Fifteen years earlier, Richard Cœur-de-Lion had repelled in similar words a charge of treason insinuated against the Marshal: “God’s Feet! I have always held him for the most loyal knight in all my realm. I do not believe he has ever been false.”[345] Three years later, when the death of the aged regent of England was announced at the court of France, the flower of the French chivalry vied with each other in extolling the knightly virtues of their dead enemy, and Philip Augustus spoke the crowning word of praise: “You have well said—but what I say is that he was the most loyal man I ever knew in any place where I have been.”[346] In the epithet unanimously chosen by three men so unlike each other as Richard, John, and Philip, to sum up their opinion of William the Marshal, lies the key to his whole career, and to the peculiar place which he held in the estimation of his contemporaries. What they admired and reverenced in him was not genius but character; the character, as a modern French critic has truly said, of the typical knight without fear and without reproach. One of William’s friends, Aimeric de Ste.-Maure, the Master of the Temple, expressed the general verdict in another way; when he and William were both on their death-beds, he said: “Bury me beside William the Marshal, the Good Knight, who has won that surname by his probity on earth and will carry it with him to Heaven.”[347] To be thus known as pre-eminently “The Good Knight” was to have won the highest title of honour that the medieval world could bestow. The “probity,” or “prowess,” which constituted the essence of the ideal knightly character, was a complex quality, hardly to be expressed by any single word of modern speech; it included valour and skill in arms; and it also included, above all else, what the men of the Middle Ages called “loyalty.” Primarily, to them, loyalty meant the faithful discharge of the obligations legally involved in the relation between vassal and lord; obligations, indeed, often disregarded and violated in practice, but theoretically acknowledged as sacred no less in the days of John Lackland and Philip Augustus than in the days when they inspired one of the noblest outbursts of feeling in the noblest epic of ancient France.[348] This principle of “loyalty” in the medieval sense was the rule by which the Marshal walked, with a rare steadfastness and consistency, throughout his life. The very passages in his career which seem at first glance most difficult to reconcile with modern ideas on the subject are in reality illustrations of the simple and literal way in which he followed his rule, and were thoroughly understood as such by the sovereigns against whom they brought him temporarily into opposition.[349] He never concerned himself with abstract politics; in any given circumstances, his sole concern was to do his own duty to his own lord, whoever that lord might be. He knew neither doubt nor fear. He was, indeed, constitutionally fearless; personal danger of any kind was a thing of which he seems to have remained through life almost as unconscious as when in early childhood, a hostage in the power of Stephen and condemned to be hurled like a stone from a mangonel into the castle which his father was defending for the Empress Maud, he had disarmed the King’s wrath by running up to the deadly engine and begging for a “swing” in it. But his courage never degenerated into rashness; he was never eager to fight (except in a tournament) merely for fighting’s sake, nor willing to countenance violent measures unless they were imperatively called for by necessity or honour. His temper was cool and practical. He was no pioneer of reform or of revolution; he accepted without question the ordinary standards of public opinion in his day.[350] His ideal was strictly the ideal of his own time; an ideal, therefore, which all his contemporaries could understand and appreciate, and which they could see to be fulfilled in his person more completely than in that of any other man then living, at any rate in England. As he was true and just in the fulfilment of his duty as a vassal, so he was true and just in all his dealing. When he was but a landless knight, living by the ransoms of the prisoners and the sale of the horses captured by him in tournaments, men already knew that his word was his bond. His lord the “young King,” Henry II’s son, habitually “spent so much in every place where he went, that when the hour of departure came, he knew not how to get away” from his creditors. “Counts, barons, vavassours” vainly offered to stand surety for the payment of his debts; the shrewd tradesmen would accept no such security; but when the Marshal pledged his word that the accounts should be settled within a month, they exclaimed, “If the Marshal warrant us, we are as good as paid.”[351] Even so Louis of France, when from the treasury of England, exhausted by years of confusion and war, an indemnity was promised him for his losses and expenses in the invasion, suffered this important item in the terms of peace to be left without mention in the written treaty, and trusted for its fulfilment solely to the regent’s plighted word. Jealousy, suspicion, party-spirit, could find no occasion against a character so simple, so unpretending, so honest and straightforward as that of William the Marshal. Thrice in his long life—once by some dastardly comrades who envied the esteem in which he was held by the two Henrys, twice by King John—an attempt was made to cast aspersions on his honour. Each time he met the calumny in the same way; he offered to disprove it by ordeal of battle. Each time his challenge, uttered in the King’s presence and in the midst of the court, was answered by a general silence more significant than words. No man dared encounter William the Marshal in the ordeal, because every man believed it impossible for the “judgement of God” to go against the Good Knight who was without fear because his conscience was without reproach.
