The last of Henry’s great legal measures, with the exception of a Forest Assize issued in 1184, was an ordinance published in the autumn of 1181 and known as the Assize of Arms. Its object was to define more fully and exactly the military obligations of the people at large in the service of the king and the defence of the country;—in a word, to put once again upon a more definite footing the old institution of the “fyrd,” which was the only effective counterpoise to the military power of the barons, and whose services in 1173 and 1174 had proved it to be well worthy of the royal consideration and encouragement. The Assize of 1181 declared the obligation of bearing arms at the king’s command to be binding upon every free layman in the realm. The character of the arms with which men of various ranks were required to provide themselves was defined according to a graduated scale, from the full equipment of the knight down to the mail-coat, steel-cap and spear of the burgher and the simple freeman.[881] The justices were directed to ascertain, through the “lawful men” of the hundreds and towns, what persons fell under each category, to enroll their names, read out the Assize in their presence, and make them swear to provide themselves with the proper accoutrements before S. Hilary’s day.[882] Every man’s arms were to be carefully kept and used solely for the royal service; they were not to be taken out of the country, or alienated in any way;[883] at their owner’s death they were to pass to his heir;[884] if any man possessed other arms than those required of him by the Assize, he was to dispose of them in such a manner that they might be used in the king’s service;[885] and all this was enforced by a stern threat of corporal punishment upon defaulters.[886]

The freemen who were armed under this Assize had little occasion to use their weapons so long as King Henry lived. Within the four seas of Britain there was almost unbroken peace till the end of his reign. The treaty with Scotland was ratified by the public homage of William the Lion to Henry and his son at York on August 10, 1175;[887] and thenceforth Henry’s sole trouble from that quarter was the necessity of arbitrating between William and his unruly vassals in Galloway,[888] and of advising him in his ecclesiastical difficulties with the Roman see. The western border of England was less secure than the northern; yet even in Wales the authority of the English Crown had made a considerable advance since Henry’s accession. His first Welsh war, directed against the princes of North Wales in 1157, had little practical result. A second expedition marched in 1163 against Rees Ap-Griffith, prince of South Wales, and a lucky incident at the outset insured its success. Directly in the king’s line of march from Shrewsbury into South Wales, between Wenlock and Newport, there ran a streamlet called Pencarn—a mountain-torrent passable only at certain points. One of these was an ancient ford concerning which a prophecy attributed to the enchanter Merlin declared: “When ye shall see a strong man with a freckled face rush in upon the Britons, if he cross the ford of Pencarn, then know ye that the might of Cambria shall perish.” The Welsh guarded this ford with the utmost care to prevent Henry from crossing it; he, ignorant of the prophecy, sent his troops over by another passage, and was about to follow them himself, when a loud blast from their trumpets on the opposite bank caused his horse to rear so violently that he was obliged to turn away and seek a means of crossing elsewhere. He found it at the fatal spot, and as the Welsh saw him dash through the stream their hearts sank in despair.[889] He marched unopposed from one end of South Wales to the other, through Glamorgan and Carmarthen as far as Pencader;[890] here Rees made his submission;[891] and Rees himself, Owen of North Wales, and several other Welsh princes appeared and swore allegiance to King Henry and his heir in that famous council of Woodstock where the first quarrel arose between Henry and Thomas of Canterbury.[892]

Next year Rees, provoked as he alleged by Henry’s non-fulfilment of his promises and also by the shelter given to the slayer of his nephew by Earl Roger of Clare, harried the whole border and roused all Wales to fling off the yoke of the “Frenchmen,” as the Welsh still called their Norman conquerors.[893] Henry was obliged to delay his vengeance till the following summer, when it furnished him with an excellent pretext for escaping from his ecclesiastical and political entanglements on the continent.[894] He set out from Oswestry[895] at the head of a vast army drawn from all parts of his dominions, both insular and continental, and reinforced by Flemish and Scottish allies.[896] All the princes of Wales were arrayed against him, and both parties intended the campaign to be decisive. But the wet climate of the Welsh hills proved a more dangerous foe than the mountaineers themselves; and after remaining for some time encamped at Berwen, Henry was compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, completely defeated by the ceaseless rain,[897] and venting his baffled wrath against the Welsh in a savage mutilation of their hostages.[898] For six years after this, as we have seen, he never had time to visit his island realm at all, and the daring “French” settlers in Wales or on its borders, such as the Geraldines or the De Clares, were free to fight their own battles and make their own alliances with the Welsh just as they chose; it was not till Henry in 1171 followed them to their more distant settlement in Ireland that he again entered South Wales. Then he used his opportunity for a series of personal interviews with Rees,[899] which ended in a lasting agreement. Rees was left, in the phrase of his native chronicler, as the king’s “justice” over all South Wales.[900] How far he maintained, along the border or within his own territories, the peace and order whose preservation formed the main part of an English justiciar’s duty, may be doubted; but in the rebellion of 1174 he shewed his personal loyalty to the king by marching all the way into Staffordshire to besiege Tutbury for him, and some of his followers did equally good service in the suppression of the Norman revolt.[901] David of North Wales, too, if he did nothing to help the king, at least resisted the temptation of joining his enemies; and the war was no sooner fairly over than, anxious that some reflection of the glories of English royalty should be cast over his own house, he became an eager suitor for the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma—a suit which Henry found it politic to grant.[902] A few months later, in June 1175, the king made an attempt to secure the tranquillity of the border by binding all the barons of the district in a sworn mutual alliance for its defence.[903] The attempt was not very successful; the border-warfare went on in much the same way as of old; but it was not till the summer of 1184 that it grew serious enough to call for Henry’s personal intervention, and then a march to Worcester sufficed to bring Rees of South Wales once more to his feet.[904]

It was the latest-won dependency of the English crown which during these years gave the most trouble to its wearer. If Henry found it hard to secure fit instruments for the work of government and administration in England, he found it harder still to secure them for the same work in Ireland. At the outbreak of the barons’ revolt he had at once guarded against all danger of the rebels finding support in Ireland by recalling the garrisons which he had left in the Irish coast-towns and summoning the chief men of the new vassal state, particularly Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy, to join him personally in Normandy.[905] Richard served him well in the war as commandant of the important border-fortress of Gisors;[906] and it may have been as a reward for these services that he was sent back to Ireland as governor in Hugh’s stead[907] at the close of the year. For the next two years, while the king had his hands full in Normandy and England, matters in Ireland went much as they had gone before his visit there; the Norman-English settlers pursued their strifes and their alliances with their Irish neighbours or with each other, and granted out to their followers the lands which they won, entirely at their own pleasure.[908] But the lesson which Henry was meanwhile teaching their brethren in England was not thrown away upon them; and at the close of 1175 it was brought home to them in another way. Roderic O’Conor, moved as it seems by the fame of Henry’s successes, and also perhaps by two papal bulls—Adrian’s famous “Laudabiliter,” and another from the reigning Pope Alexander—which Henry had lately caused to be published at Waterford,[909] at last bent his stubborn independence to send three envoys to the English king with overtures for a treaty of peace. The treaty was signed at Windsor on October 6. Roderic submitted to become Henry’s liegeman, and to pay him a yearly tribute of one hide “pleasing to the merchants” for every ten head of cattle throughout Ireland; on these conditions he was confirmed in the government and administration of justice over the whole island, except Leinster, Meath and Waterford, and authorized to reckon upon the help of the royal constables in compelling the obedience of his vassals and collecting from them their share of the tribute.[910]