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Title: England under the Angevin Kings, Volume II

Author: Kate Norgate

Release date: June 19, 2022 [eBook #68347]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Macmillan and Co., 1887

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND
UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS, VOLUME II ***

Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was created by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.
Please see the note at the end of the book.

ENGLAND
UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS

ENGLAND
UNDER

THE ANGEVIN KINGS
BY

KATE NORGATE

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. II.

WITH MAPS AND PLANS

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK

1887

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE

Archbishop Thomas, 1162–1164 1
Note A.—The Council of Woodstock 43
Note B.—The Council of Clarendon 44

CHAPTER II
Henry and Rome, 1164–1172 46

CHAPTER III
The Conquest of Ireland, 795–1172 82

CHAPTER IV
Henry and the Barons, 1166–1175 120

CHAPTER V
The Angevin Empire, 1175–1183 169

CHAPTER VI
The Last Years of Henry II., 1183–1189 229

CHAPTER VII
Richard and England, 1189–1194 273

CHAPTER VIII
The Later Years of Richard, 1194–1199 332

CHAPTER IX
The Fall of the Angevins, 1199–1206 388
Note.—The Death of Arthur 429

CHAPTER X
The New England, 1170–1206 431

LIST OF MAPS

III Ireland, A.D. 1172 To face
. page 82
IV. Map to Illustrate the Rebellion of 1173–
1174 ” 149
V. France and Burgundy c. 1180 ” 185
VI Europe c. 1180
. ” 189
VI France and the Angevin Dominions, 1194
I. ” 359

PLANS

VI Les Andelys and Château-Gaillard To face
I. page 375
VI Château-Gaillard
II. ” 378

CHAPTER I.
ARCHBISHOP THOMAS.
1162–1164.

Somewhat more than a year after the primate’s death, Thomas the
chancellor returned to England. He came, as we have seen, at the king’s
bidding, ostensibly for the purpose of securing the recognition of little
Henry as heir to the crown. But this was not the sole nor even the chief
object of his mission. On the eve of his departure—so the story was told by
his friends in later days—Thomas had gone to take leave of the king at
Falaise. Henry drew him aside: “You do not yet know to what you are
going. I will have you to be archbishop of Canterbury.” The chancellor
took, or tried to take, the words for a jest. “A saintly figure indeed,” he
exclaimed with a smiling glance at his own gay attire, “you are choosing to
sit in that holy seat and to head that venerable convent! No, no,” he added
with sudden earnestness, “I warn you that if such a thing should be, our
friendship would soon turn to bitter hate. I know your plans concerning the
Church; you will assert claims which I as archbishop must needs oppose;
and the breach once made, jealous hands would take care that it should
never be healed again.” The words were prophetic; they sum up the whole
history of the pontificate of Thomas Becket. Henry, however, in his turn
passed them over as a mere jest, and at once proclaimed his intention to the
chancellor’s fellow-envoys, one of whom was the justiciar, Richard de
Lucy. “Richard,” said the king, “if I lay dead in my shroud, would you
earnestly strive to secure my first-born on my throne?” “Indeed I would, my
lord, with all my might.” “Then I charge you to strive no less earnestly to
place my chancellor on the metropolitan chair of Canterbury.”[1]

[1] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 180, 182. Cf. Thomas Saga

(Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 63–67.

Thomas was appalled. He could not be altogether taken by surprise; he
knew what had been Theobald’s wishes and hopes; he knew that from the
moment of Theobald’s death all eyes had turned instinctively upon himself
with the belief that the future of the Church rested wholly in his all-
powerful hands; he could not but suspect the king’s own intentions,[2]
although the very suspicion would keep him silent, and all the more so
because those intentions ran counter to his own desires. For twelve months
he had known that the primacy was within his reach; he had counted the
cost, and he had no mind to pay it. He was incapable of undertaking any
office without throwing his whole energies into the fulfilment of its duties;
his conception of the duties of the primate of all Britain would involve the
sacrifice not only of those secular pursuits which he so keenly enjoyed, but
also of that personal friendship and political co-operation with the king
which seemed almost an indispensable part of the life of both; and neither
sacrifice was he disposed to make. He had said as much to an English friend
who had been the first to hint at his coming promotion,[3] and he repeated it
now with passionate earnestness to Henry himself, but all in vain. The more
he resisted, the more the king insisted—the very frankness of his warnings
only strengthening Henry’s confidence in him; and when the legate
Cardinal Henry of Pisa urged his acceptance as a sacred duty, Thomas at
last gave way.[4]

[2] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 180. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p.
14. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i., p. 63.

[3] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 25, 26.

[4] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 7, 8. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 18. Anon. II. (ib.),
p. 86.

The council in London was no sooner ended than Richard de Lucy and
three of the bishops[5] hurried to Canterbury, by the king’s orders, to obtain
from the cathedral chapter the election of a primate in accordance with his
will. The monks of Christ Church were never very easy to manage; in the
days of the elder King Henry they had firmly and successfully resisted the
intrusion of a secular clerk into the monastic chair of S. Augustine; and a

strong party among them now protested that to choose for pastor of the
flock of Canterbury a man who was scarcely a clerk at all, who was wholly
given to hawks and hounds and the worldly ways of the court, would be no
better than setting a wolf to guard a sheepfold. But their scruples were
silenced by the arguments of Richard de Lucy and by their dread of the
royal wrath, and in the end Thomas was elected without a dissentient voice.
[6]
The election was repeated in the presence of a great council[7] held at
Westminster on May 23,[8] and ratified by the bishops and clergy there
assembled.[9] Only one voice was raised in protest; it was that of Gilbert
Foliot,[10] who, alluding doubtless to the great scutage, declared that
Thomas was utterly unfit for the primacy, because he had persecuted the
Church of God.[11] The protest was answered by Henry of Winchester in
words suggested by Gilbert’s own phrase: “My son,” said the ex-legate,
addressing Thomas, “if thou hast been hitherto as Saul the persecutor, be
thou henceforth as Paul the Apostle.”[12]

[5] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket vol. ii.), pp. 366. The bishops were Exeter,
Chichester and Rochester; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 16, 17, Anon. I. (Robertson,
Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 14–16, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169; this last
alone names Rochester, and adds another envoy—Abbot Walter of Battle,
Chichester’s old adversary and the justiciar’s brother.

[6] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 17. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 366,
367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 183–185. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 16. Thomas
Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 73) has quite a different version of the result.

[7] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9.
Garnier, as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i.
p. 306.

[8] The Wednesday before Pentecost. R. Diceto (as above), p. 307.

[9] Garnier, Will. Cant., Anon. I., as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 306. Gerv.
Cant. (as above), p. 170. All these writers either say or imply that the council
represented, or was meant to represent, the entire clerus et populus of all
England; except R. Diceto, who says: “clero totius provinciæ Cantuariorum
generaliter Lundoniæ convocato” (p. 306). Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i.
pp. 73–77; Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36; and Herb. Bosh.
(ib.), p. 184.

[10] Garnier, Will. Cant., Will. Fitz-Steph. and Anon. I. as above. E. Grim
(Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 367. Will. Cant., E. Grim and the Anon. call him
“bishop of London” by anticipation.

[11] “Destruite ad seinte Iglise.” Garnier, as above.

[12] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 18.

The election was confirmed by the great officers of state and the boy-
king in his father’s name;[13] the consecration was fixed for the octave of
Pentecost, and forthwith the bishops began to vie with each other for the
honour of performing the ceremony. Roger of York, who till now had stood
completely aloof, claimed it as a privilege due to the dignity of his see; but
the primate-elect and the southern bishops declined to accept his services
without a profession of canonical obedience to Canterbury, which he
indignantly refused.[14] The bishop of London, on whom as dean of the
province the duty according to ancient precedent should have devolved, was
just dead;[15] Walter of Rochester momentarily put in a claim to supply his
place,[16] but withdrew it in deference to Henry of Winchester, who had
lately returned from Cluny, and whose royal blood, venerable character, and
unique dignity as father of the whole English episcopate, marked him out
beyond all question as the most fitting person to undertake the office.[17] By
way of compensation, it was Walter who, on the Saturday in Whitsun-week,
raised the newly-elected primate to the dignity of priesthood.[18]

[13] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 18 Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17.
Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol.
iii.), p. 185.

[14] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

[15] He died on May 4. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

[16] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 188.

[17] Gerv. Cant., R. Diceto and Herb. Bosh. as above. MS. Lansdown. II.
(Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), p. 19. There was another
claimant, a Welsh bishop, who asserted priority of consecration over all his
brother-prelates; so at least says Gerv. Cant., but one does not see who he can
have been.

[18] R. Diceto, as above.

Early next morning the consecration took place. Canterbury cathedral has
been rebuilt from end to end since that day; it is only imagination which can

picture the church of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald as it stood on that
June morning, the scarce-risen sun gleaming faintly through its eastern
windows upon the rich vestures of the fourteen bishops[19] and their
attendant clergy and the dark robes of the monks who thronged the choir,
while the nave was crowded with spectators, foremost among whom stood
the group of ministers surrounding the little king.[20] From the vestry-door
Thomas came forth, clad no longer in the brilliant attire at which he had
been jesting a few weeks ago, but in the plain black cassock and white
surplice of a clerk; through the lines of staring, wondering faces he passed
into the choir, and there threw himself prostrate upon the altar-steps. Thence
he was raised to go through a formality suggested by the prudence of his
consecrator. To guard, as he hoped, against all risk of future difficulties
which might arise from Thomas’s connexion with the court, Henry of
Winchester led him down to the entrance of the choir, and in the name of
the Church called upon the king’s representatives to deliver over the
primate-elect fully and unreservedly to her holy service, freed from all
secular obligations, actual or possible. A formal quit-claim was accordingly
granted to Thomas by little Henry and the justiciars, in the king’s name;[21]
after which the bishop of Winchester proceeded to consecrate him at once.
A shout of applause rang through the church as the new primate of all
Britain was led up to his patriarchal chair; but he mounted its steps with
eyes downcast and full of tears.[22] To him the day was one of melancholy
foreboding; yet he made its memory joyful in the Church for ever. He began
his archiepiscopal career by ordaining a new festival to be kept every year
on that day—the octave of Pentecost—in honour of the most Holy Trinity;
[23]
and in process of time the observance thus originated spread from
Canterbury throughout the whole of Christendom, which thus owes to an
English archbishop the institution of Trinity Sunday.

[19] See the list in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

[20] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 188.

[21] MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 154, 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), pp. 17,
18; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367; Herb. Bosh. (ib.
vol. iii.), p. 185; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 19; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i.
p. 81. All these place this scene in London, immediately after the consecration.
The three first, however, seem to be only following Garnier; and the words of
Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 36), though not very explicit,

seem rather to agree with the MS. Lansdown. Garnier, Grim and the Anon. I. all
expressly attribute the suggestion to Henry of Winchester.

[22] Anon. I. (as above), p. 19.

[23] Gerv. Cant. as above.

“The king has wrought a miracle,” sneered the sarcastic bishop of
Hereford, Gilbert Foliot; “out of a soldier and man of the world he has
made an archbishop.”[24] The same royal power helped to smooth the new
primate’s path a little further before him. He was not, like most of his
predecessors, obliged to go in person to fetch his pallium from Rome; an
embassy which he despatched immediately after his consecration obtained
it for him without difficulty from Alexander III., who had just been driven
by the Emperor’s hostility to seek a refuge in France, and was in no
condition to venture upon any risk of thwarting King Henry’s favourite
minister.[25] The next messenger whom Thomas sent over sea met with a
less pleasant reception. He was charged to deliver up the great seal into the
king’s hands with a request that Henry would provide himself with another
chancellor, “as Thomas felt scarcely equal to the cares of one office, far less
to those of two.”[26]

[24] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36.

[25] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 24, 25. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p.
9. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 189. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 172. R. Diceto
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 307. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 91–95.

[26] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 12. Cf. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29, and R. Diceto
as above.

Henry was both surprised and vexed. It was customary for the chancellor
to resign his office on promotion to a bishopric; but this sudden step on the
part of Thomas was quite unexpected, and upset a cherished scheme of the
king’s. He had planned to rival the Emperor by having an archbishop for his
chancellor, as the archbishops of Mainz and Cöln were respectively arch-
chancellors of Germany and Italy;[27] he had certainly never intended, in
raising his favourite to the primacy, to deprive himself of such a valuable
assistant in secular administration; his aim had rather been to secure the

services of Thomas in two departments instead of one.[28] To take away all
ground of scandal, he had even procured a papal dispensation to sanction
the union of the two offices in a single person.[29] Thomas, however,
persisted in his resignation; and as there was no one whom Henry cared to
put in his place, the chancellorship remained vacant, while the king brooded
over his friend’s unexpected conduct and began to suspect that it was
caused by weariness of his service.