In point of fact, the Legate and the magnates at Gloucester in October, 1216,1216 had set up what we now call a regency; but the idea which that word conveys to us was to them so entirely new and strange that they seem to have been at first unable to find a name for it. Immediately after the coronation Earl William the Marshal began to exercise the functions of a regent, and among them that of issuing letters patent and close in the King’s name. In these letters he, at first, sometimes styles himself simply “William Marshal Earl of Pembroke”; but on six occasions he calls himself “Justiciar.”[352] His assumption of this title is puzzling in more ways than one. The chief justiciarship of England was not vacant; it had been given by John in 1215 to Hubert de Burgh, whose fidelity to John and to his heir is as unquestionable as that of the Marshal himself, and was being demonstrated by his defence of Dover against Louis at the very time of the Marshal’s appointment to the regency. In the thirteenth century an office granted, as was that of the Justiciar, by letters patent,[353] to be held during the King’s pleasure, was not vacated by the King’s death, but belonged of right to the grantee until he was superseded by means of a new appointment.[354] Twenty years later Hubert himself declared that he had been Justiciar “without contradiction” ever since his appointment by John;[355] it is clear, therefore, that the Marshal’s assumption of the title was not regarded by Hubert as implying any design of ousting him from his office. There was indeed one precedent, dating from the time of Richard, for the appointment of two chief Justiciars at once. But Earl William’s position was from the outset not that of a Justiciar at all. The Justiciar was the King’s second in command—the foremost minister of the Crown when the sovereign was present, his lieutenant and vicegerent when he was absent from the realm; in either case, his delegate and nothing more. Earl William was not the King’s delegate; he had not been appointed by the King and was not removable at the King’s pleasure; he had been called by the Legate and the magnates to govern the realm during the King’s minority, as guardian of the King himself. He was, in modern phraseology, not Viceroy but Regent. Still, there was just sufficient analogy between his functions and those which, under certain circumstances, appertained to the Justiciar, to suggest his adoption of that title, in a tentative sort of way, until a better one could be devised.[356] In a word, as his office was a novelty and an experiment, so its earliest appellation seems to have been a makeshift. Before the end of November, 1216, that appellation was replaced by a loftier and more comprehensive one—“Governor of the king and of the kingdom.”[357] No attempt seems to have been made at any further definition either of the limits of his powers, or of his relation to the royal Council; there was in fact no means of defining either, nor any authority capable of so doing. In one sense he was above the council; but in another sense he was merely its most important member; its other members acted in subordination to him, but he was not independent of them; they were the King’s councillors, not his; nay, more—it was from them that he had received his authority, and he was thus in some sense responsible to them for his exercise of it. He was also, and above all, in theory at least, responsible to the Legate and, through the Legate, to the Pope.[358] It is thus impossible to determine precisely how much of the credit of the policy which freed England from her invaders and restored peace and order to the distracted country and the ruined administration is due to the Marshal himself, and how much to his colleagues, Gualo, Hubert, Peter des Roches, and the other ministers of the late King. A large share of credit must in any case belong to them for a steady, faithful, and intelligent co-operation without which the Marshal obviously could not have carried on either war or government at all. But it is certain that for two years and a half after the coronation no act was done in the King’s name without the Marshal’s consent; for, except on a very few special occasions, all the royal letters during that period were attested by him and sealed with his seal.[359] It may therefore fairly be said that whatsoever they did in England, he was the doer of it.
