The subject-matter of these inquiries, as laid down in the king’s instructions, embraced far more than the conduct of the sheriffs. Not only were the commissioners to examine into all particulars of the sums received by the sheriffs and bailiffs in the discharge of their functions, and the manner and grounds of their acquisition,[610] and into the disposal of all chattels and goods forfeited under the assize of Clarendon; they were also to ascertain whether the collection of the aid pour fille marier had been honestly conducted; they were at the same time to investigate the administration of the forests[611] and the condition of the royal demesnes;[612] to find out and report any persons who had failed to do homage to the king or his son;[613] and they were moreover to make inquisition into the proceedings of all the special courts of the various franchises, whether held by archbishop or bishop, abbot, earl or baron, as fully and minutely as into those of the ordinary hundreds.[614] Only two months were allowed to the commissioners for their work, which nothing but their great number can have enabled them to execute in the time. Unhappily, the report which they brought up to the king on S. Barnabas’s day is lost, and we have no record of its results save in relation to one point: out of twenty-seven sheriffs, only seven were allowed to retain their offices. The rest, who were mostly local magnates owing their importance rather to their territorial and family influence than to their connexion with the court, were replaced by men of inferior rank, and of whom all but four were officials of the Exchequer.[615]

This significant proof of Henry’s determination to pursue his anti-feudal policy was followed up next year by the last step in that resumption of alienated demesnes which in England had been virtually completed thirteen years ago, but which had been enforced only by slower degrees on the other side of the channel. In 1171 Henry ordered a general inquisition into the extent and condition of the demesne lands and forests held by his grandfather in Normandy, and into the encroachments since made upon them by the barons; and we are told that the restitution which resulted from the inquiry almost doubled his ducal revenue.[616] The endurance of the barons was now almost at an end; and moreover, their opportunity had now come. From that same council at Westminster whence the decree had gone forth for the inquest of sheriffs, there had gone forth also the summons for the crowning of the young king; that other assembly which on S. Barnabas’s day saw the deposition of the delinquent officers saw also, three days later, the new and dangerously suggestive spectacle of two kings at once in the land. When, six months later still, the first consequences of that coronation appeared in the murder of S. Thomas, the barons could not but feel that their hour was at hand. His regal dignity no longer all his own, but voluntarily shared with another—his regal unction washed out in that stream of martyr’s blood which cut him off from the support of the Church—Henry seemed to be left alone and defenceless in the face of his foes. The year which he spent in conquering Ireland was a breathing-space for them as well as for him. They used it to adapt to their purposes the weapon which he had so lately forged for his own defence; they found a rallying-point and a pretext for their designs against him in the very son whom he had left to cover his retreat and supply his place at home.

The younger Henry had passed over to Normandy just before his father quitted it, in July 1171.[617] There he apparently stayed with his mother and her younger children till the opening of the next year, when he and his wife went to England, and there remained as titular king and queen until his father’s return from Ireland.[618] The youth’s kingship, however, was scarcely more than nominal; in his presence no less than in his absence, the real work of government in England was done by the justiciars; and his own personal interests lay chiefly beyond the sea. The influences which surrounded him there were those of his father’s open or secret foes:—of his wife’s father, King Louis of France, of his own mother, Queen Eleanor, her kindred and her people; and Eleanor had ceased to be a loyal vice-gerent for the husband who had by this time forfeited his claims to wifely affection from her. She seems to have taken for her political confidant her uncle, Ralf of Faye[619]—one of the many faithless barons of Poitou; and it is said to have been at her instigation that Ralf and an Angevin baron, Hugh of Ste.-Maure, profited by Henry’s absence in Ireland to whisper to her eldest son that a crown was worthless without the reality of kingly power, and that it was time for him to assert his claim to the substance of which his father had given him only the shadow.[620] Young Henry, now seventeen years old, listened but too readily to such suggestions; and it was a rumour of his undutiful temper, coupled significantly with a rumour of growing discontent among the barons, that called Henry back from Ireland[621] and made him carry his son with him to Normandy[622] in the spring of 1172. After the elder king’s reconciliation with the Church, however, and the second coronation of the younger one, the danger seemed to have subsided; and in November Henry, to complete the pacification, allowed his son to accompany his girl-wife on a visit to her father, the king of France.[623] When they returned,[624] the young king at once confronted his father with a demand to be put in possession of his heritage, or at least of some portion of it—England, Normandy, or Anjou—where he might dwell as an independent sovereign with his queen.[625] The father refused.[626] He had never intended to make his sons independent rulers of the territories allotted to them; Richard and Geoffrey indeed were too young for such an arrangement to be possible in their cases; and the object of the eldest son’s crowning had been simply to give him such an inchoate royalty as would enable his father to employ him as a colleague and representative in case of need, and to feel assured of his ultimate succession to the English throne. The king’s plans for the distribution of his territories and for the establishment of his children had succeeded well thus far. He had secured Britanny in Geoffrey’s name before he quitted Gaul in 1171; and a month after his return, on Trinity Sunday (June 10) 1172, Richard was enthroned as duke of Aquitaine according to ancient custom in the abbot’s chair in the church of S. Hilary at Poitiers.[627] One child, indeed, the youngest of all, was still what his father had called him at his birth—“John Lackland.”[628] Even for John, however, though he was scarcely five years old,[629] a politic marriage was already in view.

