Map VI.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

An ambition so moderate as this entailed no very complicated schemes of foreign diplomacy. As a matter of fact, Henry was at some time or other in his reign in diplomatic relations with every state and every ruler in Christendom, from Portugal to Norway, and from the count of Montferrat to the Eastern and Western Emperors. But these relations sprang for the most part from his insular rather than from his continental position; or, more exactly, they arose from his position as a king of England, but a king far mightier than any who had gone before him. It was the knowledge that Henry had at his back all the forces of the island-crown which roused in Louis VII. such a restless jealousy of his power in Gaul; and it was the jealousy of Louis which drove Henry into a labyrinth of diplomacy and of war, neither of which was a natural result of Henry’s own policy. A very brief glance at Henry’s foreign relations will suffice to shew that they concerned England far more than Anjou. A considerable part of them arose directly out of his quarrel with the English primate. Such was the case with his German and Italian alliances, designed to counterbalance the French king’s league with the Pope. The alliances formed through the marriages of his daughters were all strictly alliances made by the English Crown. The immediate occasion of Matilda’s marriage with Henry of Saxony was her father’s quarrel with S. Thomas; in another point of view, this union was only a natural continuation of a policy which may be traced through the wedding of her grandmother with Henry V. and that of Gunhild with Henry III. back to the wedding of Æthelstan’s sister Eadgifu with Charles the Simple. The marriages of Eleanor and Jane were first planned during the same troubled time; in each case the definite proposal came from the bridegroom, and came in the shape of an humble suit to the king of England for his daughter’s hand; and in the case of all three sisters, the proposal was laid before a great council of the bishops and barons of England, and only accepted after formal deliberation upon it with them, as upon a matter which concerned the interests of England as a state.[926] When Jane went to be married to the king of Sicily in 1176, the details of her journey to her new home and of the honours which she received on her arrival there were recorded in England as matters of national interest and national pride.[927] When in the following year her sister Eleanor’s husband, Alfonso of Castille, submitted a quarrel between himself and his kinsman the king of Navarre to his father-in-law’s arbitration, the case was heard in an assembly of the English barons and wise men at Westminster.[928] Henry’s daughters in short were instruments of his regal, his national, his English policy; for the carrying out of his Angevin, his family policy, he looked to his sons.

The arrangement by which he endeavoured to make them carry it out is however not very easy to understand or to account for. He had long since abandoned his early scheme of devoting himself entirely to continental politics and making England over to the hands of his eldest son. That scheme, indeed, had been frustrated in the first instance by his quarrel with Thomas; although it seemed to have been revived in 1170, it was as a mere temporary expedient to meet a temporary need; and the revolt of 1173 put an end to it altogether, by proving clearly to Henry that he must never again venture to delegate his kingly power and authority to any one, even for a season. But, on the other hand, it is not easy at once to see why, during the years which followed, he persistently refused to give to his eldest son as much real, though subordinate, power on the continent as he was willing to give to the younger ones—why young Henry was not suffered to govern Anjou and Normandy as Richard was suffered to govern Aquitaine and Geoffrey to govern Britanny, so soon as they were old enough, under the control of their father as overlord. So far as we can venture to guess at the king’s motives, the most probable reason seems to be that he could not part with any share of authority over his ancestral dominions without parting at the same time with his ancestral dignities. From a strictly Angevin or Cenomannian point of view, Aquitaine and Britanny were both simply appendages, diversely acquired, to the hereditary Angevin and Cenomannian dominions. Nay, from a strictly Norman point of view, England itself was but an addition to the heritage of the Norman ducal house. Henry might make over all these to his sons as under-fiefs to govern in subjection to him, and yet retain intact his position as head of the sovereign houses of Normandy and Anjou. But to place his mother’s duchy and his father’s counties in other hands—to reduce them to the rank of under-fiefs, keeping for himself no closer connexion with them than a mere general overlordship—would have been, in principle, to renounce his birthright; while in practice, it would probably have been equivalent to complete abdication, as far as his continental empire was concerned. Henry would have had as little chance of enforcing his claim to overlordship without a territorial basis on which to rest it, as a German Emperor without his hereditary duchy of Saxony or Franconia or Suabia, or a French king without his royal domain. In short, when Henry found it impossible to give England to his eldest son, he had nothing else to give him, unless he gave him all; and Henry Fitz-Empress was no more inclined than William the Conqueror had been to “take off his clothes before he was ready to go to bed.” All his schemes for the distribution of his territories, therefore, from 1175 onwards, were intended solely to insure a fair partition among his sons after his own death; his general aim being that young Henry should step into exactly his own position as king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, and overlord of Britanny, Aquitaine, and all other dependencies of the Angevin and Norman coronets or of the English crown.