1216–1217
One thing there was which, it was clearly understood from the outset, could not be done at all during the King’s minority. No grant in perpetuity made by, or in the name of, a person under age was valid by English law. The application of this rule to the case of an infant King seems not to have been expressed till more than two years after Henry’s coronation, but it was effectually secured during that time by an expedient whose simplicity and practicality are eminently characteristic of the Marshal. A grant in perpetuity on the part of the Crown was invalid unless sealed with the King’s seal. No great seal was made for Henry till two years after he was crowned; the seal of the regent served in its stead.[360] On several occasions during the first year of the regency grants were made in the King’s name to hold good “till the fourteenth completed year of our age.”[361] {1216–1217} There was as yet no fixed rule for the determination of a King’s majority; but the reigning King of France, Philip Augustus, had been crowned as his father’s colleague shortly after his fourteenth birthday, and had exercised the functions of royalty from that time forth. This was the origin of the rule which fixed the coming of age of later Kings of France at fourteen years; and Henry’s guardians seem at first to have contemplated taking Philip’s case as a precedent for that of their own boy-sovereign.[362] There was no English precedent to guide them. Nine years later it was asserted that one castellan—Peter de Maulay—had bound himself by an oath to John not to give back the castles of which he had charge till Henry should be of legal age.[363] It is possible that John may have demanded and received such an oath from more than one of the wardens of the royal castles; but evidently neither they, the Marshal, nor any of the council knew what was John’s idea—if he even had one—of what should constitute legal age in the case of his successor; the definition tentatively suggested at the beginning of the reign was clearly not based upon any direction left by him. At the close of 1217 it was abandoned, and its place was taken by a vaguer formula—“till our coming of age.”[364] The question of when that was to be could not become urgent for three years at least; it was therefore wisely put aside for solution at a more convenient season.
1215–1216
Some indications seem to point to another possible restriction on the powers of the king’s guardians, in the shape of a theory that their “pleasure” was not legally equivalent to “the King’s pleasure”; in other words, that appointments made by the late King were not revocable (except for some special reason) during the minority of his successor. There is however no evidence that this theory was ever put into explicit words or formally recognized;[365] and nothing of the kind is needed to account for the fact that the great majority of the Crown officers appointed by John were left undisturbed by the Earl Marshal in their several bailiwicks.[366] Thirteen counties were at John’s death under sheriffs of foreign birth. Falkes de Bréauté was sheriff of Northamptonshire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire; Peter de Maulay of Dorset and Somerset; Savaric de Mauléon of Hampshire; Philip Marc of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire; Engelard de Cigogné (or d’Athée) of Surrey. The two last named were members of a family on which “the Barons” of 1215 had conferred a signal mark of distinction, by making it the subject of a separate article (the fiftieth) in the Great Charter, whereby John was pledged “to remove altogether from their bailiwicks the relations of Gerard of Athée,” several of whom, among them Engelard of Cigogné and Philip Marc, are mentioned by name, “and all their following, so that they may never more hold any bailiwick in England.” The reason for this remarkable enactment was, so far as can be made out from existing evidence, simply this: that when, after a struggle in which Gerard of Athée fought gallantly for his country and his Count,[367] the old Angevin lands were conquered by Philip Augustus, these kinsmen—sprung from a group of little villages between Tours and Loches—instead of settling down under the new ruler of Touraine, crossed the sea to seek employment in the service of their natural-born sovereign and make homes for themselves in his island realm; that he entrusted them with offices of considerable importance as well as (in some cases at least) of considerable pecuniary value, and especially with the command of some of the chief royal castles;[368] that they fulfilled the duties thus entrusted to them with fidelity and efficiency, and that they had under their control a numerous following of dependents who had accompanied or rejoined them from beyond the sea, and who were, like them, faithful soldiers and servants of the King. We need seek no further for the grounds on which the “Barons of the Charter” desired to get rid of Gerard d’Athée and his kindred;[369] nor for the grounds on which the fiftieth article of the Great Charter was omitted in the revised version issued by Gualo and the Marshal in Henry’s name. The only puzzle in the matter is why the baronial party should have singled out the members of this particular family by name[370] to be made victims of their jealousy and fear, and not included the other “alien” officers in the same condemnation (or commendation); for two at least of those others were men who by origin, class, and character differed little from Gerard of Athée and his kinsmen. The third, indeed—Savaric de Mauléon—was a noble by birth, the head of an illustrious family of baronial rank in Poitou, and a man of personal distinction in other pursuits besides that of arms; it is needless to say more of him at present, for, as he returned to his native land shortly after the council at Bristol, the military and administrative offices held by him in England were of necessity transferred to other hands. But Falkes de Bréauté and Peter de Maulay were simply soldiers of fortune from the continental dominions of the house of Anjou.