One of the many branches of Henry’s continental policy was the cultivation of an alliance with those small but important states which lay on the border-land between Italy, Germany, and that old Aquitanic Gaul over which he claimed dominion in his wife’s name. The most important of these was the county of Maurienne, a name which in strictness represents only a small mountainous region encircled to east and south by the Graian and Cottian Alps, and to west and north by another chain of mountains bordering the outermost edges of two river-valleys, those of the Isère and the Arc, which again are severed from each other by a line of lesser heights running through the heart of the district. In the southern valley, that of the Arc, stood the capital of the county, S. Jean-de-Maurienne, the seat of a bishopric from the dedication of whose cathedral church the town itself took its name. In the northern valley, at the foot of the Little S. Bernard, some few miles above the source of the Isère, the counts of Maurienne were advocates of the abbey of S. Maurice, which long treasured the sacred symbol of the old Burgundian royalty, the spear of its patron saint. The power of the counts of Maurienne, however, was not bounded by the narrow circle of hills which stood like an impregnable rampart round about their native land. On the shore of the lake of Bourget they held Chambéry, guarding the pass of Les Echelles, through which southern Gaul communicated with the German lands around the lake of Geneva; the county of Geneva itself was almost surrounded by their territories, for on its western side their sway extended from Chambéry across the valley of the Rhône northward as far as Belley, while eastward they held the whole southern shore of the lake. To north-east of Maurienne, again, the great highway which led from Geneva and from the German lands beyond it into Italy, through the vale of Aosta by the passes of the Pennine Alps or up the valley of the Isère by S. Maurice under the foot of the Little S. Bernard, was in their hands; for Aosta itself and the whole land as far as Castiglione on the Dora Baltea belonged to them. Across the Graian Alps, their possession of the extreme outposts of the Italian border, Susa and Turin, gave them the title of “Marquises of Italy,”[630] and the command of the great highway between Italy and southern Gaul by the valley of the Durance and through the gap which parts the Cottian from the Maritime Alps beneath the foot of the Mont Genèvre; while yet further south, on either side of the Maritime Alps where they curve eastward towards the Gulf of Genoa, Chiusa, Rochetta and Aspromonte all formed part of their territories.[631] In one word, they held the keys of every pass between Italy and north-western Europe, from the Great S. Bernard to the Col di Tenda. Nominally subject to the Emperor in his character of king of Burgundy, they really possessed the control over his most direct lines of communication with his Imperial capital; while the intercourse of western Europe with Rome lay almost wholly at their mercy;[632] and far away at the opposite extremity of Aquitania the present count Humbert of Maurienne seems to have claimed, though he did not actually hold, one of the keys of another great mountain-barrier, in the Pyrenean county of Roussillon on the Spanish March.[633]