[27] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i., p. 308. The real work of the office in the
Empire was, however, done by another chancellor, who at this time was a certain
Reginald, of whom we shall hear again later on. “Cancellarius” plays almost as
conspicuous and quite as unclerkly a part in the Italian wars of Barbarossa as in
the French and Aquitanian wars of Henry.

[28] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 69–
71.

[29] Garnier, as above.

Meanwhile Thomas had entered upon the second phase of his strangely
varied career. He had “put off the deacon” for awhile; he was resolved now
to “put off the old man” wholly and for ever. No sooner was he consecrated
than he flung himself, body and soul, into his new life with an ardour more
passionate, more absorbing, more exclusive than he had displayed in pursuit
of the worldly tasks and pleasures of the court. On the morrow of his
consecration, when some jongleurs came to him for the largesse which he
had never been known to refuse, he gently but firmly dismissed them; he
was no longer, he said, the chancellor whom they had known; his whole
possessions were now a sacred trust, to be spent not on actors and jesters
but in the service of the Church and the poor.[30] Theobald had doubled the
amount of regular alms-givings established by his predecessors; Thomas
immediately doubled those of Theobald.[31] To be diligent in providing for
the sick and needy, to take care that no beggar should ever be sent empty
away from his door,[32] was indeed nothing new in the son of the good
dame Rohesia of Caen. The lavish hospitality of the chancellor’s household,
too, was naturally transferred to that of the archbishop; but it took a
different tone and colour. All and more than all the old grandeur and
orderliness were there; the palace still swarmed with men-at-arms, servants

and retainers of all kinds, every one with his own appointed duty, whose
fulfilment was still carefully watched by the master’s eyes; the bevy of
high-born children had only increased, for by an ancient custom the second
son of a baron could be claimed by the primate for his service—as the
eldest by the king—until the age of knighthood; a claim which Thomas was
not slow to enforce, and which the barons were delighted to admit. The
train of clerks was of course more numerous than ever. The tables were still
laden with delicate viands, served with the utmost perfection, and crowded
with guests of all ranks; Thomas was still the most courteous and gracious
of hosts. But the banquet wore a graver aspect than in the chancellor’s hall.
The knights and other laymen occupied a table by themselves, where they
talked and laughed as they listed; it was the clerks and religious who now
sat nearest to Thomas. He himself was surrounded by a select group of
clerks, his eruditi, his “learned men” as he called them: men versed in
Scriptural and theological lore, his chosen companions in the study of Holy
Writ into which he had plunged with characteristic energy; while instead of
the minstrelsy which had been wont to accompany and inspire the gay talk
at the chancellor’s table, there was only heard, according to ecclesiastical
custom, the voice of the archbishop’s cross-bearer who sat close to his side
reading from some holy book: the primate and his confidential companions
meanwhile exchanging comments upon what was read, and discussing
matters too deep and solemn to interest unlearned ears or to brook
unlearned interruption.[33] Of the meal itself Thomas partook but sparingly;
[34]
its remainder was always given away;[35] and every day twenty-six poor
men were brought into the hall and served with a dinner of the best, before
Thomas would sit down to his own midday meal.[36]

[30] MS. Lansdown. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 156.

[31] Anon. I. (ibid.), p. 20. The Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 90, and Joh. Salisb. (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 307, say that to this purpose he appropriated a tithe of all his revenues
—a statement which reflects rather strangely upon the former archbishops.

[32] Joh. Salisb. and Anon. I. as above. Anon. II. (as above), pp. 89, 90.

[33] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 225–229. On the eruditi see
ib. pp. 206, 207, 523–529.

[34] Ib. pp. 231–236. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 37. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.),
p. 308. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 89.

[35] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 307. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 20, 21.

[36] Anon. II. (ib.), p. 89.

The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have
been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s
occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop
came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,
[37]
while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who
were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his
audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones,
occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were
followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own
apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in
business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical
hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was
of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards
there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen
poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with
the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from
the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in
which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a
very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and
doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple—the one who tells
the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve
other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the
primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the
Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for
meditation and confession, scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained
absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.
[47]

[37] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 208.

[38] Ib. p. 203.

[39] Ib. p. 219.

[40] Ib. p. 225.

[41] Ib. pp. 236, 237.

[42] Ib. p. 238.

[43] Ib. p. 199. Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 38, and Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.),
p. 307.

[44] On the hair-shirt see MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 154; Anon. I.
(ibid.), p. 20; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 10; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 196,
199; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 23. On Thomas’s troubles about his dress and how he
settled them see Garnier, pp. 19, 20, 23; Anon. I. (as above), p. 21; E. Grim (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 368; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 196. On his whole manner of life
after consecration cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 95–111.

[45] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 202–205.

[46] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 88.

[47] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 205.

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his
long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred
calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many
of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like
simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor
and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his
immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently
akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and
perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to
Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert
aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his
conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he
saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he
worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil
this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily
his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself.
He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the
intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which
he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time
could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled
along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place

in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its
contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest
pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly
monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]

[48] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 186.

[49] Ib. p. 206.

[50] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), pp. 38, 39.

But the eruditi of Thomas, like the disciples of Theobald, were the
confidants and the sharers of far more than his literary and doctrinal studies.
It was in those evening hours which he spent in their midst, secluded from
all outside interruption, that the plans of Church reform and Church revival,
sketched long ago by other hands in the Curia Theobaldi, assumed a shape
which might perhaps have startled Theobald himself. As the weeks wore
quickly away from Trinity to Ember-tide, the new primate set himself to
grapple at once with the ecclesiastical abuses of the time in the persons of
his first candidates for ordination. On his theory the remedy for these
abuses lay in the hands of the bishops, and especially of the metropolitans,
who fostered simony, worldliness and immorality among the clergy by the
facility with which they admitted unqualified persons into high orders, thus
filling the ranks of the priesthood with unworthy, ignorant and needy clerks,
who either traded upon their sacred profession as a means to secular
advancement, or disgraced it by the idle wanderings and unbecoming shifts
to which the lack of fit employment drove them to resort for a living. He
was determined that no favour or persuasion should ever induce him to
ordain any man whom he did not know to be of saintly life and ample
learning, and provided with a benefice sufficient to furnish him with
occupation and maintenance; and he proclaimed and acted upon his
determination with the zeal of one who, as he openly avowed, felt that he
was himself the most glaring example of the evils resulting from a less
stringent system of discipline.[51]

[51] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 238–247.

His next undertaking was one which almost every new-made prelate in
any degree alive to the rights and duties of his office found it needful to
begin as soon as possible: the recovery of the alienated property of his see.
Gilbert Foliot, the model English bishop of the day, had no sooner been
consecrated than he wrote to beg the Pope’s support in this important and
troublesome matter.[52] It may well be that even fourteen years later the
metropolitan see had not yet received full restitution for the spoliations of
the anarchy. Thomas however set to work in the most sweeping fashion,
boldly laying claim to every estate which he could find to have been
granted away by his predecessors on grounds which did not satisfy his
exalted ideas of ecclesiastical right, or on terms which he held detrimental
to the interest and dignity of his church, and enforcing his claims without
respect of persons; summarily turning out those who held the archiepiscopal
manors in ferm,[53] disputing with the earl of Clare for jurisdiction over the
castle and district of Tunbridge, and reclaiming, on the strength of a charter
of the Conqueror, the custody of Rochester castle from the Crown itself.
Such a course naturally stirred up for him a crowd of enemies, and
increased the jealousy, suspicion and resentment which his new position
and altered mode of life had already excited among the companions and
rivals of his earlier days. The archbishop however was still, like the
chancellor, protected against them by the shield of the royal favour; they
could only work against him by working upon the mind of Henry. One by
one they carried over sea their complaints of the wrongs which they had
suffered, or with which they were threatened, at the primate’s hands;[54]
they reported all his daily doings and interpreted them in the worst sense:—
his strictness of life was superstition, his zeal for justice was cruelty, his
care for his church avarice, his pontifical splendour pride, his vigour
rashness and self-conceit:[55]—if the king did not look to it speedily, he
would find his laws and constitutions set at naught, his regal dignity trodden
under foot, and himself and his heirs reduced to mere cyphers dependent on
the will and pleasure of the archbishop of Canterbury.[56]

[52] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxxvii. (Giles, vol. i., p. 113).

[53] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 371, 372. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol.
iii.) pp. 250, 251. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 117–121.

[54] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 252. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 121.

[55] Joh. Salisb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 309, 310. Anon. II. (ib. vol.
iv.) pp. 91, 92.

[56] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 310. E. Grim (ibid.) p. 372. Anon. II. (ib. vol.
iv.), p. 92. Cf. Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 34 (Giles, pp. 148, 149).

At the close of the year Henry determined to go and see for himself the
truth of these strange rumours.[57] The negotiations concerning the papal
question had detained him on the continent throughout the summer; in the
end both he and Louis gave a cordial welcome to Alexander, and a general
pacification was effected in a meeting of the two kings and the Pope which
took place late in the autumn at Chouzy on the Loire. Compelled by
contrary winds to keep Christmas at Cherbourg instead of in England as he
had hoped,[58] the king landed at Southampton on S. Paul’s day.[59] Thomas,
still accompanied by the little Henry, was waiting to receive him; the two
friends met with demonstrations of the warmest affection, and travelled to
London together in the old intimate association.[60] One subject of
disagreement indeed there was; Thomas had actually been holding for six
months the archdeaconry of Canterbury together with the archbishopric,
and this Henry, after several vain remonstrances, now compelled him to
resign.[61] They parted however in undisturbed harmony, the archbishop
again taking his little pupil with him.[62]

[57] Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92.

[58] Rob. Torigni, a. 1162.

[59] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 252. The date is given by R.
Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 308.

[60] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 252, 253. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92. R.
Diceto (as above) tells a different tale; but Herbert is surely a better authority on
these personal matters. Cf. also Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 121–123.

[61] R. Diceto, as above.

[62] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 253.

The first joint work of king and primate was the translation of Gilbert
Foliot from Hereford to London. Some of those who saw its consequences
in after-days declared that Henry had devised the scheme for the special

purpose of securing Gilbert’s aid against the primate;[63] but it is abundantly
clear that no such thought had yet entered his mind, and that the suggestion
of Gilbert’s promotion really came from Thomas himself.[64] Like every one
else, he looked upon Gilbert as the greatest living light of the English
Church; he expected to find in him his own most zealous and efficient
fellow-worker in the task which lay before him as metropolitan, as well as
his best helper in influencing the king for good. Gilbert was in fact the man
who in the natural fitness of things had seemed marked out for the primacy;
failing that, it was almost a matter of necessity that he should be placed in
the see which stood next in dignity, and where both king and primate could
benefit by his assistance ever at hand, instead of having to seek out their
most useful adviser in the troubled depths of the Welsh marches. The
chapter of London, to whom during the pecuniary troubles and long illness
of their late bishop Gilbert had been an invaluable friend and protector,
were only too glad to elect him; and his world-wide reputation combined
with the pleadings of Henry to obtain the Pope’s consent to his translation,
[65]
which was completed by his enthronement in S. Paul’s cathedral on
April 28, 1163.[66]

[63] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 46.

[64] This is the statement of Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv. p. 98) and Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs, vol. i. p. 173), fully borne out by the letters of Thomas.

[65] Epp. xvi.–xix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 24–30). Herb. Bosh. (ib.
vol. iii.), pp. 255, 256. Cf. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 98.

[66] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309.

The king spent the early summer in subduing South-Wales; the primate,
in attending a council held by Pope Alexander at Tours.[67] From the day of
his departure to that of his return Thomas’s journey was one long triumphal
progress; Pope and cardinals welcomed him with such honours as had never
been given to any former archbishop of Canterbury, hardly even to S.
Anselm himself;[68] and the request which he made to the Pope for
Anselm’s canonization[69] may indicate the effect which they produced on
his mind—confirming his resolve to stand boldly upon his right of
opposition to the secular power whenever it clashed with ecclesiastical

theories of liberty and justice. The first opportunity for putting his resolve
in practice arose upon a question of purely temporal administration at a
council held by Henry at Woodstock on July 31, after his return from Wales.
The Welsh princes came to swear fealty to Henry and his heir; Malcolm of
Scotland came to confirm his alliance with the English Crown by doing
homage in like manner to the little king.[70] Before the council broke up,
however, Henry met the sharpest constitutional defeat which had befallen
any English sovereign since the Norman conquest, and that at the hands of
his own familiar friend.

[67] According to Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 173, and Will. Newb., l. ii. c.
14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 135), it opened on Trinity Sunday, May 19; according to R.
Diceto (as above), p. 310, on May 21. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp.
123–127, makes out that Thomas’s chief object in going there was to obtain
confirmation of certain privileges of his see. Cf. also the account of this council
in Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 13–15, vv. 949–1224 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp.
742–751).

[68] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 253–255. Thomas Saga (as
above), pp. 129, 131.

[69] Ep. xxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 35).