[371] Together with the sheriffdom of Dorset, Peter de Maulay had been entrusted by the late king with the castle of Corfe, and in it not only the royal treasury and some important State prisoners, but also the child Richard who was, after Henry, the next and indeed the only male heir to the Crown. Since John had deemed Peter a fit person to have such a charge as this, the darkest hour of the struggle with the enemies of John’s heir was obviously not the time for removing him from his post. As to Falkes—called by Matthew Paris “the rod of the Lord’s fury”—he was a man after John’s own heart, as ruthless and reckless as John himself; but his fierceness was equalled by his daring valour, his consummate skill in military affairs, and his zeal in the royal cause. A glance at the map of England is enough to shew why John had chosen such a man as this to have charge of the particular group of counties and castles which he placed under the command of Falkes; and the story of the war is enough to justify the wisdom of his choice.[372]
1217
The treaty of Kingston was no sooner concluded than both parties set to work conscientiously to carry its provisions into effect. “Reverted perverts” came crowding in to the King’s allegiance, and as fast as they came their lands were ordered to be restored to them.[373] On 23rd September Louis and Henry joined in summoning Alexander of Scotland to make restitution of the English lands which he had seized during the war.[374] Orders were promptly issued for the delivery of prisoners and the payment of ransoms and other moneys due according to the terms of the treaty.[375] Only two classes of men suffered any real punishment for their share in the war. The one class consisted of men of Norman birth who held or claimed lands in England, and who had taken the side of Louis; concerning these the sheriffs were warned that “no seisin is adjudged to them, till the English shall have recovered their lands in Normandy.”[376] The other class was that of the clergy who had disobeyed the bishops and the Pope by supporting Louis; and their punishment came solely from the Legate. On 27th October he went to London[377] and there meted out condign punishment to the clergy who had set his excommunication at naught. He “went to the church of S. Paul, and caused all the altars and all the chalices to be broken up, and all the vestments to be burnt, and new ones to be put in their place; and he put in new canons; and the old ones who had chanted the service in defiance of him he deprived of all their benefices; and he made the beneficed clergy of the town exchange their parishes for upland ones.”[378] “Some of the clergy he degraded; some he sent, still excommunicate, to the threshold of the Apostles.”[379] Thirteen clerks “who used threatening language to him and his” he put in ward at Westminster.[380] What ultimately became of them we are not told; but on 18th February next year {1218} all clerks under sentence of excommunication for adherence to Louis were, in the king’s name, bidden to leave England before Mid-Lent (22nd March), and warned that if found there after that date, they would be kept in ward “till the king should give further orders concerning them.”[381]
On Sunday, 29th October, 12171217—a year and a day after his coronation—the young King entered his capital.[382] “He was received with glory, and fealty and homage were done to him,” no doubt by the citizens and by many other “reverted perverts.” During the ensuing week “many discussions were held by the King’s guardians and the leading men of the kingdom concerning the ordering of the realm, the establishment of peace, and the abolition of evil customs.”[383] The outcome of these deliberations was a new issue of the Charter,[384] or what seems to have been meant to be regarded as the issue of a new Charter; for the preamble (which, except for the names, is a copy of the preamble of Magna Charta) ignores all earlier documents. As a matter of fact, however, this Charter is a revised edition of the Charter of 1216, from which it differs only in the following particulars: In the article concerning widows, the amount of legal dowry is, for the first time, defined: it is fixed at a third part of all the husband’s lands, “unless she have been dowered with a less amount at the church door.”[385] The article relating to the judicial eyres and the three recognitions is modified. Recognitions of mort d’ancester and novel disseisin are to be taken in the several shires before justices who are to be sent thither once (instead of four times) a year, and who are to hold the assizes “with the knights of the shires”[386]—not, it seems, as in 1215 and 1216, with four knights specially elected for the purpose; if these assizes cannot be completed on the day fixed, the cases are to be dealt with, not as in 1215 and 1216 by a sufficient number of knights and freeholders who are to remain on the spot for that intent, but by the judges “elsewhere on their eyre,” or if the cases are too difficult they are to be referred to and settled by the judges of the Bench;[387] and the assizes of darrein presentment are to be always held and settled by these last-named judges.[388] In the article regulating the imposition of amercements the king’s villeins are excepted from the safeguard given to the villeins of other lords.[389] The article concerning the requisition of corn or cattle is modified by the extension of the limit of time for payment from twenty-one days to forty.[390] On the other hand, carts belonging to an ecclesiastical person, a knight, or a lady, are henceforth not to be requisitioned at all.[391] The unsupported accusation of a Crown bailiff is henceforth to be insufficient not only for sending a man to the ordeal, but also for compelling him to make compurgation.