Hugh of Lincoln was the universally-acknowledged leader of the English Church in all matters of religion and morals; he had exercised in Henry II.’s later years such an influence over the king as no one, except perhaps Thomas Becket, had ever possessed; the whole Church and nation reverenced him as it had never reverenced any man since the death of S. Anselm. When he took up the position of Thomas and Anselm as a champion of constitutional liberty, the victory was sure. Strangely enough, his action seems to have taken the primate completely by surprise. For a moment Hubert stood speechless; then he turned to Bishop Herbert of Salisbury, and with quivering lips asked what he was minded to do for the king’s assistance. As a son of Richard of Ilchester and a kinsman of the great ministerial house founded by Roger of Salisbury,[1788] Herbert represented the traditions of an old and venerated political school, as Hugh represented those of the best school of ecclesiastics. The statesman’s reply was an echo of the saint’s: “It seems to me that, without grievous wrong to my church, I can neither do nor say aught but what I have heard from my lord of Lincoln.” The justiciar, hurling a torrent of reproaches at Hugh, broke up the assembly, and wrote to the king that his plan had been foiled through Hugh’s opposition.[1789] Richard in a fury ordered the property of the two recalcitrant bishops to be confiscated; in the case of Salisbury this was done, but no Englishman dared lay a finger on anything belonging to the saint of Lincoln, “for they feared his curse like death itself.” In vain did the king reiterate his command, till at last his own officers begged Hugh to put an end to the scandal by making his peace, for their sakes if not for his own; Hugh therefore went to seek Richard in Normandy, and literally forced him into a reconciliation on S. Augustine’s day. Herbert, on the other hand, had to purchase his restoration at a heavy price;[1790] but the king and his justiciar were none the less completely beaten. The death of Rees Ap-Griffith and a dispute between his sons for the succession in South Wales gave Hubert an opportunity of renewing his fading laurels by a brilliant expedition to the Welsh marches, where he succeeded in restoring tranquillity and securing the border-fortresses for the king.[1791] He had however scarcely had time to recover from his political defeat before he was overwhelmed by the bursting of an ecclesiastical storm which had long been hanging over his head. Pope Celestine died on January 8, 1198. On the morrow the cardinals elected as his successor a young deacon named Lothar, who took the name of Innocent III., and began at once to sweep away the abuses of the Roman court and to vindicate the rights of his see against the Roman aristocracy with a promptness and vigour which were an earnest of his whole future career.[1792] The monks of Canterbury lost no time in sending to the new Pope their list of grievances against their primate; and at the head of the list they set a charge which, in the eyes of such a pontiff as Innocent, could admit of no defence. Hubert, said they, had violated the duties and the dignity of his order by becoming the king’s justiciar, acting as a judge in cases of life and death, and so entangling himself in worldly business that he was incapable of paying due attention to the government of the Church. Innocent immediately wrote to the king, charging him, if he valued his soul’s health, not to suffer either the archbishop of Canterbury or any other priest to continue in any secular office; and at the same time he solemnly forbade the acceptance of any such office by any bishop or priest throughout the whole Church. Discredited as Hubert now was in the eyes of all parties, he had no choice but to resign, and this time Richard had no choice but to accept his resignation.[1793]

The last few months of his justiciarship were however occupied with the projection, if not the execution, of a measure of great constitutional importance. Early in the spring he had, in his master’s name, laid upon England a carucage to the amount of five shillings upon every carucate or ploughland. The great increase in the rate of taxation, as compared with that of 1194, was not unjustifiable; for since that year the socage-tenants, on whom the impost fell, had paid no direct taxes at all, while two scutages had been exacted from the tenants-in-chivalry. But a far more important change was made in the assessment of the new impost. Until now, the carucate, like the hide, had been a term of elastic significance. It represented, as the literal meaning of the word implied, the extent of land which could be cultivated by a single plough; and this of course varied in different parts of the country according to the nature of the soil, and the number and strength of the plough-team. In general, however, a hundred acres seem to have been reckoned as the average extent both of the carucate and of the hide. In order to avoid the endless complications and disputes which under the old system had made the assessment of the land-tax a matter of almost more trouble than profit, Hubert Walter adopted this average as a fixed standard, and ordered that henceforth, for purposes of taxation, the word “carucate” should represent a hundred acres. It followed as a necessary consequence that the whole arable land of England must be re-measured. The old customary reckoning of hides, based upon the Domesday survey, would no longer answer its purpose: the venerable rate-book which had been in use for more than a hundred years, partially superseded since 1168 by the Black Book of the Exchequer, was now to be superseded entirely. Hubert therefore issued in the king’s name a commission for what was virtually a new Domesday survey. Into every shire he sent a clerk and a knight, who, together with the sheriff and certain lawful men chosen out of the shire, were, after swearing that they would do the king’s business faithfully, to summon before them the stewards of the barons of the county, the lord or bailiff of every township and the reeve and four lawful men of the same, whether free or villein, and two lawful knights of the hundred; these persons were to declare upon oath what ploughlands there were in every township—how many in demesne, how many in villenage, how many in alms, and who was responsible for these last. The carucates thus ascertained were noted in a roll of which four copies were kept, one by each of the two royal commissioners, one by the sheriff, and the other divided among the stewards of the local barons. The collection of the money was intrusted to two lawful knights and the bailiff of every hundred; these were responsible for it to the sheriff; and the sheriff had to see that it agreed with his roll, and to pay it into the Exchequer. Stern penalties were denounced against witnesses, whether free or villein, who should be detected in trying to deceive the commissioners. No land was to be exempted from the tax, except the free estates belonging to the parish churches, and lands held of the king by serjeanty or special service; even these last, however, were to be included in the survey, and their holders were required to come and prove their excuses at its conclusion, in London at the octave of Pentecost.[1794]