[70] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

The king had devised a new financial project for increasing his own
revenue at the expense of the sheriffs. According to current practice, a sum
of two shillings annually from every hide of land in the shire was paid to
those officers for their services to the community in its administration and
defence. This payment, although described as customary rather than legal,
[71]
and called the “sheriff’s aid,”[72] seems really to have been nothing else
than the Danegeld, which still occasionally made its appearance in the
treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they
collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the Crown and kept the
greater part as a remuneration for their own labours. Henry now, it seems,
proposed to transfer the whole of these sums from the sheriff’s income to
his own, and have it enrolled in full among the royal dues. Whether he
intended to make compensation to the sheriffs from some other source, or
whether he already saw the need of curbing their influence and checking
their avarice, we know not; but the archbishop of Canterbury started up to

resist the proposed change as an injustice both to the receivers and to the
payers of the aid. He seems to have looked upon it as an attempt to re-
establish the Danegeld with all the odiousness attaching to its shameful
origin and its unfair incidence, and to have held it his constitutional duty as
representative and champion of the whole people to lift up his voice against
it in their behalf. “My lord king,” he said, “saving your good pleasure, we
will not give you this money as revenue, for it is not yours. To your officers,
who receive it as a matter of grace rather than of right, we will give it
willingly so long as they do their duty; but on no other terms will we be
made to pay it at all.”—“By God’s Eyes!” swore the astonished and angry
king, “what right have you to contradict me? I am doing no wrong to any
man of yours. I say the moneys shall be enrolled among my royal
revenues.”—“Then by those same Eyes,” swore Thomas in return, “not a
penny shall you have from my lands, or from any lands of the Church!”[73]

[71] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 12. E.
Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 373. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 23.

[72] “L’Aïde al Vescunte.” Garnier, as above.

[73] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Cf. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p.
12. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 374. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 23, 24.

How the debate ended we are not told; but one thing we know: from that
time forth the hated name of “Danegeld” appeared in the Pipe Rolls no
more. It seems therefore that, for the first time in English history since the
Norman conquest, the right of the nation’s representatives to oppose the
financial demands of the Crown was asserted in the council of Woodstock,
and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to
abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which
it was founded. And it is well to remember, too, that the first stand made by
Thomas of Canterbury against the royal will was made in behalf not of
himself or his order but of his whole flock;—in the cause not of
ecclesiastical privilege but of constitutional right. The king’s policy may
have been really sounder and wiser than the primate’s; but the ground taken
by Thomas at Woodstock entitles him none the less to a place in the line of
patriot-archbishops of which Dunstan stands at the head.[74]

[74] On the different account of this affair given in the Thomas Saga, and the
view which has been founded on it, see note A at end of chapter.

The next few weeks were occupied with litigation over the alienated
lands of the metropolitan see. A crowd of claims put in by Thomas and left
to await the king’s return now came up for settlement, the most important
case being that of Earl Roger of Clare, whom Thomas had summoned to
perform his homage for Tunbridge at Westminster on July 22. Roger
answered that he held the entire fief by knight-service, to be rendered in the
shape of money-payment,[75] of the king and not of the primate.[76] As
Roger was connected with the noblest families in England,[77] king and
barons were strongly on his side.[78] To settle the question, Henry ordered a
general inquisition to be made throughout England to ascertain where the
service of each land-holder was lawfully due. The investigation was of
course made by the royal justiciars; and when they came to the
archiepiscopal estates, one at least of the most important fiefs in dispute
was adjudged by them to the Crown alone.[79]

[75] “Publicis pensionibus persolvendis.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

[76] Ibid.

[77] And had moreover “the fairest sister in the whole kingdom,” adds Will.
Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 43.

[78] Ibid.

[79] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

Meanwhile a dispute on a question of church patronage arose between
the primate and a tenant-in-chief of the Crown, named William of
Eynesford. Thomas excommunicated his opponent without observing the
custom which required him to give notice to the king before inflicting
spiritual penalties on one of his tenants-in-chief.[80] Henry indignantly bade
him withdraw the sentence; Thomas refused, saying “it was not for the king
to dictate who should be bound or who loosed.”[81] The answer was
indisputable in itself; but it pointed directly to the fatal subject on which the

inevitable quarrel must turn: the relations and limits between the two
powers of the keys and the sword.

[80] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 311, 312. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson,
Becket, vol. iii.), p. 43. The object of this rule—one of the avitæ consuetudines—
was, as R. Diceto explains, to guard the king against the risk of unwittingly
associating with excommunicates.

[81] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Almost from his accession Henry seems to have been in some degree
contemplating and preparing for those great schemes of legal reform which
were to be the lasting glory of his reign. His earliest efforts in this direction
were merely tentative; the young king was at once too inexperienced and
too hard pressed with urgent business of all kinds, at home and abroad, to
have either capacity or opportunity for great experiments in legislation.
Throughout the past nine years, however, the projects which floated before
his mind’s eye had been gradually taking shape; and now that he was at last
freed for a while from the entanglements of politics and war, the time had
come when he might begin to devote himself to that branch of his kingly
duties for which he probably had the strongest inclination, as he certainly
had the highest natural genius. He had by this time gained enough insight
into the nature and causes of existing abuses to venture upon dealing with
them systematically and in detail, and he had determined to begin with a
question which was allowed on all hands to be one of the utmost gravity:
the repression of crime in the clergy.
The origin of this difficulty was in the separation—needful perhaps, but
none the less disastrous in some of its consequences—made by William the
Conqueror between the temporal and ecclesiastical courts of justice. In
William’s intention the two sets of tribunals were to work side by side
without mutual interference save when the secular power was called in to
enforce the decisions of the spiritual judge. But in practice the scheme was
soon found to involve a crowd of difficulties. The two jurisdictions were
constantly coming into contact, and it was a perpetual question where to
draw the line between them. The struggle for the investitures, the religious
revival which followed it, the vast and rapid developement of the canon
law, with the increase of knowledge brought to bear upon its interpretation

through the revived study of the civil law of Rome, gave the clergy a new
sense of corporate importance and strength, and a new position as a distinct
order in the state; the breakdown of all secular administration under
Stephen tended still further to exalt the influence of the canonical system
which alone retained some vestige of legal authority, and to throw into the
Church-courts a mass of business with which they had hitherto had only an
indirect concern, but which they alone now seemed capable of treating.
Their proceedings were conducted on the principles of the canon law, which
admitted of none but spiritual penalties; they refused to allow any lay
interference with the persons over whom they claimed sole jurisdiction; and
as these comprised the whole clerical body in the widest possible sense,
extending to all who had received the lowest orders of the Church or who
had taken monastic vows, the result was to place a considerable part of the
population altogether outside the ordinary law of the land, and beyond the
reach of adequate punishment for the most heinous crimes. Such crimes
were only too common, and were necessarily fostered by this system of
clerical immunities; for a man capable of staining his holy orders with theft
or murder was not likely to be restrained by the fear of losing them, which a
clerical criminal knew to be the worst punishment in store for him; and
moreover, it was but too easy for the doers of such deeds to shelter
themselves under the protection of a privilege to which often they had no
real title. The king’s justiciars declared that in the nine years since Henry’s
accession more than a hundred murders, besides innumerable robberies and
lesser offences, had gone unpunished because they were committed by
clerks, or men who represented themselves to be such.[82] The scandal was
acknowledged on all hands; the spiritual party in the Church grieved over it
quite as loudly and deeply as the lay reformers; but they hoped to remedy it
in their own way, by a searching reformation and a stringent enforcement of
spiritual discipline within the ranks of the clergy themselves. The subject
had first come under Henry’s direct notice in the summer of 1158, when he
received at York a complaint from a citizen of Scarborough that a certain
dean had extorted money from him by unjust means. The case was tried, in
the king’s presence, before the archbishop of the province, two bishops, and
John of Canterbury the treasurer of York. The dean failed in his defence;
and as it was proved that he had extorted the money by a libel, an offence
against which Henry had made a special decree, some of the barons present
were sent to see that the law had its course. John of Canterbury, however,

rose and gave it as the decision of the spiritual judges that the money should
be restored to the citizen and the criminal delivered over to the mercy of his
metropolitan; and despite the justiciar’s remonstrances, they refused to
allow the king any rights in the matter. Henry indignantly ordered an appeal
to the archbishop of Canterbury; but he was called over sea before it could
be heard,[83] and had never returned to England until now, when another
archbishop sat in Theobald’s place.

[82] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140).

[83] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket), vol. iii. pp. 43–45.

That it was Thomas of London who sat there was far from being an
indication that Henry had forgotten the incident. It was precisely because
Henry in these last four years had thought over the question of the clerical
immunities and determined how to deal with it that he had sought to place
on S. Augustine’s chair a man after his own heart. He aimed at reducing the
position of the clergy, like all other doubtful matters, to the standard of his
grandfather’s time. He held that he had a right to whatever his ancestors had
enjoyed; he saw therein nothing derogatory to either the Church or the
primate, whom he rather intended to exalt by making him his own
inseparable colleague in temporal administration and the supreme authority
within the realm in purely spiritual matters—thus avoiding the appeals to
Rome which had led to so much mischief, and securing for himself a
representative to whom he could safely intrust the whole work of
government in England as guardian of the little king,[84] while he himself
would be free to devote his whole energies to the management of his
continental affairs. He seems in fact to have hoped tacitly to repeal the
severance of the temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and bring back
the golden age of William and Lanfranc, if not that of Eadgar and Dunstan;
and for this he, not unnaturally, counted unreservedly upon Thomas. By
slow degrees he discovered his miscalculation. Thomas had given him one
direct warning which had been unheeded; he had warned him again
indirectly by resigning the chancellorship; now, when the king unfolded his
plans, he did not at once contradict him; he merely answered all his

arguments and persuasions with one set phrase:—“I will render unto Cæsar
the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”[85]

[84] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket vol. iv.), pp. 92–94.

[85] Ib. pp. 94, 95.

In July occurred a typical case which brought matters to a crisis. A clerk
named Philip de Broi had been tried in the bishop of Lincoln’s court for
murder, had cleared himself by a legal compurgation, and had been
acquitted. The king, not satisfied, commanded or permitted the charge to be
revived, and the accused to be summoned to take his trial at Dunstable
before Simon Fitz-Peter, then acting as justice-in-eyre in Bedfordshire,
where Philip dwelt. Philip indignantly refused to plead again in answer to a
charge of which he had been acquitted, and overwhelmed the judge with
abuse, of which Simon on his return to London made formal complaint to
the king. Henry was furious, swore his wonted oath “by God’s Eyes” that an
insult to his minister was an insult to himself, and ordered the culprit to be
brought to justice for the contempt of court and the homicide both at once.
The primate insisted that the trial should take place in his own court at
Canterbury, and to this Henry was compelled unwillingly to consent. The
charge of homicide was quickly disposed of; Philip had been acquitted in a
Church court, and his present judges had no wish to reverse its decision. On
the charge of insulting a royal officer they sentenced him to undergo a
public scourging at the hands of the offended person, and to forfeit the
whole of his income for the next two years, to be distributed in alms
according to the king’s pleasure. Henry declared the punishment
insufficient, and bitterly reproached the bishops with having perverted
justice out of favour to their order.[86] They denied it; but a story which
came up from the diocese of Salisbury[87] and another from that of
Worcester[88] tended still further to shew the helplessness of the royal
justice against the ecclesiastical courts under the protection of the primate;
and the latter’s blundering attempts to satisfy the king only increased his
irritation. Not only did Thomas venture beyond the limits of punishment
prescribed by the canon law by causing a clerk who had been convicted of
theft to be branded as well as degraded,[89] but he actually took upon

himself to condemn another to banishment.[90] He hoped by these severe
sentences to appease the king’s wrath;[91] Henry, on the contrary, resented
them as an interference with his rights; what he wanted was not severe
punishment in isolated cases, but the power to inflict it in the regular course
of his own royal justice. At last he laid the whole question before a great
council which met at Westminster on October 1.[92]

[86] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 30–32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp.
12, 13. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 374–376. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 45.
Herb. Bosh. (ib.), pp. 265, 266. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 24, 25. R. Diceto
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. There is another version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson),
vol. i. p. 145.

[87] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 264, 265. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 143.

[88] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[89] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 45, 46.

[90] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 267.

[91] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 46.

[92] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 266. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 95. Summa Causæ
(ibid.), p. 201; this last gives the date.

