The work was no longer where his father had left it. When the secular side of the Norman government in England, somewhat obscured for a while by the ecclesiastical conflict, comes into distinct view again after the settlement of 1107, one is almost startled at the amount of developement which has taken place in the twenty years since the Conqueror’s death—a developement whose steps lie hidden beneath the shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of Henry’s early struggles. The power of the crown had outgrown even the nominal restraints preserved from the older system: the king’s authority was almost unlimited, even in theory; the Great Council, the successor and representative of the Witenagemot, had lost all share in the real work of legislation and government; of the old formula—“counsel and consent”—the first half had become an empty phrase and the second a mere matter of course. The assembly was a court rather than a council, the qualification of its members, whether earls, barons, or knights, being all alike dependent on their position as tenants-in-chief of the crown; the bishops alone kept their unaltered dignity as lineal successors of the older spiritual Witan; but even the bishops had been compelled by the compromise of 1107 to hold their temporalities on the baronial tenure of homage and fealty to the king, a step which involved the strict application of the same rule to the lay members of the assembly. Moreover, the Witenagemot was being gradually supplanted in all its more important functions by an inner circle of counsellors, forming a permanent ministerial body which gathered into its own hands the entire management of the financial and judicial administration of the state. In one aspect it was the “Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the supreme court of judicature which appropriated alike the judicial powers of the Witenagemot, of the old court of the king’s thegns or theningmanna-gemot, and of the feudal court of the Norman tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it was the Exchequer, the court which received the royal revenues from the sheriffs of the counties, arranged and reviewed the taxation, transacted the whole fiscal business of the crown, and in short had the supreme control and management of the “ways and means” of the realm. The judicial, military and social organization under the Norman kings rests so completely on a fiscal basis that the working of the Exchequer furnishes the principal means of studying that of the whole system; while the connexion between the functions of the Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis is so close that it is often difficult to draw a line accurately between them, and all the more so, that they were made up of nearly the same constituent elements. These were the great officers of the royal household:—the justiciar, the treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal, and their subordinates:—titles of various origin, some, as for example the chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin, while others seem to have existed almost from time immemorial;—but all titles whose holders, from being mere personal attendants upon the sovereign, had now become important officials of the state. Like a crowd of other matters which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the system seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the reign of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf Flambard. At its head stood the justiciar;—second in authority to the king in his presence, his representative and vicegerent in his absence, officially as well as actually his chief minister and the unquestioned executor of his will. This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as far back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius” under his brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from that which Æthelred II. had instituted under the title of high-thegn or high-reeve, and which grew into a permanent vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine and Harold under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under William Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who from the position of an obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s household had made his way by the intriguing, pushing, unscrupulous temper which had earned him his nickname of the “Firebrand,” was an upstart whom the barons of the Conquest may well have despised as much as the native English feared and hated him. After an interval during which his office was held by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln—a former chancellor of the Red King—it passed to a man who from beginnings almost as lowly as those of Ralf rose to yet loftier and, it is but fair to add, purer fame. Henry in his wandering youth, as he rode out from Caen one morning with a few young companions, stopped to hear mass at a little wayside chapel. The poor priest who served it, guessing by their looks the temper of his unexpected congregation, rattled through the office with a speed which delighted them; they all pronounced him just the man for a soldier’s chaplain; Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that he had picked up a treasure. Roger became his steward, and discharged his functions with such care, fidelity and good management as earned him the entire confidence of his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s accession he was appointed chancellor, a post whose duties involved, besides the official custody of the royal seal, the superintendence of the clerks of the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged with the keeping of the royal accounts, the conducting of the royal correspondence, the drawing up of writs and other legal documents and records, and who were now formed into a trained and organized body serving as secretaries for all departments of state business. From 1101 to 1106 this office seems to have been held successively by Roger, William Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it in 1106 on Waldric’s elevation to the bishopric of Laon, but if so he resigned it again next year, to become bishop of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]

Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the old English administrative system, had by this time become self-evident. The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity and given him the justification for superseding them in all the more important functions of government, by carrying out, with a free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated under less favourable circumstances—the organization of a distinct ministerial body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all upstarts—novi homines, “new men” in the phrase of the time—compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming a sort of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility and from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious to both, but very much better fitted than any instruments which either could have furnished for managing the business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and above the obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there was, however, another cause for the jealousy with which they were generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing, more especially in his later years, a preference for foreigners which was equally galling to all his native subjects, whatever their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest. The sons and grandsons of the men who had come over with Duke William never lost one spark of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no longer their home; most of them were born in England, some had English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife—though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to the world under the name of Orderic the Englishman. This last was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”—men born beyond sea—over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were equally aliens from both.

Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of the Exchequer. Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer met under his presidency around the chequered table whence they derived their name, and settled accounts with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs were answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from their respective shires, the settlement amounted to a thorough review of the financial condition of the realm. The profits of the demesne lands and of the judicial proceedings in the shire-court, now commuted at a fixed sum under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a definite rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of the towns seem to have corresponded to the Danegeld in the rural districts; the feudal sources of income, reliefs, wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits arising out of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of his predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning refused to redress; all these and many other items found their places in the exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s court of Exchequer. Hand in hand with its financial work went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a court in theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief, but in practice limited to the great officers of the household and others specially appointed by the king, and acting under him, or under the chief justiciar as his representative, as a supreme tribunal of appeal, and also of first resort in suits between tenants-in-chief and in a variety of other cases called up by special writ for its immediate cognisance. It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still based upon the Domesday survey; but transfers of land, changes in cultivation, the reclaiming of wastes on the one hand and the creation of new forests on the other, necessarily raised questions which called for an occasional revision and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending the judges of the King’s Court—who were only the barons of the Exchequer in another capacity—on judicial circuits throughout the country, to hold the pleas of the crown and settle disputed points of assessment and tenure in the several shires. As the justices thus employed held their sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature were thus brought into immediate connexion with each other, and the first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging over the gap which severed the lower from the higher organization.

