wigmore, who held the royal fortress of Bridgenorth. Roger was brought to reason in little more than a week by the persuasions of his kinsman Bishop Gilbert of Hereford;[1345] Hugh was suffered to complete his preparations for defiance while Henry kept the Easter feast and held a great council at Wallingford to settle the succession to the throne, first upon his eldest child William, and, in case of William’s death, upon the infant Henry, who was scarcely six weeks old.[1346] That done, the king marched with all his forces against Hugh of Mortemer. He divided his host into three parts; one division laid siege to Cleobury, another to Wigmore,[1347] and the third, commanded by Henry himself, sat down before Bridgenorth.[1348] On the spot where the spirit of feudal insubordination, incarnate in Robert of Bellême, had fought its last fight against Henry I., the same spirit, represented by Hugh of Mortemer, now fought against Henry II. The fight had been useless fifty years ago; it was equally useless now. One after another the three castles were taken, and on July 7 a great council met beneath the walls of Bridgenorth to witness Hugh’s surrender.[1349]

At the opposite side of the kingdom two great barons still remained to be dealt with. One was Hugh Bigod, the veteran turncoat who had been seneschal to Henry I., and who had (as the Angevin party believed) perjured himself to oust Matilda from her rights, yet whose hereditary and territorial influence had, it seems, been great enough to win from the young king a confirmation of his earldom of Norfolk,[1350] as well as to procure him a long day of grace before he was called upon to give up his many unlawfully-acquired castles. The other was William of Blois, Stephen’s eldest surviving son, by marriage earl of Warren and Surrey, to whom the treaty of Wallingford had assigned two royal castles, Pevensey and Norwich. The danger of leaving these important fortresses in William’s hands was increased by the position of Norwich, in the very midst of Hugh Bigod’s earldom; and after a year’s delay Henry determined to put an end to this state of things in East Anglia. Contrary to all precedent, he summoned the Whitsuntide council of 1157 to meet at Bury S. Edmund’s.[1351] This peaceful invasion of their territories sufficed to bring both earls to submission. William contentedly gave up his castles in exchange for the private estates which his father had held before he became king; Hugh surrendered in like manner,[1352] and was likewise taken back into favour, to have another opportunity of proving his ingratitude sixteen years later. This settlement of East Anglia completed the pacification of the realm. Even before this, however, as early as the autumn of 1155, peace and order were so far secured that Henry could venture to think of leaving the country. At Michaelmas in that year he laid before his barons a scheme for conquering Ireland as a provision for his brother William.[1353] The Pope, who was traditionally held to be the natural owner of all islands which had no other sovereign, had granted a bull authorizing the expedition;[1354] but the Empress, whose counsel was always deferentially sought by her royal son, disapproved of his project;[1355] and when he went over sea in January 1156 it was not to win a kingdom for his youngest brother in Ireland, but to put down a rebellion of the second in Anjou.[1356]

In England the year of his absence was a year without a history. Not a single event of any consequence is recorded by the chroniclers save the death of Henry’s eldest son, shortly before Christmas;[1357] and even this was a matter of no political moment; for, as we have seen, there was another infant to take his place as heir-apparent. The blank in the chronicles has to be filled up from the Pipe Roll which once again makes its appearance at Michaelmas 1156, and which has a special value and interest as being the most authoritative witness to the character of the young king’s efforts for the reorganization of the government, and to the results which they had already produced. The record itself is a mere skeleton, and a very imperfect one; the carefulness of arrangement, the fulness of detail, the innumerable touches of local and personal colour which make the one surviving Pipe Roll of Henry I. so precious and so interesting, are sadly wanting in this roll of the second year of Henry II.; yet between its meagre lines may be read a suggestive, almost a pathetic story. Its very imperfections, its lack of order and symmetry, its scantiness of information, its brief, irregular, confused entries, help us to realize as perhaps nothing else could how disastrous had been the break-down of the administrative machinery which we saw working so methodically five-and-twenty years ago, and how laborious must have been the task of restoration. Three whole shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, send in no account at all, for they were still in the hands of the king of Scots; in almost every shire there are significant notices of “waste,” and a scarcely less significant charge for repair of the royal manors. The old items reappear—the Danegeld, the aids from the towns, the proceeds of justice, the feudal incidents; but the total product amounts to little more than a third part of the sum raised in 1130; and even this diminished revenue was only made up with the help of sundry “aids” and “gifts” (as they were technically called), and of a new impost specially levied upon some of the ecclesiastical estates under the name of scutage.

The origin of this tax is implied in its title; it was derived from the “service of the shield” (scutum)—one of the distinguishing marks of feudal tenure—whereby the holder of a certain quantity of land was bound to furnish to his lord the services of a fully-armed horseman for forty days in the year. The portion of land charged with this service constituted a “knight’s fee,” and was usually reckoned at the extent of five hides, or the value of twenty pounds annually. The gradual establishment of this military tenure throughout the kingdom was a process which had been going on ever since the Norman conquest; the use of the word “scutage,” implying an assessment of taxation based on the knight’s fee instead of the old rating division of the hide, indicates that it was now very generally completed. The scutage of 1156 was levied, as we learn from another source,[1358] specially to meet the expenses of a war which Henry was carrying on with his rebel brother in Anjou. For such a purpose the feudal host itself was obviously not a desirable instrument. Ralf Flambard’s famous device of 1093, when he took a money compensation from the English levies and sent it over sea to pay the wages of the Red King’s foreign mercenaries, suggested a precedent which might be applied to the feudal knighthood as well as to the national host. Its universal application might be hindered at present by a clause in the charter of Henry I., which exempted the tenants by knight-service from all pecuniary charges on their demesne lands. It was, however, possible to make a beginning with the Church lands. These habitually claimed, with more or less success, immunity from military service except in the actual defence of the country; on the other hand, now that the bishops and abbots had been made to accept their temporalities on the same tenure as the lay baronies, there was a fair shew of reason for compelling them to compromise their claim by a money contribution assessed on the same basis as the personal service for which it was a substitute.[1359]