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]

Stern and cruel, however, as was the administration of the last eight months of Richard’s reign, it was still part of a salutary discipline. The milder chastenings which Richard’s English subjects had endured from Hubert Walter, the scorpion-lashes with which he chastised them by the hands of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, were both alike stages in the training which Richard’s predecessor had begun, and whose value they were to learn when left face to face with the personal tyranny of his successor. For nearer at hand than they could dream was the day when English people and Angevin king were to stand face to face indeed, more closely than they had ever stood before. The nine generations of increasing prosperity promised to Fulk the Good were all numbered and fulfilled, and with their fulfilment had come the turn of the tide. The power of the Angevins had reached its destined limit, and had begun to recede again. From the sacred eastern land all trace of it was already swept away; in the west it was, slowly indeed as yet, but none the less surely falling back. Five years were still to pass before the tide should be fairly out; then it was to leave the Good Count’s heir stranded, not on the black rock of Angers, but on the white cliffs of England.

Richard had spent the first half of his reign in fighting for a lost cause in Palestine; he spent the other half in fighting for a losing cause in Gaul. The final result of the long series of conquests and annexations whereby the Angevin counts, from Fulk the Red to Henry Fitz-Empress, had been enlarging their borders for more than two hundred years, had been to bring them into direct geographical contact and political antagonism with an enemy more formidable than any whom they had yet encountered. In their earliest days the king of the French had been their patron; a little later, he had become their tool. Now, he was their sole remaining rival; and ere long he was to be their conqueror. Since the opening of the century, a great change had taken place in the political position of the French Crown; a change which was in a considerable measure due to the yet greater change in the position of the Angevin house. When Louis VI. came to the throne in 1109, he found the so-called “kingdom of France” distributed somewhat as follows. The western half, from the river Somme to the Pyrenees, was divided between four great fiefs—Normandy, Britanny, Anjou and Aquitaine. Four others—Champagne, Burgundy, Auvergne and Toulouse—covered its eastern portion from the river Meuse to the Mediterranean Sea; another, Flanders, occupied its northernmost angle, between the sources of the Meuse, the mouth of the Scheld, and the English Channel. The two lines of great fiefs were separated by an irregular group of smaller territories, amid which lay, distributed in two very unequal portions, the royal domain. Its northern and larger half, severed from Flanders by the little counties of Amiens and Vermandois, was flanked on the east by Champagne and on the north-west by Normandy, while its south-western border was ringed in by the counties of Chartres, Blois and Sancerre, which parted it from Anjou, and which were all linked together with Champagne under the same ruling house. Southward, in the upper valleys of the Loire and the Cher, a much smaller fragment of royal domain, comprising the viscounty of Bourges and the territory afterwards known as the Bourbonnais, lay crowded in between Auvergne, the Aquitanian district of Berry, and the Burgundian counties of Mâcon and Nevers and that of Sancerre, which parted it from the larger royal possessions north of the Loire. The whole domains of the Crown thus covered scarcely more ground than the united counties of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, scarcely so much as the duchy of Normandy. Within these limits, however, Louis VI. had in his twenty-nine years’ reign contrived to establish his absolute authority on so firm a basis that from thenceforth the independence of the Crown was secured. To destroy that of the great feudataries, and to bring them one by one into a subjection as absolute as that of the royal domain itself, was the work which he bequeathed to his successors.

Map VII.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.