Another measure which must have been taken at the coronation, when all the recognised earls did their homage and paid their ceremonial services, seems to have been the degrading or cashiering of the supposititious earls created by Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may have obtained recognition by getting new grants; but those who lost endowment and dignity at once, like William of Ypres, the leader of the Flemish mercenaries, could make no terms. They sank to the rank from which they had been so incautiously raised.
Resumption of
lands.
Resistance
of William
of Aumâle.
Surrender
of
the malcontents.
The resumption of royal estates, and the restoration of the dispossessed on each side, was probably a much more difficult business than the humiliation of the earls. Doubtless the enemies of Henry’s mother would bear their reverses silently, to avoid entire ruin; or only those would think of continuing in opposition who had no hope but in terms which might be granted to pertinacious resistance; but Matilda’s supporters might well think it hard that they should be called upon to resign their hard-won gains. Still, Henry was a national king; the resumption of domain was not an Angevin conquest; it was a national restoration of the state of affairs as it stood before the beginning of the national quarrel. As a matter of fact only two or three of the nobles made any resistance. William of Aumâle, the Lord of Holderness, who had commanded at the Battle of the Standard, and who played the part of a petty king in Yorkshire, objected to surrender his great castle at Scarborough. He, of course, had been on Stephen’s side, and was, indeed, a member of the House of Champagne—the son of that Count Stephen who had been brought forward by the Norman earls as competitor with William Rufus. Of Matilda’s old friends, Hugh Mortimer, the lord of Wigmore, and Roger of Hereford, the son of Miles the Constable, declined to submit. The King of Scots too, Malcolm IV., grandson of King David and half-cousin of Henry, although the Northern counties had been held in trust for Henry, wished to retain them for himself. In January, 1155, however, Henry marched northwards and brought the Count of Aumâle to his feet. In March he was at London holding council for the restoration of peace and the confirmation of the ancient laws. He declared that neither friend nor foe should be spared. Roger of Hereford immediately surrendered. Hugh of Mortimer still held out, and did not submit until Henry had called out the national force for the capture of Bridgenorth. On exactly the same ground it was that Henry I., had won his victory over Robert of Belesme, when in 1102 he laid the axe to the tree of feudal misrule, and his subjects, rejoicing at the overthrow of the oppressor, hailed him as now for the first time a king. This was accomplished in July. And this was a permanent pacification; it was nearly twenty years before anything like rebellion reared its head.
Restoration
of judicature.
Frequent
councils.
Proposal to
conquer Ireland.
The history of the first year of Henry’s reign is not, however, filled up thus. He restored the administration of justice, and sent itinerant members of his judicial court to enforce the law which had been so long in abeyance. He himself learned the law as an apt scholar. Even at Bridgenorth he found time to hear suits brought before him as supreme judge; at Nottingham, whilst he was on his way from Scarborough, he threatened William Peverell with a charge of having poisoned the Earl of Chester. The very threat caused Peverell to take refuge in a monastery. He held council after council, taking advice from his elders, and making friends everywhere. In one assembly held at Wallingford after Easter he obtained the recognition of his little son William, who afterwards died, as his successor. In another, held at Winchester, at Michaelmas, he proposed that the conquest of Ireland should be attempted and a kingdom founded there for his brother William. The empress objected to this, and it was given up, at least during her life, although the English Pope, Adrian IV., by his famous Bull Laudabiliter, issued about this time, was already anxious to give the papal authorization to a scheme that would complete the symmetrical conformation of Western Christendom. A national expedition, Henry may have thought, would do more than anything else to consolidate the national unity which was growing rapidly into more than a name. But clearly the time was not come for England, shorn of her Northern provinces, and with the Welsh unsubdued, to attempt foreign conquest; and Henry had other states besides England to take thought for.
Hugh Bigot
humbled, 1157.