This was Hubert’s last great administrative act, and it had a far more important significance than he himself probably knew. In form, the application of the process of jury-inquest to the assessment of an impost on the land was only a return to the precedent of Domesday itself. In reality, however, it was something much more important than this. The jury-inquest had been introduced by the Conqueror in 1086 under exceptional circumstances, and for an exceptional purpose which could be attained by no other means. So far as its original use was concerned, the precedent had remained a wholly isolated one for more than a hundred years. But during those years the principle which lay at the root of the jury-inquest had made its way into every branch of legal, fiscal and judicial administration. It had been applied to the purposes of private litigation by the Great Assize, to the determination of individual liability to military duty by the Assize of Arms, to the assessment of taxation on personal property by the ordinance of the Saladin tithe; it had penetrated the whole system of criminal procedure through the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton; and it had gained a yet fuller recognition in the judicial ordinances of 1194. Viewed in this light, its application to the assessment of taxation on real property was another highly important step in the extension of its sphere of work. But this was not all. The chief value of the jury-system lay in its employment of the machinery of local representation and election, whereby it was a means of training the people to the exercise of constitutional self-government. The commission of 1198 shews that, although doubtless neither rulers nor people were conscious of the fact, this training had now advanced within measurable distance of its completion. The machinery of the new survey was not identical with that used in 1086. The taxpayers were represented, not only by the witnesses on whose recognition the assessment was based, but by the “lawful men chosen out of the shire” who took their place side by side with the king’s officers as commissioners for the assessment, and by the bailiff and two knights of the hundred who were charged with the collection of the money. The representative principle had now reached its furthest developement in the financial administration of the shire. Its next advance must inevitably result in giving to the taxpayers a share in the determination, first of the amount of the impost, and then of the purposes to which it should be applied, by admitting them, however partially and indirectly, to a voice in the great council of the nation.[1795]

We must not credit Hubert Walter with views so lofty or so far-reaching as these. The chief aim of his policy doubtless was to get for his master as much money as he could, although he would only do it by what he regarded as just and constitutional methods. Unluckily the commissioners’ report is lost, and there is not even any proof that it was ever presented; for before Whitsuntide the new Pope’s views had become known, and on July 11 a royal writ announced Hubert’s retirement from the justiciarship and the appointment of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter in his stead.[1796] Like Hubert, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter came of a family which had long been engaged in administrative work. His elder brother Simon had in Henry’s early years filled the various offices of sheriff, justice-in-eyre, and king’s marshal.[1797] Geoffrey himself had been sheriff of Northampton throughout the last five years of Henry’s reign, and had during the same period acted occasionally as an ordinary justice of assize, and more frequently as a judge of the forest-court.[1798] In 1189 Richard appointed him one of the assistant-justiciars, and in this capacity he supported Walter of Rouen in the affair of William of Longchamp’s deposition.[1799] In the early days of William’s rule, however, Geoffrey had made use of the latter’s influence to secure for himself the whole English inheritance of the earl of Essex, William de Mandeville, upon which his wife had a distant claim.[1800] Such a man was likely to be controlled by fewer scruples, as well as hampered by fewer external restraints, than those which had beset the justiciar-archbishop; and in truth, before the year was out, both clergy and people had cause to regret the change of ministers. Some of the religious orders refused to pay their share of the carucage; their refusal was met by a royal edict declaring the whole body of clergy, secular as well as monastic, incapable of claiming redress for any wrongs inflicted on them by the laity, while for any injury done by a clerk or a monk to a layman satisfaction was exacted to the uttermost farthing. The archbishop of Canterbury could hardly have published what was virtually a decree of outlawry against his own order; the new justiciar published it seemingly without hesitation, and the recalcitrant monks were compelled to submit.[1801] This act was followed by a renewal of the decree requiring all charters granted under the king’s old seal to be brought up for confirmation under the new one[1802]—a step which seems to imply that Richard’s former command to this effect had not been very strictly enforced by Hubert. Meanwhile three justices-errant, acting on a set of instructions modelled upon those of 1194, were holding pleas of the Crown in the northern shires;[1803] “so that,” says King Henry’s old chaplain Roger of Howden, “with these and other vexations, just or unjust, all England from sea to sea was reduced to penury. And these things were not yet ended when another kind of torment was added to confound the men of the kingdom, through the justices of the forest,” who were sent out all over England to hold a great forest-assize, which was virtually a renewal of that issued by Henry in 1184.[1804]