None of the holders of these dependencies, however, had as yet entered into full enjoyment of their possessions. At the close of their first revolt, in 1175, the young king was but just entering his twentieth year; Richard was in his eighteenth and Geoffrey in his seventeenth year; and although the one had been titular duke of Aquitaine and the other titular duke of Britanny since 1169, the real government of both duchies, as well as that of Normandy and Anjou, had been until now in the hands of their father. For the purposes of our story there is only one part of these continental possessions of our Angevin king into whose internal concerns we need enter at any great length; a very slight sketch may suffice for the others. The part which lay nearest to England, and which politically was most closely connected with it—the duchy of Normandy—was also associated with it in many of Henry’s legal, constitutional and administrative reforms. A comparison of dates indeed would almost suggest that Henry, when contemplating a great legal or administrative experiment in England, usually tried it first in Normandy in order to test its working there upon a small scale before he ventured on applying it to his island realm. An edict issued at Falaise in the Christmas-tide of 1159–1160, ordaining “that no dean should accuse any man without the evidence of neighbours who bore a good character, and that in the treatment of all causes, the magistrates of the several districts at their monthly courts should determine nothing without the witness of the neighbours, should do injustice to no man and inflict nothing to the prejudice of any, should maintain the peace, and should punish all robbers summarily,”[929] seems to contain a foreshadowing at once of some of the Constitutions of Clarendon which created such excitement in England four years afterwards, and of the Assize which followed two years later still. A commission of inquiry into the administration of the Norman episcopal sees and viscounties in 1162[930] was a sort of forerunner of the great inquest into the conduct of the English sheriffs in 1170. This again was followed next year, as we have seen, by an inquiry into the state of the ducal forests and demesnes,[931] which has its English parallels in the great forest assize of 1176 and in an inquest into the condition of the royal demesnes ordered in the spring of 1177.[932] On the other hand, a roll of the Norman tenants-in-chivalry compiled in 1172 seems to have been modelled upon the English “Black Book” of 1168;[933] and when Henry determined to institute a thorough reform in the whole Norman administration, it was at the English exchequer-table that he found his instrument for the work. In 1176 William de Courcy, the seneschal of Normandy, died. In his stead the king appointed Richard of Ilchester. Richard, to judge by his surname, must have been an Englishman by birth; from the second year of Henry’s reign he was employed as a “writer” in the royal treasury;[934] about 1163 he was made archdeacon of Poitiers, but his archidiaconal functions sat as lightly upon him as upon a contemporary whose name is often associated with his, Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury and vice-chancellor; and throughout the struggle with Archbishop Thomas he was one of the most active agents of Henry’s foreign diplomacy.[935] Unlike his colleagues Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford, he contrived, notwithstanding the ecclesiastical disgrace in which he became involved through his dealings with the schismatic Emperor and the antipope, to retain the general respect of all parties among his fellow-countrymen.[936] Throughout the same period, when not absent from England on some diplomatic mission, he frequently appears as an acting justice of the King’s Court and baron of the Exchequer.[937] He continued to fulfil the same duties after his elevation to the see of Winchester in 1174; and the estimation in which he was held is shewn by the fact that on his return from Normandy, where he was replaced at the end of two years by William Fitz-Ralf,[938] a special seat was assigned to him at the exchequer-table between the presiding justiciar and the treasurer, “that he might diligently examine what was written on the roll.”[939] He was evidently invested with far more authority in Normandy than that which usually appertained to a Norman seneschal—authority, in fact, more like that of an English justiciar; indeed, he is actually called justiciar, and not seneschal, by contemporary English writers.[940] His work in the duchy seems to have been moreover specially connected with finance;[941] and we may perhaps venture to see a trace of his hand in the organization of the Norman Court of Exchequer, which first comes distinctly to light in Henry’s latter years, its earliest extant roll being that of the year 1180.[942] The earlier stages of the legal and administrative organization of Normandy are, however, so lost in obscurity that neither constitutional lawyers in Henry’s day nor constitutional historians in our own have been able to determine the exact historical relation of the Norman system to that of England;[943] and the speedy severance of the political connexion between them makes the determination of the question, after all, of little practical moment.

Even more obscure than the internal history of Normandy under Henry II. is that of Anjou and of the two dependencies which may now be reckoned as one with it, Touraine and Maine. There is in his time throughout the whole of his dominions, with the marked exception of England, a dearth of historical records. Normandy cannot boast of a single historian such as those of the preceding generation, Orderic or William of Jumièges; the only Norman chronicle of any importance is that of Robert of Torigny, commonly known as “Robert de Monte,” from the Mont-St.-Michel of which he was abbot; and even his work is nothing more than a tolerably full and accurate chronicle of the old-fashioned type, arranged on the annalistic plan “according to the years of our Lord” which William of Malmesbury had condemned long ago. The Breton chronicles, always meagre, grow more meagre still as the years pass on; the same may be said of the chronicles of Tours; the “Acts of the bishops of Le Mans,” our sole native authority for the history of Maine, cease to record anything save purely ecclesiastical details. In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland; and indeed the half-blank pages of the few monastic chronicles which still dragged out a lingering existence in one or two of the great Angevin abbeys shew us that under Count Henry Fitz-Empress Anjou was once more, as of old under Count Fulk the Good, happy in having no history.