This very clemency was in itself at once the strongest proof of the completeness of Henry’s victory and the surest means of retaining the hold which he had now gained over the barons. The struggle whose course we have been trying to follow has a special significance: it was the last struggle in English history in which the barons were arrayed against the united interests of the Crown and the people. That feudal pride which had revolted so often and so fiercely against the determination of William the Conqueror and Henry I. to enforce justice and order throughout their realm stooped at last to acknowledge its master in Henry II. In the unbroken tranquillity, the uninterrupted developement of reform in law and administration, the unchecked growth of the material and social prosperity of England during the remaining fifteen years of his reign, Henry and his people reaped the first-fruits of the anti-feudal policy which he and his predecessors had so long and so steadily maintained. Its full harvest was to be reaped after he was gone, not by the sovereign, but by the barons themselves, to whom his strong hand had at last taught their true mission as leaders and champions of the English people against a king who had fallen away from the traditions alike of the Norman and of the Angevin Henry.

CHAPTER V.
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE.
1175–1183.

In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his whole dominions were thus completely removed.

In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional. Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a great council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been accumulating during Thomas’s exile was completed in another council at Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king; all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors, to come to the court without special summons, and, under any circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest, was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851]