The king’s first proposition, that the bishops should confirm the old
customs observed in his grandfather’s days,[93] opened a discussion which
lasted far into the night. Henry himself proceeded to explain his meaning
more fully; he required, first, that the bishops should be more strict in the
pursuit of criminal clerks;[94] secondly, that all such clerks, when convicted
and degraded, should be handed over to the secular arm for temporal
punishment like laymen, according to the practice usual under Henry I.;[95]
and finally, that the bishops should renounce their claim to inflict any
temporal punishment whatever, such as exile or imprisonment in a
monastery, which he declared to be an infringement of his regal rights over
the territory of his whole realm and the persons of all his subjects.[96] The
primate, after vainly begging for an adjournment till the morrow, retired to
consult with his suffragans.[97] When he returned, it was to set forth his
view of the “two swords”—the two jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal—in

terms which put an end to all hope of agreement with the king. He declared
the ministers of the Heavenly King exempt from all subjection to the
judgement of an earthly sovereign; the utmost that he would concede was
that a clerk once degraded should thenceforth be treated as a layman and
punished as such if he offended again.[98] Henry, apparently too much
astonished to argue further, simply repeated his first question—“Would the
bishops obey the royal customs?” “Aye, saving our order,” was the answer
given by the primate in the name and with the consent of all.[99] When
appealed to singly they all made the same answer.[100] Henry bade them
withdraw the qualifying phrase, and accept the customs unconditionally;
they, through the mouth of their primate, refused;[101] the king raged and
swore, but all in vain. At last he strode suddenly out of the hall without
taking leave of the assembly;[102] and when morning broke they found that
he had quitted London.[103] Before the day was over, Thomas received a
summons to surrender some honours which he had held as chancellor and
still retained;[104] and soon afterwards the little Henry was taken out of his
care.[105]

[93] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 25,
26. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376.

[94] Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 96.

[95] Ibid. Cf. Summa Causæ (ib.), p. 202, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 266,
and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

[96] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 267.

[97] Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 202. Their discussion is given in Thomas
Saga (as above), p. 151.

[98] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 268–272. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.
vol. iv.), p. 22. The speech in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 151–153, is
much more moderate in tone, but grants no more in substance.

[99] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 13. E.
Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 273. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.),
p. 97. Cf. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v. p. 527).

[100] For Hilary of Chichester’s attempt at evasion see Herb. Bosh. (as
above), pp. 273, 274, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 155.

[101] Garnier, E. Grim, Herb. Bosh., Anon. II., as above. For this scene the
Saga (as above), pp. 153–155, substitutes a wrangle between king and primate,
which however comes to the same result.

[102] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 274.

[103] Ib. p. 275. Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 205. Thomas Saga (as above),
p. 157.

[104] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 275.

[105] He was with his father at the council of Clarendon in January 1164.
Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 208.

The king’s wrath presently cooled so far that he invited the primate to a
conference at Northampton. They met on horseback in a field near the
town; high words passed between them; the king again demanded, and the
archbishop again refused, unconditional acceptance of the customs; and in
this determination they parted.[106] A private negotiation with some of the
other prelates—suggested, it was said, by the diplomatist-bishop of Lisieux
—was more successful; Roger of York and Robert of Lincoln met the king
at Gloucester and agreed to accept his customs with no other qualification
than a promise on his part to exact nothing contrary to the rights of their
order. Hilary of Chichester not only did the same but undertook to persuade
the primate himself. In this of course he failed.[107] Some time before
Christmas, however, there came to the archbishop three commissioners who
professed to be sent by the Pope to bid him withdraw his opposition; Henry
having, according to their story, assured the Pope that he had no designs
against the clergy or the Church, and required nothing beyond a verbal
assent for the saving of his regal dignity.[108] On the faith of their word
Thomas met the king at Oxford,[109] and there promised to accept the
customs and obey the king “loyally and in good faith.” Henry then
demanded that as the archbishop had withstood him publicly, so his
submission should be repeated publicly too, in an assembly of barons and
clergy to be convened for that purpose.[110] This was more than Thomas had
been led to expect; but he made no objection, and the Christmas season
passed over in peace. Henry kept the feast at Berkhampstead,[111] one of the
castles lately taken from the archbishop; Thomas at Canterbury, where he
had just been consecrating the great English scholar Robert of Melun—one

of the three Papal commissioners—to succeed Gilbert Foliot as bishop of
Hereford.[112]

[106] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 27–29.

[107] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 33, 34. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.),
pp. 14, 15. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 377, 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 30–31.
Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 276, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p.
159.

[108] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 34, 35. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 15. E. Grim (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 31. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 161. All,
except the Anon., seem to doubt the genuineness of the mission.

[109] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 277. The Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 32, and
Garnier (Hippeau), p. 35, say Woodstock.

[110] Garnier, Will. Cant., Herb. Bosh. and Thomas Saga, as above. E. Grim
(Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 379. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33, 34.

[111] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 66, from Pipe Roll a. 1164.

[112] On December 22. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 176.

On S. Hilary’s day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of
Clarendon near Salisbury.[113] Henry called upon the archbishop to fulfil the
promise he had given at Oxford and publicly declare his assent to the
customs. Thomas drew back. As he saw the mighty array of barons round
the king—as he looked over the ranks of his own fellow-bishops—it flashed
at last even upon his unsuspicious mind that all this anxiety to draw him
into such a public repetition of a scene which he had thought to be final
must cover something more than the supposed papal envoys had led him to
expect, and that those “customs” which he had been assured were but a
harmless word might yet become a terrible reality if he yielded another step.
His hesitation threw the king into one of those paroxysms of Angevin fury
which scared the English and Norman courtiers almost out of their senses.
Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep
ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to
save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their
sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights
of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order

and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a
verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace
to the Church. He believed them; and though he still shrank from the
formality, thus emptied of meaning, as little better than a lie, yet for the
Church’s sake he gave way. He publicly promised to obey the king’s laws
and customs loyally and in good faith, and made all the other bishops do
likewise.[114]

[113] On the date see note B at end of chapter.

[114] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 20–22, 36. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol.
i.), pp. 16, 17. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 380–382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp.
278, 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33–36. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 99. Cf. Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 163–167, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 177,
178.

The words were no sooner out of their mouths than Thomas learned how
just his suspicions had been. A question was instantly raised—what were
these customs? It was too late to discuss them that night; next morning the
king bade the oldest and wisest of the barons go and make a recognition of
the customs observed by his grandfather and bring up a written report of
them for ratification by the council.[115] Nine days later[116] the report was
presented. It comprised sixteen articles, known ever since as the
Constitutions of Clarendon.[117] Some of them merely re-affirmed, in a
more stringent and technical manner, the rules of William the Conqueror
forbidding bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate
the king’s tenants-in-chief without his leave, and the terms on which the
temporal position of the bishops had been settled by the compromise
between Henry I. and Anselm at the close of the struggle for the
investitures. Another aimed at checking the abuse of appeals to Rome, by
providing that no appeal should be carried further than the archbishop’s
court without the assent of the king. The remainder dealt with the settlement
of disputes concerning presentations and advowsons, which were
transferred from the ecclesiastical courts to that of the king; the treatment of
excommunicate persons; the limits of the right of sanctuary as regarding the
goods of persons who had incurred forfeiture to the Crown; the ordination
of villeins; the jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime; the protection of
laymen cited before the Church courts against episcopal and archidiaconal

injustice; and the method of procedure in suits concerning the tenure of
Church lands.

[115] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 18.
E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol.
iv.), p. 37. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 102. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 178.

[116] On the chronology see note B at end of chapter.

[117] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 18–23; Gerv. Cant, (as above), pp. 178–180;
Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 137–140.

The two articles last mentioned are especially remarkable. The former
provided that if a layman was accused before a bishop on insufficient
testimony, the sheriff should at the bishop’s request summon a jury of
twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood to swear to the truth or falsehood
of the charge.[118] The other clause decreed that when an estate was claimed
by a clerk in frank-almoign and by a layman as a secular fief the question
should be settled by the chief justiciar in like manner on the recognition of
twelve jurors.[119] The way in which these provisions are introduced implies
that the principle contained in them was already well known in the country;
it indicates that some steps had already been taken towards a general
remodelling of legal procedure, intended to embrace all branches of judicial
administration and bring them all into orderly and harmonious working. In
this view the Constitutions of Clarendon were only part of a great scheme in
whose complete developement they might have held an appropriate and
useful place.[120] But the churchmen of the day, to whom they were thus
suddenly presented as an isolated fragment, could hardly be expected to see
in them anything but an engine of state tyranny for grinding down the
Church. Almost every one of them assumed, in some way or other, the
complete subordination of ecclesiastical to temporal authority; the right of
lay jurisdiction over clerks was asserted in the most uncompromising terms;
while the last clause of all, which forbade the ordination of villeins without
the consent of their lords, stirred a nobler feeling than jealousy for mere
class-privileges. Its real intention was probably not to hinder the
enfranchisement of serfs, but simply to protect the landowners against the
loss of services which, being attached to the soil, they had no means of
replacing, and very possibly also to prevent the number of criminal clerks

being further increased by the admission of villeins anxious to escape from
the justice of their lords. But men who for ages had been trained to regard
the Church as a divinely-appointed city of refuge for all the poor and needy,
the oppressed and the enslaved, could only see the other side of the measure
and feel their inmost hearts rise up in the cry of a contemporary poet
—“Hath not God called us all, bond and free, to His service?”[121]

[118] Const. Clarend. c. 6 (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 138, 139).

[119] Const. Clarend. c. 9 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 139).

[120] It should be noticed that this was clearly understood, and full justice was
done to Henry’s intentions, not only by the most impartial and philosophic
historian of the time— William of Newburgh (l. ii. c. 16; Howlett, vol. i. p. 140)
—but even by Thomas’s most ardent follower, Herbert of Bosham (Robertson,
Becket, vol. iii. pp. 272, 273, 278, 280).

[121]
“Et Deus à sun servise nus a tuz apelez!
Mielz valt filz à vilain qui est preuz et senez,
Que ne fet gentilz hum failliz et debutez!”
Garnier (Hippeau), p. 89. This, variously expressed, was the grand argument of
the clerical-democratic party, and the true source of their strength. And they were
not altogether wrong in attributing the action of their opponents, in part at least,
to aristocratic contempt and exclusiveness—if we may trust Gervase of
Canterbury’s report of a complaint said to have been uttered at a later time by the
king: “Hi quoque omnes” [i.e. the religious orders] “tales sibi fratres associant,
pelliparios scilicet et sutores, quorum nec unus deberet instante necessitate in
episcopum vel abbatem salvâ conscientiâ nostrâ promoveri.” Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 540.

The discussion occupied six days;[122] as each clause was read out to the
assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it.[123] When
at last the end was reached, Henry called upon him and all the bishops to
affix their seals to the constitutions. “Never,” burst out the primate—“never,
while there is a breath left in my body!”[124] The king was obliged to
content himself with the former verbal assent, gained on false pretences as
it had been; a copy of the obnoxious document was handed to the primate,
who took it, as he said, for a witness against its contrivers, and indignantly
quitted the assembly.[125] In an agony of remorse for the credulity which
had led him into such a trap he withdrew to Winchester and suspended

himself from all priestly functions till he had received absolution from the
Pope.[126]

[122] See note B at end of chapter.

[123] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 280–285. The answers to
the Constitutions in Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 84–89, seem to be partly Thomas’s
and partly his own.

[124]
“L’arcevesques respunt: Fei que dei Deu le bel,
Co n’ert, tant cum la vie me bate en cest vessel!”
Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Cf. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 383, and
Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

[125] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 23. E. Grim
(ib. vol. ii.), p. 383. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37. Cf. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p.
311; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 288; Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 103, and Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 167–169. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket,
vol. iii.), pp. 48, 49, says that Thomas did set his seal to the constitutions; but his
statement is at variance with those of all other authorities; and he himself
afterwards recites two speeches made at Northampton, one by Thomas and one
by Hilary of Chichester, both distinctly affirming that none of the bishops sealed.
Ib. pp. 66, 67.

[126] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 38. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 24. Joh. Salisb. (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 383. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 49.
Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 289–292. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

It was to the Pope that both parties looked for a settlement of their
dispute; but Alexander, ill acquainted both with the merits of the case and
with the characters of the disputants, and beset on all sides with political
difficulties, could only strive in vain to hold the balance evenly between
them. Meanwhile the political quarrel of king and primate was embittered
by an incident in which Henry’s personal feelings were stirred. His brother
William—the favourite young brother whom he had once planned to
establish as sovereign in Ireland—had set his heart upon a marriage with
the widowed countess of Warren; the archbishop had forbidden the match
on the ground of affinity, and his prohibition had put an end to the scheme.
[127]
Baffled and indignant, William returned to Normandy and poured the
story of his grievance into the sympathizing ears first of his mother and
then, as it seems, of the brotherhood at Bec.[128] On January 29, 1164—one

day before the dissolution of the council of Clarendon—he died at Rouen;
[129]
and a writer who was himself at that time a monk at Bec not only
implies his own belief that the young man actually died of disappointment,
but declares that Henry shared that belief, and thenceforth looked upon the
primate by whom the disappointment had been caused as little less than the
murderer of his brother.[130] The king’s exasperation was at any rate plain to
all eyes; and as the summer drew on Thomas found himself gradually
deserted. His best friend, John of Salisbury, had already been taken from his
side, and was soon driven into exile by the jealousy of the king;[131] another
friend, John of Canterbury, had been removed out of the country early in
1163 by the ingenious device of making him bishop of Poitiers.[132] The old
dispute concerning the relations between Canterbury and York had broken
out afresh with intensified bitterness between Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and
the former comrade of whom he had long been jealous, and who had now
once again been promoted over his head; the king, hoping to turn it to
account for his own purposes, was intriguing at the Papal court in Roger’s
behalf, and one of his confidential agents there was Thomas’s own
archdeacon, Geoffrey Ridel.[133] The bishops as yet were passive; in the
York controversy Gilbert Foliot strongly supported his own metropolitan;
[134]
but between him and Thomas there was already a question, amicable
indeed at present but ominous nevertheless, as to whether or not the
profession of obedience made to Theobald by the bishop of Hereford should
be repeated by the same man as bishop of London to Theobald’s successor.
[135]

[127] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.) p. 142. Isabel de Warren
was the widow of Stephen’s son William, who of course was cousin in the third
degree to William of Anjou.

