CHAPTER VIII.
THE LATER YEARS OF RICHARD.
1194–1199.

The political history of England during the four years which followed Richard’s departure over sea is simply the history of the administration of Hubert Walter. Richard never again interfered in the concerns of his island realm, save for the purpose of obtaining money from it; and even the method whereby the money was to be raised he left, like all other details of administration, wholly to the justiciar’s discretion. Hubert in fact, as justiciar and archbishop, wielded during these years a power even more absolute than that which William of Longchamp had wielded during the king’s absence on crusade. But Richard’s second experiment in governing England by deputy succeeded far otherwise than the first. It was, indeed, attended with far less risk; for the king himself was never really out of reach, and could at any moment have returned to take up the reins of government in person, had there been any need to do so. Moreover, the man whom he now left as viceroy had far other qualifications for the office than William of Longchamp.

Hubert Walter had been trained under the greatest constitutional lawyer and most successful administrator of the age, Ralf de Glanville. He was nephew to Ralf’s wife,[1695] and had been a clerk or chaplain in Ralf’s household until 1186, when he was appointed dean of York.[1696] A few months later he was one of five persons nominated by the York chapter in answer to a royal mandate for election to the vacant see.[1697] King Henry, however, refused all five, and Hubert remained dean of York for three years longer. He seems to have held, besides his deanery, an office at court, either as protonotary or as vice-chancellor under Geoffrey; for during the last few months of Henry’s life he is found in Maine attending upon the king, and apparently charged with the keeping of the royal seal.[1698] Consecrated to Salisbury by Archbishop Baldwin on October 22, 1189,[1699] he immediately afterwards set out with him for Palestine; there he won universal esteem by the zeal and ability with which he exerted himself to relieve the wants of the poorer crusaders;[1700] on Baldwin’s death Hubert virtually succeeded to his place as the chief spiritual authority in the host;[1701] and after Richard’s arrival he made himself no less useful as the king’s best adviser and most trusty diplomatic agent in Palestine.[1702] It was Hubert who headed in Richard’s stead the first body of pilgrims whom the Turks admitted to visit the Holy Sepulchre;[1703] and it seems to have been he, too, who led back the English host from Palestine to Europe after Richard’s departure. He hastened as early as possible to visit the king in his captivity;[1704] and Richard lost no time in sending him to England to be made archbishop, and to help the justiciars in collecting the ransom.[1705] They had refused the help of William of Longchamp, but they could not reject that of Hubert; for they knew that, as a contemporary historian says, “the king had no one so like-minded with himself, whose fidelity, prudence and honesty he had proved in so many changes of fortune.”[1706] Hubert was one of the commissioners appointed to have the custody of the ransom;[1707] and there can be little doubt that the scheme by which it was raised was in part at least devised by his financial genius, and carried into execution by his energy and skill—qualities which he displayed no less effectively in dealing with the revolt which was finally quelled by the return of Richard himself.

Hubert entered upon his vice-royalty—for it was nothing less—under more favourable conditions than William of Longchamp. He came to it not as an upstart stranger, but as an Englishman already of high personal and official standing, thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy with the people whom he had to govern, intimately acquainted with the principles and the details of the system which he was called upon to administer; his qualifications were well known, and they were universally acknowledged. Moreover, there was now no one capable of heading any serious opposition to his authority, at least in secular affairs. William of Longchamp was still chancellor; but like the royal master to whose side he clave for the rest of his life, he had left England for ever. From John there was also nothing to fear. His intended trial never took place, for he threw himself at Richard’s feet at the first opportunity, and was personally forgiven; but the king was wise enough to leave untouched the sentence of forfeiture passed by the justiciar, and to keep his brother at his own side, a dependent upon his royal bounty, for nearly twelve months;[1708] and then he restored to him nothing but the counties of Mortain and Gloucester and the honour of Eye, but without their castles, giving him in compensation for the latter and for his other estates a yearly pension of eight thousand pounds Angevin.[1709] Even John’s capacities for mischief-making were so far paralyzed by this arrangement that he seems to have made no further attempt to meddle in English politics so long as Richard lived. The one man in whom Hubert saw, or fancied he saw, a possible rival on personal and ecclesiastical grounds, he swept roughly out of his path. The two primates had already quarrelled over the privileges of their respective sees, and nothing but the king’s presence had availed to keep peace between them.[1710] The northern one had been at feud with his own chapter ever since his appointment, and they were now prosecuting an appeal against him at Rome. In June 1194, backed, it can hardly be doubted, by Hubert’s influence, they obtained from the Pope a sentence which practically condemned Geoffrey without trial;[1711] and before these tidings reached England in September, a committee of royal justices, sent by Hubert to deal with the case in its temporal aspect, had already punished Geoffrey’s refusal to acknowledge their jurisdiction by confiscating all his archiepiscopal estates except Ripon.[1712] He went over sea and appealed to the king, but in vain;[1713] and for the next five years there was again but one primate in the land. One northern bishop, however, was still ready to defy Hubert as he had defied William of Longchamp and his own metropolitan. When the newly appointed sheriff of Northumberland, Hugh Bardulf, sought to enter upon his office shortly after Richard’s departure, he found that Hugh of Durham had already made a fresh bargain with the king, whereby he was to retain the county on a payment of two thousand marks. He tried, however, as before, to evade the necessity of payment, and was in consequence forcibly disseized by Richard’s orders.[1714] Still he was unwilling to give up the game; and in the spring of 1195 he made another attempt to regain the territorial influence in the north which Geoffrey’s fall seemed to have placed again within his reach. The story went in Yorkshire that he actually succeeded in once more obtaining from Richard—of course on Richard’s usual terms—a commission as co-justiciar with Hubert.[1715] Such a commission can hardly have been given otherwise than in mockery; yet the aged bishop, untaught by all his experience of the king’s shifty ways, once again set out from York, where he had just been excommunicating some of Geoffrey’s partizans,[1716] to publish his supposed triumph in London. Sickness, however, overtook him on the way; from Doncaster he was compelled to turn back to his old refuge at Howden, and there on March 3 he died.[1717] His palatinate was of course taken into the custody of the royal justiciars.[1718] A fortnight later Celestine III. sent to Archbishop Hubert a commission as legate for all England;[1719] and thenceforth he was undisputed ruler alike in Church and state.