[392] The King’s promise to take no unfair advantage of his possession of escheats is made still more definite.[393] Of the six matters spoken of in John’s Charter which were expressly mentioned in clause 42 of the Charter of 1216 as being postponed for future consideration—the assessment of scutages and aids, the rights of Jewish and other creditors against the heirs of deceased debtors, liberty of ingress into and egress from the realm, the regulation of forests and warrens, the customs of the shires, and the river-enclosures and their keepers—the fourth was left to be dealt with in a separate Charter of the Forest; to three others as many new articles were devoted. No river-enclosures are henceforth to be kept up save those which were in existence in the time of Henry II.[394] Respecting the “customs of the shires,” the provision in the twenty-fifth chapter of Magna Charta (to which the words on that subject in the closing paragraph of Henry’s first Charter must refer), that all shires and other local jurisdictions except those on the royal domains shall be at their “old ferm” without increment, is not renewed; but in its stead there is a clause regulating the holding of the county courts and the sheriff’s tourn. The shire court is to be held not oftener than once a month, and at longer intervals where such have been customary. No sheriff or his bailiff is to make his tourn in the hundred except twice a year—after Easter and after Michaelmas—and only in the proper and accustomed place. View of frankpledge is to be made at Michaelmas term, in such a manner “that every man shall have the liberties which he used to have in the time of our grandfather King Henry, or which he has since acquired, and so that our peace shall be kept, and the tithing shall be complete as it was wont to be; and the sheriff is to seek no occasions, and is to be content with what the sheriff used to have for holding his view in King Henry’s time.”[395] Concerning the once crucial question which had furnished the original pretext for the rising of the barons against John, the guardians could now venture to reassert the rights of the Crown; and they did so, but in terms carefully chosen so as to avoid all reference to the late troubles: “Scutage shall be taken henceforth as it used to be taken in the time of our grandfather King Henry.”[396] Two other new articles were added, whose connexion with the scutage clause is not difficult to see. The one enacted that henceforth no free man should either give away or sell so much of his land as that the residue should be insufficient to furnish the service due to the lord of the fief;[397] the other forbade that any man should give his land to a religious house for the purpose of receiving it back again to hold of that house, and enacted that if any man were convicted of so doing, his donation should be void, and his land forfeited to the lord.[398] The other omissions were disposed of, for the moment, by a general saving clause: “Reserving to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, Templars, Hospitallers, earls, barons, and all other persons both ecclesiastical and secular, the liberties and free customs which they had before.”[399] Lastly, it was ordained also “by common consent of the whole realm” that all adulterine castles, that is, castles which had been built or rebuilt since the beginning of the war between the late King and his barons, should be immediately destroyed.[400] This Charter has no date. It was, doubtless issued in the early days of November; probably on the 6th, for on that day there was issued a Charter of the Forest which dealt amply with the grievances connected with the abuse of Forest law.[401]
The article concerning scutage was inserted in the Charter for an immediate and important purpose; it was the ratification of a tax which the Council had imposed a few days before the Charters were issued. Of the many problems with which the Marshal and his colleagues had to grapple one of the most urgent and most difficult was that of finance. The confused entries on the Pipe Rolls of John’s later years indicate that the financial administration of the realm had been gradually drifting towards chaos from 1212 onwards; in 1215 chaos was reached, and the machinery of the Exchequer came to a standstill. After Michaelmas, 1214, no session of the Exchequer was held, no accounts were rendered by any of the sheriffs or other bailiffs of the Crown, for more than three years. John had met the expenses of the war partly by payments out of the treasury, partly by means of writs addressed to various fiscal officers throughout the country, directing them to make on his behalf certain payments out of the ferms for which they were accountable at the Exchequer.[402] As, however, “no one”—as a chronicler says—“would pay any money to the King” or his representatives, and as a considerable part of the kingdom was in the possession of the enemy, both of these resources must have been well-nigh exhausted before the death of John, who was in fact reduced at last to sheer plunder to provide for the maintenance of his troops. The Marshal at the outset of his regency seems to have sought help towards providing the sinews of war in the levy of a hidage, carucage, and “aid,” this last word probably representing a tallage from the towns. Of the time and circumstances of their imposition there is no record, but it is most probable that the matter was decided in the council at Bristol immediately after the coronation, in November, 1216.[403] Of course none of these taxes could be collected in the districts which were under the control of Louis or his partisans. In July, 1217, the Pope ordered the prelates to contribute an aid to the King’s necessities.[404] Meanwhile wages, allowances, and other payments were made by means of jewels from the royal treasury, and in cloth of silk, samite, and baldaquin from the royal wardrobe.[405]