[128]
“Hic” [i.e. Thomas] “regis fratrem pertæsum semper habebat,
Ne consul foret hic, obvius ille fuit:
Cum nata comitis comitem Warenna tulisset,
Nobilis hic præsul ne nocuisset ei.
Irâ permotus, nunquam rediturus, ab Anglis
Advenit is, matri nunciat ista piæ.
Hinc Beccum veniens fratrum se tradit amori.”
Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 441–447 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. p. 676).

[129] Rob. Torigni, a. 1164. Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 448–450 (as above).
The date is from the first-named writer.

[130] Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 453–456 (as above). Considering the
abundance—one might almost say superabundance—of unquestionably
authentic information which we already possess as to the origin and grounds of
Henry’s quarrel with Thomas, I cannot attach so much importance as Mr.
Howlett apparently does (ib. pref. pp. lxi–lxiii) to this new contribution from
Stephen of Rouen. Stephen’s work is quasi-romantic in character and utterly
unhistoric in style; and his view of the whole Becket controversy is simply
ludicrous, for he ignores the clerical immunities and the Constitutions of
Clarendon altogether, and attributes the quarrel wholly to two other causes—this
affair about William, and Thomas’s supposed peculations while chancellor (ib. l.
iii. c. 12, vv. 909–914, p. 741). That the domestic tragedy of which he gives such
a highly-coloured account had some bearing upon the great political drama
appears from the words of Richard le Breton to Thomas at his murder seven
years later, “Hoc habeas pro amore domini mei Willelmi fratris regis” (Will. Fitz-
Steph., Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 142). But in these words there is no
mention either of William’s death or of Henry’s feelings about it. Some allusion
to either or both may have been in the speaker’s mind; but what he actually said
implies nothing more than that he had been in William’s service, and had
therefore resented the thwarting of his lord’s interests, and through them, it may
be, of his own. Will. Fitz-Steph., after explaining what William’s grievance was,
simply adds, “Unde Willelmus . . . inconsolabiliter doluit; et omnes sui
archiepiscopo inimici facti sunt.” Ibid.

[131] From a comparison of Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p.
46, with Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 95–103), it appears that John was separated from
Thomas before the council of Clarendon. After some months of wandering he
found shelter at Reims, in the great abbey of S. Remigius of which his old friend
Peter of Celle was now abbot, and there he chiefly dwelt during the next seven
years.

[132] Will. Fitz-Steph., as above, says John was promoted for the purpose of
getting him out of the way. He was consecrated by the Pope at the council of
Tours; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311. It must be remembered that Henry had
already had experience of John’s zeal for clerical immunities.

[133] Epp. xiii., xxvii., xxxvi., xli.–xliii., l., li., liii., liv. (Robertson, Becket,
vol. v. pp. 21, 22, 44–46, 59, 60, 67–69, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94); Will. Cant. (ib. vol.
i.), p. 24; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 384; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 38, 39; Garnier
(Hippeau), pp. 39, 40; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 179–181; Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 181.

[134] Ep. xxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 46, 47).

[135] Epp. xxxv., lxvii. (ib. pp. 56, 57, 130, 131).

Thomas himself fully expected to meet the fate of Anselm; throughout
the winter his friends had been endeavouring to secure him a refuge in

France;[136] and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an
interview with the king,[137] he made two attempts to escape secretly from
Romney. The first time he was repelled by a contrary wind; the second time
the sailors put back ostensibly for the same reason, but really because they
had recognized their passenger and dreaded the royal wrath;[138] and a
servant who went on the following night to shut the gates of the deserted
palace at Canterbury found the primate, worn out with fatigue and
disappointment, sitting alone in the darkness like a beggar upon his own
door-step.[139] Despairing of escape, he made another effort to see the king
at Woodstock. Henry dreaded nothing so much as the archbishop’s flight,
for he felt that it would probably be followed by a Papal interdict on his
dominions,[140] and would certainly give an immense advantage against him
to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in
Auvergne.[141] He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with
somewhat less than the usual honours,[142] and made no allusion to the past
except by a playful question “whether the archbishop did not think the
realm was wide enough to contain them both?” Thomas saw, however, that
the old cordiality was gone; his enemies saw it too, and, as his biographer
says, “they came about him like bees.”[143] Foremost among them was John
the king’s marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop’s court concerning the
manor of Pageham.[144] It was provided by one of Henry’s new rules of
legal procedure that if a suitor saw no chance of obtaining justice in the
court of his own lord he might, by taking an oath to that effect and bringing
two witnesses to do the same, transfer the suit to a higher court.[145] John by
this method removed his case from the court of the archbishop to that of the
king; and thither Thomas was cited to answer his claim on the feast of the
Exaltation of the Cross. When that day came the primate was too ill to
move; he sent essoiners to excuse his absence in legal form, and also a
written protest against the removal of the suit, on the ground that it had
been obtained by perjury—John having taken the oath not upon the Gospel,
but upon an old song-book which he had surreptitiously brought into court
for the purpose.[146] Henry angrily refused to believe either Thomas or his
essoiners,[147] and immediately issued orders for a great council to be held
at Northampton.[148] It was customary to call the archbishops and the
greater barons by a special writ addressed to each individually, while the
lesser tenants-in-chief received a general summons through the sheriffs of

the different counties. Roger of York was specially called in due form;[149]
the metropolitan of all Britain, who ought to have been invited first and
most honourably of all, merely received through the sheriff of Kent a
peremptory citation to be ready on the first day of the council with his
defence against the claim of John the marshal.[150]

[136] Epp. xxxv., xxxvi., lv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 57, 58, 97).

[137] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), vol. iii. p. 49.

[138] Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 293; Anon. II. (ib.
vol. iv.), p. 104; and Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 325, with E. Grim (ibid.), pp.
389, 390; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 40; and Garnier
(Hippeau), p. 49.

[139] Alan Tewkesb. as above.

[140] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib.
vol. iv.), p. 40. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[141] Ep. lx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v., p. 115).

[142] Ep. ccxxv. (ib. p. 530). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 294.

[143] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 294, 295.

[144] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 50.

[145] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 51. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31.
Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. On this proceeding see Glanville, De Legg. et Conss.
Angl., l. xii. c. 7.

[146] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 51–53. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 30. E. Grim (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 390. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 50. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41.
Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 530, 531.

[147] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[148] Ib. p. 49. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 296. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 30. Ep.
ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 531. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[149] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

The council—an almost complete gathering of the tenants-in-chief, lay
and spiritual, throughout the realm[151]—was summoned for Tuesday

October 6.[152] The king however lingered hawking by the river-side till late
at night,[153] and it was not till next morning after Mass that the archbishop
could obtain an audience. He began by asking leave to go and consult the
Pope on his dispute with Roger of York and divers other questions touching
the interests of both Church and state; Henry angrily bade him be silent and
retire to prepare his defence for his contempt of the royal summons in the
matter of John the marshal.[154] The trial took place next day. John himself
did not appear, being detained in the king’s service at the Michaelmas
session of the Exchequer in London;[155] the charge of failure of justice was
apparently withdrawn, but for the alleged contempt Thomas was sentenced
to a fine of five hundred pounds.[156] Indignant as he was at the flagrant
illegality of the trial, in which his own suffragans had been compelled to sit
in judgement on their primate, Thomas was yet persuaded to submit, in the
hope of avoiding further wrangling over what seemed now to have become
a mere question of money.[157] But there were other questions to follow.
Henry now demanded from the archbishop a sum of three hundred pounds,
representing the revenue due from the honours of Eye and Berkhampstead
for the time during which he had held them since his resignation of the
chancellorship.[158] Thomas remarked that he had spent far more than that
sum on the repair of the royal palaces, and protested against the unfairness
of making such a demand without warning. Still, however, he disdained to
resist for a matter of filthy lucre, and found sureties for the required
amount.[159] Next morning Henry made a further demand for the repayment
of a loan made to Thomas in his chancellor days.[160] In those days the two
friends had virtually had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,”
and Thomas was deeply wounded by this evident proof that their friendship
was at an end. Once more he submitted; but this time it was no easy matter
to find sureties;[161] and then, late on the Friday evening, there was reached
the last and most overwhelming count in the long indictment thus gradually
unrolled before the eyes of the astonished primate. He was called upon to
render a complete statement of all the revenues of vacant sees, baronies and
honours of which he had had the custody as chancellor—in short, of the
whole accounts of the chancery during his tenure of office.[162]

[151] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 296. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib. vol.
iv.), p. 41. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. Only two bishops were absent:

Nigel of Ely, disabled by paralysis, and William of Norwich, who made an
excuse to avoid sharing in what he knew was to come. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol.
i. p. 185. From Alan Tewkesb. however (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii. p. 331), it
seems that Norwich came after all—only, like Rochester (Will. Fitz-Steph., ib.
vol. iii. p. 52), somewhat late.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 50. Herb. Bosh. (ib. p. 296), says
“hebdomadæ feria quinta, sexta ante B. Calixti . . . diem”—a self-
contradiction, for in 1164 October 9, the sixth day before the feast of S. Calixtus,
was not Thursday but Friday. He makes, however, a similar confusion as to the
last day of the council (ib. pp. 301, 304, 326); and as this was undoubtedly
Tuesday October 13—not Wednesday 14, as he seems to make it in p. 304 —it is
plain that his mistake lies in placing the feast of S. Calixtus a day too early, and
that the day to which he really means to assign the opening of the assembly is
Thursday October 8. This really agrees with Will. Fitz-Steph., for, as will be
seen, the council did not formally meet till a day after that for which it was
summoned, and did not get to business till a day later still. William gives the date
for which it had been summoned; Herbert, that of its practical beginning. R.
Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 313) has substituted the closing day for that of opening;
the author of Thomas Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 241), has done the same, with
a further confusion as to the days of the week; while Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i.
p. 182) has a date which agrees with nothing, and which must be altogether
wrong.

[153] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[154] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 391.
Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42, and Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 51.

[155] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

[156] Ibid. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 297. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 30. E. Grim
(ib. vol. ii.), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52.
Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 18. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 183. R.
Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. The actual sentence was forfeiture of all his
moveable goods ad misericordiam—commuted according to custom; cf. Herb.
Bosh. and Gerv. Cant., as above, with Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Garnier
makes the sum three hundred pounds; Will. Cant., fifty; E. Grim, the Anon. I.
and R. Diceto, five hundred.

[157] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (as above), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol.
iv.), p. 43.

[158] This must be the meaning of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 53,
compared with R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[159] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[160] The demand is stated by Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.) as “de quingentis
marcis ex causâ commodati in exercitu Tolosæ, et aliis quingentis marcis ex
causâ fidejussionis regis pro eo erga quendam Judæum ibidem.” This would

make the total amount £666: 3: 8. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 298, and the Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 189, make it five hundred pounds.

[161] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 298, 299.

[162] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 53. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31.
Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 392. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol.
iii.), p. 54. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 299. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II.
(ibid.), p. 104. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 314. The total sum due was assessed
in the end at thirty thousand pounds, according to Garnier (p. 65), Will. Cant. (p.
38), E. Grim (p. 396) and Anon. I. (p. 49). Herb. Bosh., however (as above),
makes it thirty thousand marks (i.e. twenty thousand pounds). The Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. p. 191, says thirty thousand marks “of burnt silver,” i.e.
blanch; while Gilbert Foliot, when reciting the story to the Pope’s legates in
1167, is reported as stating it at forty-four thousand marks (£2933: 6: 8); Ep.
cccxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 271). Herb. Bosh. (as above) places this
demand on the Saturday morning, and the whole history of the three days,
Friday-Sunday, October 9–11, is somewhat confused by the discordant notes of
time given by the various biographers. I have followed Will. Fitz-Steph., who is
the most self-consistent and apparently the most trustworthy.