By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative routine Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding together all branches of public business and all classes of society in intimate connexion with and entire dependence on the crown, through the medium of the Curia Regis and the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full length in the Dialogue in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew expounded the constitution and functions of the fully developed Court of Exchequer; its working in Roger’s own day is vividly illustrated in the one surviving record which has come down to us from that time, the earliest extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in which the annual statement of accounts was embodied by the treasurer. The value of this solitary roll of Henry I.—that of the year 1130—lies less in the dry bones of the actual financial statement than in the mass of personal detail with which they are clothed, and through which we get such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social condition of the time. The first impression likely to be produced by the document is that under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury—“the Lion of Justice” and “the Sword of Righteousness”—every possible contingency of human life was somehow turned into a matter of money for the benefit of the royal treasury. It must, however, be remembered that except the Danegeld, there was no direct taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up a budget at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents; and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments of unlimited extortion, but were calculated according to a regular and fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent modification under special circumstances. Still the items look strange enough. We see men paying to get into office and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the right to enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying that they may administer the estates of minors; suitors paying for leave to marry heiresses or dowered widows; heiresses and widows paying for freedom to wed the man of their own choice. The remittances are not always in money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there are some amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52] There is an endless string of land-owners, great and small, paying for all sorts of privileges connected with their property; some for leave to make an exchange of land with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit with a rival claimant of their estates, some on the contrary to delay or avoid answering such a claim, and some for having themselves put forth claims which they were unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the loser for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both ways. Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering their debts from his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens of Gloucester promise thirty marks of silver if the king’s justice can get back for them a sum of money “which was taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted entry brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most interesting of all; those which relate to the growing liberties of the towns.

The English towns differed completely in their origin and history from those of the states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy and Gaul were daughters of Rome; they were the abiding depositaries of her social, municipal and political traditions; as such, they had a vitality and a character which, like their great mistress and model, they were able to preserve through all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal reorganization. The English towns had no such imperial past; in their origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable from the general crowd of little rural settlements throughout the country. Here and there, for one reason or another, some particular spot attracted an unusually large concourse of inhabitants; but whether sheltered within the walls of a Roman military encampment like Winchester and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round some fortress raised for defence against the Welsh or the Danes like Taunton or Warwick, or round some venerated shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury or Oxford, still the settlement differed in nothing but its size from the most insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which sent its reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually large township, generally provided with a dyke and palisade, or sometimes even a wall, instead of the ordinary quickset hedge; or it was a cluster of townships which had somehow coalesced, but without in any way forming an organic whole. Each unit of the group had its own parish church and parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes, its own assembly for transacting its own internal affairs; while the general borough-moot, in a town of this kind, answered roughly to the hundred-court of the rural districts, and the character of the borough-constitution itself resembled that of the hundred rather than that of the single township. The earlier and greater towns must have been originally free; a few still retain in their common lands a vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great and wealthy monastery, were dependent from the first upon the lord of the soil on which they stood; their inhabitants owed suit and service to the earl, the bishop, or the abbot, whichever he might chance to be, and their reeve was appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became a recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and that all folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a natural inference that all towns which had no other lord were counted as royal demesnes, and their chief magistrate was an officer of the crown. In the great cities he usually bore the title of port-reeve, a word whose first syllable, though here used to represent the town in general, refers in strict etymology to the porta, or place where the market was held, and thus at once points to the element in the life of the towns which gave them their chief consequence and their most distinctive character. The Norman conquest had led to a great increase of their trading importance; a sense of corporate life and unity grew up within them; their political position became more clearly defined; they began to recognize themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands of the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state. The distinction was definitely marked by the severance of their financial interests from those of the shires in which they stood; a fixed “aid,” varying according to their size and wealth, was substituted in their case for the theoretically even, but practically very unfair pressure of the Danegeld; and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the sheriff, their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for as a separate item, under the name of firma burgi, either by the sheriff or, in some cases where the privilege had been specially conferred, by the towns themselves. At the same time the voluntary institution of the gilds, which had long acted as a supplement to the loose territorial and legal constitution of the boroughs, forced its way into greater prominence; the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer as mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies endowed with authority over all matters connected with trade in the great mercantile cities; the recognition of their legal status—generally expressed by the confirmation of the right to possess a “gild-hall” (or, as it was called in the north, a “hans-house”)—became a main point in the struggles of the towns for privileges and charters. The handicraftsmen, fired with the same spirit of association, banded themselves together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford, bought of the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the customs of their respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed, as well as they could, the example of the great cities; they too won from their lords a formal assurance of their privileges; Archbishop Thurstan’s charter to Beverley was expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to York.[56]

Plan I.