Like most of the higher clergy of Henry’s later years, Hubert was distinctly more of a statesman than a churchman. His pontificate left no mark on the English Church; as primate, his chief occupation was to quarrel with his chapter. No scruples such as had moved Archbishop Thomas to resign the chancellorship, or had made even Bishop Roger of Salisbury seek a papal dispensation before he would venture to undertake a lay office,[1720] held back Hubert Walter from uniting in his own person the justiciarship and the primacy of all England. He was, however, a statesman of the best school of the time, steeped in the traditions of constitutional and administrative reform which had grown up during Henry’s later years under the inspiration of the king himself and the direction of Ralf de Glanville. The task of developing their policy, therefore, could not have fallen to more competent hands; and as Richard was totally destitute of his father’s business capacities, it was well that Hubert was left to fulfil it according to his own judgement and on his own sole responsibility for nearly four years.

The justiciar’s first act after his sovereign’s departure was to despatch the judges itinerant upon their annual visitation-tour with a commission[1721] which struck the key-note of his future policy. It was the note which had been struck by Henry II. in the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton; but the new commission shewed a great advance in the developement of the principles which those measures embodied. The jurisdiction of the justices is defined with greater fulness and extended over a much wider sphere. The “pleas of the Crown” with which they are empowered to deal include, besides those formerly recognized under this head, such various matters as the number and condition of churches in the king’s gift,[1722] escheats, wardships and marriages;[1723] forgers[1724] and defaulters;[1725] the harbouring of malefactors;[1726] the arrears of the ransom;[1727] the use of false measures;[1728] the debts of the murdered Jews; the fines due from their slayers,[1729] from the adherents of John, and from his debtors, as well as from his own forfeited property;[1730] the disposal of the chattels of dead usurers, and also of crusaders who had died before setting out on their pilgrimage;[1731] and the taking of recognitions under the Great Assize concerning land worth not more than five pounds a year.[1732] In all these proceedings the chief object evidently was to procure money for the royal treasury; a tallage which the judges were also directed to assess upon all cities, towns and royal demesnes[1733] being deemed insufficient to supply its needs. The details of this multifarious business are however of less historical importance than the method employed for its transaction. Every item of it was to be dealt with on the presentment of what may now be called the “grand jury”—the jury of sworn recognitors in every shire, whose functions, hitherto confined to the presentment of criminals, were thus extended to all branches of judicial work. This growth in the importance of the jury was marked by the introduction of a new ordinance for its constitution. The Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton simply ordered that the jury should consist of twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every township, without specifying how they were to be selected. Most probably they were nominated by the sheriff.[1734] The recognitors employed in the civil process known as the Great Assize, however, were from the first appointed in a special manner prescribed in the Assize itself. Four knights of the shire were summoned by the sheriff, and these four elected the twelve recognitors.[1735] By the “Form of proceeding in the pleas of the Crown” delivered to the justices-errant in 1194, this method of election was applied to the jury of presentment in all cases, with a modification which removed the choice yet one step further from the mere nomination of the sheriff. Four knights were first to be chosen out of the whole shire; these were to elect two out of every hundred or wapentake, and these two were to choose ten others, who with them constituted the legal twelve.[1736] Whether or not the choice of the first four was actually, as seems most probable, transferred from the sheriff to the body of the freeholders assembled in the county-court,[1737] still this enactment shews a distinct advance in the principles of election and representation, as opposed to that of mere nomination by a royal officer. Another step in the same direction was the appointment of three knights and a clerk to be “elected in every shire to keep the pleas of the Crown.”[1738] This was the origin of the office afterwards known as that of coroner. It had the effect of depriving the sheriff of a considerable part of his judicial functions; and his importance was at the same time yet further limited by an order that no sheriff should act as justiciar in his own shire, nor in any shire which he had held at any time since the king’s first crowning.[1739] The difficulty of checking the abuse of power in the hands of the sheriffs, which Henry had been unable to overcome, had certainly not been lessened by Richard’s way of distributing the sheriffdoms in his earlier years. It had indeed become so serious that in this very year either the new justiciar, or possibly the king himself, proposed an inquisition similar to that made by Henry in 1170, into the administration of all servants of the Crown, whether justices, sheriffs, constables, or foresters, since the beginning of the reign. When the king was gone, however, it seems to have been felt that such an undertaking would add too heavily to the labours of the judges-errant; and the inquiry was accordingly postponed for an indefinite time by the archbishop’s orders.[1740]