At this crushing demand the archbishop’s courage gave way, and he
threw himself at the king’s feet in despair. All the bishops did likewise, but
in vain; Henry swore “by God’s Eyes” that he would have the accounts in
full. He granted, however, a respite till the morrow,[163] and Thomas spent
the next morning in consultation with his suffragans.[164] Gilbert of London
advised unconditional surrender;[165] Henry of Winchester, who had already
withstood the king to his face the night before,[166] strongly opposed this
view,[167] and suggested that the matter should be compromised by an offer
of two thousand marks. This the king rejected.[168] After long
deliberation[169] it was decided—again at the suggestion of Bishop Henry—
that Thomas should refuse to entertain the king’s demands on the ground of
the release from all secular obligations granted to him at his consecration.
This answer was carried by the bishops in a body to the king. He refused to
accept it, declaring that the release had been given without his authority;
and all that the bishops could wring from him was a further adjournment till
the Monday morning.[170] In the middle of Sunday night the highly-strung
nervous organization of Thomas broke down under the long cruel strain; the
morning found him lying in helpless agony, and with great difficulty he
obtained from the king another day’s delay.[171] Before it expired a warning
reached him from the court that if he appeared there he must expect nothing

short of imprisonment or death.[172] A like rumour spread through the
council, and at dawn the bishops in a body implored their primate to give up
the hopeless struggle and throw himself on the mercy of the king. He
refused to betray his Church by accepting a sentence which he believed to
be illegal as well as unjust, forbade the bishops to take any further part in
his trial, gave them notice of an appeal to Rome if they should do so, and
charged them on their canonical obedience to excommunicate at once
whatever laymen should dare to sit in judgement upon him.[173] Against this
last command the bishop of London instantly appealed.[174] All then
returned to the court, except Henry of Winchester and Jocelyn of Salisbury,
who lingered for a last word of pleading or of sympathy.[175] When they too
were gone, Thomas went to the chapel of the monastery in which he was
lodging—a small Benedictine house dedicated to S. Andrew, just outside
the walls of Northampton—and with the utmost solemnity celebrated the
mass of S. Stephen with its significant introit: “Princes have sat and spoken
against me.” The mass ended, he mounted his horse, and escorted no longer
by a brilliant train of clerks and knights, but by a crowd of poor folk full of
sympathy and admiration, he rode straight to the castle where the council
awaited him.[176]

[163] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 53, 54.

[164] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 300.

[165] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 326, 327.

[166] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 54.

[167] Alan Tewkesb. (as above), p. 327.

[168] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 54.

[169] The speeches of the bishops—interesting for studies of character—are
given at length by Alan Tewkesb. (as above), pp. 327, 328. Cf. the account in
Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 193–199.

[170] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p.
392. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 300. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II.
(ibid.), pp. 104, 105. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 328, 329, has a slightly
different version; in this, and also in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 199–
201, Gilbert Foliot wins the respite by a daring misrepresentation of Thomas’s
answer to the king. I have followed Herbert’s reckoning of the days here, as it
fits in with that of Will. Fitz-Steph., who seems the best guide in this matter.

[171] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 55, 56. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 32. Alan
Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.) pp. 329, 330. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 392, 393. Will. Fitz-
Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 56. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 300, 301. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.),
p. 44. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 203. Here again I follow Will. Fitz-Steph. and
Herbert as to the day.

[172] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 56. Will. Cant. as above. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p.
393. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 44. Thomas Saga as above.

[173] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 301–303.
Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 205–207.

[174] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 303. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 207. Some
of the other biographers place this scene later in the day, but we can hardly do
otherwise than follow the two eye-witnesses, William and Herbert.

[175] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 303. Jocelyn’s after-conduct
shewed that his sympathy with the primate was not very deep.

[176] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 32, 34. Alan Tewkesb. (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 393. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 56, 57.
Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 45. Garnier (Hippeau), pp.
56–60. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 207–209.

At the gate he took his cross from the attendant who usually bore it, and
went forward alone to the hall where the bishops and barons were
assembled.[177] They fell back in amazement at the apparition of the tall
solitary figure, robed in full pontificals, and carrying the crucifix like an
uplifted banner prepared at once for defence and for defiance; friends and
opponents were almost equally shocked, and it was not till he had passed
through their midst and seated himself in a corner of the hall that the
bishops recovered sufficiently to gather round him and intreat that he would
give up his unbecoming burthen. Thomas refused; “he would not lay down
his standard, he would not part with his shield.” “A fool you ever were, a
fool I see you are still and will be to the end,” burst out Gilbert Foliot at
last, as after a long argument he turned impatiently away.[178] The others
followed him, and the primate was left with only two companions, William
Fitz-Stephen and his own especial friend, Herbert of Bosham.[179] The king
had retired to an inner chamber and was there deliberating with his most
intimate counsellors[180] when the story of the primate’s entrance reached
his ears. He took it as an unpardonable insult, and caused Thomas to be
proclaimed a traitor. Warnings and threats ran confusedly through the hall.
The archbishop bent over the disciple sitting at his feet:—“For thee I fear—

yet fear not thou; even now mayest thou share my crown.” The ardent
encouragement with which Herbert answered him[181] provoked one of the
king’s marshals to interfere and forbid that any one should speak to the
“traitor.” William Fitz-Stephen, who had been vainly striving to put in a
gentle word, caught his primate’s eyes and pointed to the crucifix, intrusting
to its silent eloquence the lesson of patience and prayer which his lips were
forbidden to utter. When he and Thomas, after long separation, met again in
the land of exile, that speechless admonition seems to have been the first
thing which recurred to the minds of both.[182]

[177] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 60. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.),
p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 207–209, p. 209.

[178] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 60, 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 34. Alan
Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 394. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol.
iii.), p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 305, 306. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 46, 47.
Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 211–213.

[179] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 34. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.),
p. 307. They only mention Herbert; William’s presence appears in the sequel.

[180] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 35. E. Grim (ib. vol.
ii.), p. 394. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 305. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 47.

[181] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 306–308.

[182] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 59.

In the chamber overhead, meanwhile, Henry had summoned the bishops
to a conference.[183] On receiving from them an account of their morning’s
interview with Thomas, he sent down to the latter his ultimatum, requiring
him to withdraw his appeal to Rome and his commands to the bishops as
contrary to the customs which he had sworn to observe, and to submit to the
judgement of the king’s court on the chancery accounts. Seated, with eyes
fixed on the cross, Thomas quietly but firmly refused. His refusal was
reported to the king, who grew fiery-red with rage, caught eagerly at the
barons’ proposal that the archbishop should be judged for contempt of his
sovereign’s jurisdiction in appealing from it to another tribunal, and called
upon the bishops to join in his condemnation.[184] York, London and
Chichester proposed that they should cite him before the Pope instead, on

the grounds of perjury at Clarendon and unjust demands on their obedience.
[185]
To this Henry consented; the appeal was uttered by Hilary of
Chichester in the name of all, and in most insulting terms;[186] and the
bishops sat down opposite their primate to await the sentence of the lay
barons.[187]

[183] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 57. Will. Cant. (ib. vol.
i.), p. 35. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 331. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 62.

[184] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 65, 66. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.),
pp. 36–38. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 62–65. Cf. Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 213–217.

[185] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 37. In the versions of E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p.
396, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 308, and the Thomas Saga (as above), p. 217,
they bluntly bargain to be let off from actually sitting in judgement on their
primate in consideration of a promise to stand by the king against him for ever
after.

[186] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 65, 66. Alan Tewkesb.
(ib. vol. ii.), pp. 331, 332. According to Alan, Thomas answered but one word
—“I hear”; according to William, he condescended to make a long speech. Cf.
Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 49.

[187] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 332.

What that sentence was no one outside the royal council-chamber ever
really knew. It was one thing to determine it there and another to deliver it
to its victim, sitting alone and unmoved with the sign of victory in his hand.
With the utmost reluctance and hesitation the old justiciar, Earl Robert of
Leicester, came to perform his odious task. At the word “judgement”
Thomas started up, with uplifted crucifix and flashing eyes, forbade the
speaker to proceed, and solemnly appealed to the protection of the court of
Rome. The justiciar and his companions retired in silence.[188] “I too will
go, for the hour is past,” said Thomas.[189] Cross in hand he strode past the
speechless group of bishops into the outer hall; the courtiers followed him
with a torrent of insults, which were taken up by the squires and serving-
men outside; as he stumbled against a pile of faggots set ready for the fire,
Ralf de Broc rushed upon him with a shout of “Traitor! traitor!”[190] The
king’s half-brother, Count Hameline, echoed the cry;[191] but he shrank back

at the primate’s retort—“Were I a knight instead of a priest, this hand
should prove thee a liar!”[192] Amid a storm of abuse Thomas made his way
into the court-yard and sprang upon his horse, taking up his faithful Herbert
behind him.[193] The outer gate was locked, but a squire of the archbishop
managed to find the keys.[194] Whether there was any real intention of
stopping his egress it seems impossible to determine; the king and his
counsellors were apparently too much puzzled to do anything but let
matters take their course; Henry indeed sent down a herald to quell the
disturbance and forbid all violence to the primate;[195] but the precaution
came too late. Once outside the gates, Thomas had no need of such
protection. From the mob of hooting enemies within he passed into the
midst of a crowd of poor folk who pressed upon him with every
demonstration of rapturous affection; in every street as he rode along the
people came out to throw themselves at his feet and beg his blessing.

[188] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 67. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 38,
39. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 332, 333. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 397, 398. Will.
Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 67, 68. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 309, 310. Anon. I.
(ib. vol. iv.), pp. 50, 51. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 221, where the
altercation is longer, but comes to the same end.

[189] Anon. I. (as above), p. 51.

[190] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 68. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 39.
E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 398. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 51, 52. Cf. Will. Fitz-
Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 68.

[191] Garnier and Will. Cant. as above. Anon. I. (as above), p. 52.

[192] Anon. I. as above. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. There is a
different version in Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 39, 40.

[193] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Of his own escape William says nothing; but
we know from a passage later in the same page that he soon rejoined his primate.

[194] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 69. Cf. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 40; Alan
Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 333; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52; and Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. p. 222.

[195] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 69. E. Grim
(ib. vol. ii.), p. 399.

It was with these poor folk that he supped that night, for his own
household, all save a chosen few, now hastened to take leave of him.[196]
Through the bishops of Rochester, Hereford and Worcester he requested of
the king a safe-conduct for his journey to Canterbury; the king declined to
answer till the morrow.[197] The primate’s suspicions were aroused. He
caused his bed to be laid in the church, as if intending to spend the night in
prayer.[198] At cock-crow the monks came and sang their matins in an
under-tone for fear of disturbing their weary guest;[199] but his chamberlain
was watching over an empty couch. At dead of night Thomas had made his
escape with two canons of Sempringham and a faithful squire of his own,
named Roger of Brai. A violent storm of rain helped to cover their flight,
[200]
and it was not till the middle of the next day that king and council
discovered that the primate was gone.

[196] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 333. E. Grim (ibid.), p.
399. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52. Will. Cant. (ib.
vol. i.), p. 40. Garnier, (Hippeau), p. 70.

[197] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 334. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.
vol. iii.), p. 69. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 312.

[198] Alan Tewkesb. and Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p.
40. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 53. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. p. 229.

[199] Garnier, as above.

[200] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 71. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 399.
Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 53, 54. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40, Will. Fitz-
Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 69, and Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 312.

“God’s blessing go with him!” murmured with a sigh of relief the aged
Bishop Henry of Winchester. “We have not done with him yet!” cried the
king. He at once issued orders that all the ports should be watched to
prevent Thomas from leaving the country,[201] and that the temporalities of
the metropolitan see should be left untouched pending an appeal to the
Pope[202] which he despatched the archbishop of York and the bishops of
London, Worcester, Exeter and Chichester to prosecute without delay.[203]
They sailed from Dover on All Souls day;[204] that very night Thomas, after

three weeks of adventurous wanderings, guarded with the most devoted
vigilance by the brethren of Sempringham, embarked in a little boat from
Sandwich; next day he landed in Flanders;[205] and after another fortnight’s
hiding he made his way safe to Soissons, where the king of France,
disregarding an embassy sent by Henry to prevent him, welcomed him with
open arms. He hurried on to Sens, where the Pope was now dwelling; the
appellant bishops had preceded him, but Alexander was deaf to their
arguments.[206] Thomas laid at the Pope’s feet his copy of the Constitutions
of Clarendon; they were read, discussed and solemnly condemned in full
consistory.[207] The exiled primate withdrew to a shelter which his friend
Bishop John of Poitiers had secured for him in the Cistercian abbey of
Pontigny in Burgundy.[208] On Christmas-eve, at Marlborough, Henry’s
envoys reported to him the failure of their mission. On S. Stephen’s day
Henry confiscated the whole possessions of the metropolitan see, of the
primate himself and of all his clerks, and ordered all his kindred and
dependents, clerical or lay, to be banished from the realm.[209]

[201] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 55.

[202] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 322.

[203] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 79. Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p.
336. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 402. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh.
(ibid.), p. 323. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 60, 61. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol.
i. p. 261.

[204] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[205] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 71–74. E. Grim (as above), pp. 399, 400. Alan
Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 335. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.),
pp. 323–325. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 54, 55. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i.
p. 245. Here again there is a confusion about the date.

[206] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 74–81. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.),
pp. 42–46. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 335–341. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 400–
403. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 70–74. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 325–340.
Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 57–61. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 265–
289.

[207] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 82–84. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Alan
Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 341, 342. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 403, 404. Herb. Bosh.
(ib. vol. iii.), pp. 340–342. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 61–64. The formal record of
these proceedings is the edition of the Constitutions included among the

collected letters of S. Thomas—Ep. xlv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 71–79), in which there is
appended to each article the Pope’s verdict—“Hoc toleravit” or “Hoc damnavit.”
The tolerated articles are 2, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 16. Alan of Tewkesbury, who first
collected the letters of S. Thomas, was for some years a canon of Benevento, and
probably got this annotated copy of the Constitutions from Lombard, who had
been in Thomas’s suite as one of his eruditi during this visit to Sens, and who
was archbishop of Benevento at the time of Alan’s residence there.

[208] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 90. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Joh. Salisb. (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 313. Alan Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 345. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-
Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 357. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 64.
Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 109. Cf. Ep. lx. (ib. vol. v.), p. 114.

[209] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 91. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 46, 47. Joh. Salisb.
(ib. vol. ii.), pp. 313, 314. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.),
p. 75. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 359. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. The dates are from
Will. Fitz-Steph. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 347–349, puts this
banishment too late in the story.

Note A.
THE COUNCIL OF WOODSTOCK.

The usual view of the council of Woodstock—a view founded on
contemporary accounts and endorsed by Bishop Stubbs ( Constit. Hist., vol.
i. p. 462)—has been disputed on the authority of the Icelandic Thomas
Saga. This Saga represents the subject of the quarrel as being, not a general
levy of so much per hide throughout the country, but a special tax upon the
Church lands—nothing else, in fact, than the “ungeld” which William
Rufus had imposed on them to raise the money paid to Duke Robert for his
temporary cession of Normandy, and which had been continued ever since.
“We have read afore how King William levied a due on all churches in the
land, in order to repay him all the costs at which his brother Robert did
depart from the land. This money the king said he had disbursed for the
freedom of Jewry, and therefore it behoved well the learned folk to repay it
to their king. But because the king’s court hath a mouth that holdeth fast,
this due continued from year to year. At first it was called Jerusalem tax, but

afterwards Warfare-due, for the king to keep up an army for the common
peace of the country. But at this time matters have gone so far, that this due
was exacted, as a king’s tax, from every house” [“monastery,” editor’s
note], “small and great, throughout England, under no other name than an
ancient tax payable into the royal treasury without any reason being shown
for it.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 139. Mr. Magnusson (ib. p.
138, note 7) thinks that this account “must be taken as representing the true
history of” the tax in question. In his Preface (ib. vol. ii. pp. cvii–cviii) he
argues that if the tax had been one upon the tax-payers in general,
“evidently the primate had no right to interfere in such a matter, except so
far as church lands were concerned;” and he concludes that the version in
the Saga “gives a natural clue to the archbishop’s protest, which thus
becomes a protest only on behalf of the Church.” This argument hardly
takes sufficient account of the English primate’s constitutional position,
which furnishes a perfectly “natural clue” to his protest, supposing that
protest to have been made on behalf of the whole nation and not only of the
Church:—or rather, to speak more accurately, in behalf of the Church in the
true sense of that word—the sense which Theobald’s disciples were always
striving to give to it—as representing the whole nation viewed in a spiritual
aspect, and not only the clerical order. Mr. Magnusson adds: “We have no
doubt that the source of the Icelandic Saga here is Robert of Cricklade, or
. . . Benedict of Peterborough, who has had a better information on the
subject than the other authorities, which, it would seem, all have Garnier for
a primary source; but he, a foreigner, might very well be supposed to have
formed an erroneous view on a subject the history of which he did not
know, except by hearsay evidence” (ib. pp. cviii, cix). It might be answered
that the “hearsay evidence” on which Garnier founded his view must have
been evidence which he heard in England, where he is known to have
carefully collected the materials for his work (Garnier, ed. Hippeau, pp. 6,
205, 206), and that his view is entitled to just as much consideration as that
of the Icelander, founded upon the evidence of Robert or Benedict;—that of
the three writers who follow Garnier, two, William of Canterbury and
Edward Grim, were English (William of Canterbury may have been Irish by
birth, but he was English by education and domicile) and might therefore
have been able to check any errors caused by the different nationality of
their guide:—and that even if the case resolved itself into a question
between the authority of Garnier and that of Benedict or Robert (which can

hardly be admitted), they would be of at least equal weight, and the balance
of intrinsic probability would be on Garnier’s side. For his story points
directly to the Danegeld; and we have the indisputable witness of the Pipe
Rolls that the Danegeld, in some shape or other, was levied at intervals
throughout the Norman reigns and until the year 1163, when it vanished for
ever. On the other hand, the Red King’s “ungeld” upon the Church lands,
like all his other “ungelds,” certainly died with him; and nothing can well
be more unlikely than that Henry II. in the very midst of his early reforms
should have reintroduced, entirely without excuse and without necessity,
one of the most obnoxious and unjust of the measures which had been
expressly abolished in “the time of his grandfather King Henry.”

Note B.
THE COUNCIL OF CLARENDON.

There is some difficulty as to both the date and the duration of this
council. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 176) gives the date of meeting as
January 13; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 312) as January 25; while the
official copy of the Constitutions (Summa Causæ, Robertson, Becket, vol.
iv. p. 208; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 140) gives the closing day as January
30 (“quartâ die ante Purificationem S. Mariæ”). As to the duration of the
council, we learn from Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 279) and
Gerv. Cant. (as above, p. 178) that there was an adjournment of at least one
night; while Gilbert Foliot (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 527–
529) says “Clarendonæ . . . continuato triduo id solum actum est ut
observandarum regni consuetudinum et dignitatum a nobis fieret absoluta
promissio;” and that “die vero tertio,” after a most extraordinary scene,
Thomas “antiquas regni consuetudines antiquorum memoriâ in commune
propositas et scripto commendatas, de cætero domino nostro regi se fideliter
observaturum in verbo veritatis absolute promittens, in vi nobis injunxit
obedientiæ sponsione simili nos obligare.” This looks at first glance as if

meant to describe the closing scene of the council, in which case its whole
duration would be limited to three days. But it seems possible to find
another interpretation which would enable us to reconcile all the discordant
dates, by understanding Gilbert’s words as referring to the verbal discussion
at the opening of the council, before the written Constitutions were
produced at all. Gilbert does indeed expressly mention “customs committed
to writing”; but this may very easily be a piece of confusion either
accidental or intentional. On this supposition the chronology may be
arranged as follows:—The council meets on January 13 (Gerv. Cant.). That
day and the two following are spent in talking over the primate; towards
evening of the third—which will be January 15—he yields, and the bishops
with him (Gilb. Foliot). Then they begin to discuss what they have
promised; the debate warms and lengthens; Thomas, worn out with his three
days’ struggle and seeing the rocks ahead, begs for a respite till the morrow
(Herb. Bosh.). On that morrow—i.e. January 16—Henry issues his
commission to the “elders,” and the council remains in abeyance till they
are ready with their report. None of our authorities tell us how long an
interval elapsed between the issue of the royal commission and its report.
Herbert, indeed, seems to imply that the discussion on the constitutions
began one night and the written report was brought up next day. But this is
only possible on the supposition that it had been prepared secretly
beforehand, of which none of the other writers shew any suspicion. If the
thing was not prepared beforehand, it must have taken some time to do; and
even if it was, the king and the commissioners would surely, for the sake of
appearances, make a few days’ delay to give a shew of reality to their
investigations. Nine days is not too much to allow for preparation of the
report. On January 25, then, it is brought up, and the real business of the
council begins in earnest on the day named by R. Diceto. And if Thomas
fought over every one of the sixteen constitutions in the way of which
Herbert gives us a specimen, six days more may very well have been spent
in the discussion, which would thus end, as the Summa Causæ says, on
January 30.

CHAPTER II.
HENRY AND ROME.
1164–1172.

With the archbishop’s flight into France the struggle between him and the
king entered upon a new phase. Its intrinsic importance was almost entirely
lost, and it became simply an element in the wider questions of general
European politics. In England Thomas’s departure left Henry sole master of
the field; the Constitutions of Clarendon were put in force without delay
and without difficulty; a year later they were followed up by an Assize,
significantly issued from the same place, which laid the foundations of the
whole later English system of procedure in criminal causes; and thenceforth
the work of legal and judicial reform went on almost without a break,
totally unaffected by the strife which continued to rage between king and
primate for the next five years. The social condition of the country was only
indirectly affected by it. The causes which had ostensibly given rise to it—
the principle involved in the acceptance or rejection of the Constitutions—
did not appeal strongly to the national mind, and had already become
obscured and subordinated to the personal aspect which the quarrel had
assumed at Northampton. As in the case of Anselm, it was on this personal
aspect alone that popular feeling really fastened; and in this point of view
the advantage was strongly on the archbishop’s side. Thomas, whose natural
gifts had already made him a sort of popular idol, was set by the high-
handed proceedings of the council in the light of a victim of regal tyranny;
and the sweeping and cruel proscriptions inflicted upon all who were in the
remotest way connected with him tended still further to excite popular
sympathy for his wrongs and turn it away from his persecutor. But the
sympathy was for the individual, not for the cause. The principle of the
clerical immunities had no hold upon the minds of the people or even of the
clergy at large. Even among the archbishop’s own personal friends, almost

the only men who clave to it with anything like the same ardour as himself
were his two old comrades of the Curia Theobaldi, Bishop John of Poitiers
and John of Salisbury; and even the devotion of John of Salisbury, which is
one of the brightest jewels in Becket’s crown, was really the devotion of
friend to friend, of Churchman to primate, of a generous, chivalrous soul to
what seemed the oppressed and down-trodden side, rather than the devotion
of a partizan to party principle. Herbert of Bosham, the primate’s shadow
and second self, who clave to his side through good report and evil report
and looked upon him as a hero and a martyr from first to last, was
nevertheless the author of the famous verdict which all the searching
criticism of later times has never yet been able to amend: “Both parties had
a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, His judgement
alone can determine.”[210]

[210] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 273. The whole passage
from “O rex et o pontifex” to “judicium” (pp. 272, 273) should be compared
with the admirable commentary of Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp.
140–141).

Cool, dispassionate thinkers like Gilbert Foliot, on the other hand, while
inclining towards the cause which Thomas had at heart, recoiled from his
mode of upholding it as little less than suicidal. In Gilbert’s view it was
Thomas who had betrayed those “rights of his order” which he proclaimed
so loudly, by forsaking the attitude of passive resistance which the bishops
had adopted at Westminster and in which they were practically unassailable,
and staking everything upon the king’s good faith, without security, in the
meeting at Oxford and the council at Clarendon:—it was Thomas who by
his subsequent conduct—his rash attempts at flight, his rapid changes of
front at Northampton in first admitting and then denying the royal
jurisdiction, his final insult to the king in coming to the council cross in
hand, and his undignified departure from the realm—had frustrated the
efforts whereby wiser and cooler heads might have brought the king to a
better mind and induced him to withdraw the Constitutions:—and it was not
Thomas, but his suffragans, left to bear the brunt of a storm which they had
neither deserved nor provoked, who were really in a fair way to become
confessors and martyrs for a Church brought into jeopardy by its own
primate.[211] Gilbert in fact saw clearly that the importance of the point at

issue between king and archbishop was as nothing compared to the
disastrous consequences which must result from their protracted strife. It
threatened nothing less than ruin to the intellectual and religious revival
which Theobald had fostered so carefully and so successfully. The best
hopes of the movement were bound up with the alliance between Church
and state which had been cemented at Henry’s accession; that alliance was
now destroyed; instead of the Church’s most valuable fellow-worker, the
king had been made her bitter foe; and the work of revival was left to be
carried on—if it could be carried on at all—in the teeth of the royal
opposition and without a leader, while the man who should have directed it
was only a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of those who had to
supply as best they could the place left deserted by his flight. It was upon
Gilbert of London that this burthen chiefly fell; and it is in Gilbert’s
position that we may find a key to the subsequent direction of the
controversy, as far as England was concerned.

[211] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 526 et seq.

For full twenty years before Becket’s rise to the primacy Gilbert Foliot
had been one of the most respected members of the reforming party in the
English Church. While Thomas was a worldly young subdeacon in the
household of Archbishop Theobald, while as chancellor he was outshining
the king in luxurious splendour or riding in coat of mail at the head of his
troops, Gilbert was setting the pattern of ecclesiastical discipline and
furnishing the steadiest and most valued assistance to the primate’s schemes
of reform. Trained no less than Henry of Winchester in the old Cluniac
traditions of ecclesiastical authority, his credit had never been shaken by
rashness and inconsistency such as had marred Henry’s labours; and it
would have been neither strange nor blameworthy if he had cherished a
hope of carrying on Theobald’s work as Theobald’s successor. Gilbert,
however, solemnly denied that he had ever sought after or desired the
primacy;[212] and his conduct does not seem to furnish any just ground for
assuming the falsehood of the denial. His opposition to the election of
Thomas was thoroughly consistent with his position and known views;
equally so was the support and co-operation which Thomas, as soon as he
was fairly launched into his new course of action, anxiously sought to

obtain from him, and which he for a while steadily gave. He had begun to
find such co-operation difficult even before the question of the clerical
immunities arose at the council of Westminster. On that question, in itself,
the primate and the bishop of London were at one; but they differed
completely in their way of treating it. To the impulsive, short-sighted,
downright Thomas it was the one, sole, all-absorbing question of life and
death; to the calm, far-seeing, cautious Gilbert it was a provoking hindrance
—raised up partly by the primate’s own bad management—to the well-
being of interests far too serious and too wide-reaching to be imperilled for
a mere point of administrative detail. He took up his position definitely at
the council of Northampton. The customs being once accepted, he held it
the true Churchman’s duty to obey them, to make the best and not the worst
of them, while desiring and labouring for their abrogation, but only by
pacific means. A temporary submission was the least of two evils. It was
infinitely safer to bend to the storm and trust to the influences of time and
conciliation for turning the mind of the king, than to run the risk of driving
him into irreconcileable hostility to the Church. For hostility to the Church
meant something far worse now than in the days when William Rufus and
Henry I. had set up their regal authority against primate and Pope. It meant
a widening of the schism which was rending western Christendom in twain;
it meant the accession of the whole Angevin dominions to the party of the
Emperor and the anti-Pope, and the severance of all the ties between the
English Church and her continental sisters which Theobald, Eugene and
Adrian had laboured so diligently to secure.

[212] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 522, 523.

The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the
long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through
the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-
contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory
and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however
only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was
also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on
its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:—“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV.
had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of

fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and
prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S.
Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or
remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner
than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only
“the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care
of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of
appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal
referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between
contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political
situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to
exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range
of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have
voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the
twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight too
heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often
seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a
position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary
rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties
could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was
worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that
of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a
Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish
and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed
against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of
the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest
touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no
Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no
experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend,
no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin
king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was
almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as
possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was
to him anything but a welcome guest.

[213] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 367).

[214] Joh. Salisb., Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 363).

[215] Ibid. (pp. 366, 367). “Licet nihil aliud lædat, necesse est ut citissime vel
solo labore deficiat [sc. Papa]. . . . Dum superest, ipsum interroga.” This was
written early in 1159, and in August Adrian died.

It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and
his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges
of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of
driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause
as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had
once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff—“between
hammer and anvil”—Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and
contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry
and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbert Foliot and
Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the
contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only
too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where
Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the
ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but
one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two
sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and
with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences
had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn
warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the
English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical
body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best,
as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating
experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for
Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being
again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in
an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at
the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for
which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation
to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow
such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his
determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on
the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued,

censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the
monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France,
none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to
press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a
matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom.
Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm;
yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in
which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something
exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one
mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the
pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom
the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as
single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs
provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as
Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true
strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of
aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than
the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry
himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be
according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes
the popular hero and martyr.

[216] Ep. cviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), p. 207.

[217] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 46; Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 342, 343;
E. Grim (ibid.), p. 403; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76; Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 305–313. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p.
140), gives this scene as having occurred, “ut dicitur,” at the council of Tours.

From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he
perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king
became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the
indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became
secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to
all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most
thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally
at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he
could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on

the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen
into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had
indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings
—of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor
days—to choose going to live on his own resources at Pontigny rather than
accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement
probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s
complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”—Thomas was
in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not
harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s
exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause
heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a
foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis
in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage
by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a
skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and
friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be
kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.

[218] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 109.

With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game
with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition
of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he
would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained
unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could
not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a
compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a
corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense
of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France
that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning
in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was
passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the
two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present;
Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without
him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now

busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probably not sorry to
escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who
should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been
heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately
after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.

[219] Rob. Torigni, a. 1165.

[220] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 346, 347; evidently
taken from the Pope’s own letter, extant only in the Icelandic version, in Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 329.

The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their
fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April;
his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the
title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide
was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering
determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English
king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what
would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was
fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry
at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages:
one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the
Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s
second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was
Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s
accession—two years before that of Henry—had been his chancellor and
confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till
in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was
appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for
Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the
Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified
with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the
queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal
promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council
convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of
Leicester refused the kiss of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at

which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from
the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-
pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not
prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at
Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge
Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible
to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s
name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to
make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.

[221] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 318. He mistakenly thinks that the king was
at Westminster, and he also thinks the embassy came in 1167. Its true date, 1165,
is shown by the letters referred to in next note.

[222] Epp. xcviii.–ci. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 184–195). Will. Cant. (ib.
vol. i.), pp. 52, 53. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 331.

A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the
Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the
pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his
escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept
him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an
excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the
schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it
was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair,
and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the
king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the
birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which
Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed
disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent
1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandy to hold a conference with
Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before
him.

[223] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 197) says Henry went into Wales in 1165,
“quo facilius domini Papæ vel etiam Cantuariensis archiepiscopi . . . declinaret
sententiam.”

[224] “Movetur enim [rex] Francorum invidiâ, calumniisque Flandrensium,
Wallensium improbitate, Scottorum insidiis, temeritate Britonum, Pictavorumque
fœderibus, interioris Aquitaniæ sumptibus, Gasconum levitate, et (quod gravius
est) simultate fere omnium quoscumque ditioni ejus constat esse subjectos.” Ep.
clxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 313, 314.

The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three
Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his
children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his
eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step.
Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little
Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s
heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225]
Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had
but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her
father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however
required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of
the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had
set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an
arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman
yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance.
A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a
third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in May
1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the
dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas
they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of
triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty
wherever they went.[229]

[225] Will. Newb. l. ii. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 145, 146).

[226] On the Breton campaign of 1166 see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 329,
and Rob. Torigni ad ann. Henry was near Fougères on June 28 (Ep. ccix.,
Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 421); he was besieging Fougères itself on July 13–
14 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 96). On the campaigns of 1167 and 1168 see Rob.
Torigni ad ann., the meagre entries in a Breton chronicle, a. 1168–1169 (Morice,
Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 104; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560), and
Chron. S. Albin. a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 40), which tells of Louis’s share
in the matter. See also the account of Henry’s correspondence with King Arthur
in Draco Norm., l. ii. cc. 17–22, vv. 941–1282 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp.

695–707). According to this writer, one of the Breton leaders—“Arturi dapifer,
Rollandus, consul et idem tunc Britonum” (Mr. Howlett suggests that this may
be Roland of Dinan, ib. p. 696 note) —wrote a letter to Arthur imploring his aid
for Britanny, and received a reassuring answer; Henry also received a long
epistle from the blameless king, to which, “subridens sociis, nil pavefactus,” (c.
21, v. 1218, p. 705) he returned a polite and diplomatic answer. Unluckily the
good monk omits to say how the letters were conveyed, and gives us no light
upon the postal arrangements between Britanny and Avalon—which by the way
he places among “silvas . . . Cornubiæ, proxima castra loco,” whatever that
may mean (c. 20, vv. 1213, 1214, p. 705). It is quite possible that some of the
Breton leaders did seek to rouse the spirit of their followers by publishing an
imaginary correspondence with the mythic hero-king whose existence was to
most of the common people in Britanny at that time almost as much an article of
faith as any in the Creed; it is possible too that they were themselves so far
carried away by the same illusion as to attempt to work upon Henry by similar
means; and in that case it is extremely probable that Henry, with his Angevin tact
and sense of humour, would meet the appeal pretty much as the Bec writer
represents. But the letters given in the Draco must be the monk’s own
composition. Neither Roland nor Henry can have been capable of stringing
together such a quantity of pseudo-history, ancient and modern, as is therein
contained.

[227] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

[228] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 337. Gesta Hen. [“Benedict of
Peterborough”] (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3.

[229] Gesta Hen. as above.

It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half
independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire,
were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November
1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230]
and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep
Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232]
His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a
meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s
ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with
Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine,
secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of
a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely
had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he
had appointed to assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was
murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to

stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the
Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and
vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as
the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish
and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.

[230] Ep. ccliii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 74.

[231] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 104, 108.

[232] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Ep. cclxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p.
131.

[233] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1166
(Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 40, 149).

[234] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ep. ccccix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 408.

[235] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 331.
Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 273, 274. This last
writer states that the slayer was Guy of Lusignan, and that Guy fled to Jerusalem
(of which he afterwards became king) to escape the punishment of this crime.
This story has been generally adopted by modern historians. But its latter half is
incompatible with the appearance of “Guy of Lusignan” among the rebels in
Aquitaine in 1173, five years after the death of Patrick (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol.
i. p. 46); and the whole of it seems to rest solely on Roger’s misunderstanding of
the passage in the Gesta which he was copying. In that passage Guy is
introduced as “Guido de Lezinan, frater Gaufridi de Lezinan, qui Patricium
comitem Salesbiriensem tempore hostilitatis . . . occiderat. Erat enim prædictus
Guido,” etc.; then comes an account of his adventures in Palestine (Gesta Hen.,
Stubbs, vol. i. p. 343). Roger of Howden chose to make qui refer to Guido; but it
might just as well, or even better, refer to Gaufridus. Guy comes upon the
historical scene for the first time in 1173. It seems pretty clear that Geoffrey was
his elder brother, and took a leading part in southern politics and warfare long
before Guy was of an age to join in them. If Patrick was slain by either of the
brothers, therefore, it was by Geoffrey and not by Guy. Admitting this much,
however, there is still no ground for looking upon even Geoffrey as a murderer
who had committed such a crime as to be obliged to fly from justice. For
“Geoffrey of Lusignan” stood by the side of Guy among the rebels of 1173
(Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 46); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” and his brothers
claimed La Marche against King Henry between 1178 and 1180 (Geoff. Vigeois,
l. i. c. 70, Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” rose
against Richard in 1188 (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 34; Rog. Howden,
Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 339; R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 54, 55); and it was not till
after he had in this revolt slain a special friend of Richard, that he betook himself
to Palestine, where he arrived in the summer of the same year (Itin. Reg. Ric.,
Stubbs, p. 26), and where, moreover, he and Richard afterwards became firm
allies. Geoffrey may therefore enjoy the benefit of the plea which Bishop Stubbs

(Itin. Reg. Ric., introd. p. cxxiv, note) puts forward for Guy, that “there is nothing
to show that Patrick was not killed in fair fight.” But it seems pretty clear that for
the heroic king of Jerusalem himself no such plea is needed at all.

[236] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168; Epp. ccccix., ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol.
vi.), pp. 408, 455, 456.

Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position
by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter
with the duke of Saxony had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years
before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis
of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238]
and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter,
Eleanor, with the king of Castille—a marriage which took place in 1169;
[239]
while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed
to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now
endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of
Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine;
while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the
Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the
jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring
to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s
new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]

[237] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. From the Pipe Roll of the year, with
Mr. Eyton’s comment (Itin. Hen. II., p. 109), it seems that Matilda and her
mother crossed the sea together in September 1167, and that Matilda went on to
Germany, where she was married early next year, while Eleanor returned to
England before Christmas. Rob. Torigni, a. 1167.

[238] Ep. cclii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 68.

[239] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 334. The original scheme seems to have
been for marrying both Eleanor and Jane to Spanish sovereigns, among whom,
however, Castille is not named. In a letter written in the summer of 1168 John of
Salisbury speaks of “regum, Navariensis aut Aragonensis scilicet, quibus filias
suas dare disponit [rex].” Ep. ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.) p. 457.

[240] Ep. dxxxviii. (ib. vol. vii.) p. 26. Jane was born at Angers in October
1165; Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

[241] Epp. dxxxviii., dxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 26, 30, 31.

[242] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. Draco Norm.,
l. iii. cc. 4, 5, vv. 191–360 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 718–724).

All this political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic coil Henry had to unravel
almost single-handed. Of the group of counsellors who had stood around
him in his early years, Arnulf of Lisieux on one side of the sea and Richard
de Lucy on the other were almost the sole survivors. He had lost the
services of his constable Henry of Essex under very painful circumstances a
few months before that council at Woodstock which saw the beginning of
his quarrel with Thomas. The constable was accused by Robert de Montfort
of having committed high treason six years before by purposely letting fall
the standard and falsely proclaiming the king’s death at the battle of Consilt.
Henry of Essex declared that he had dropped the standard in the paralysis of
despair, really believing the king to be dead; and it is evident from the high
commands which he held in the war of Toulouse and elsewhere that the
king continued to treat him with undiminished confidence, and to regard
him as one of his most valuable ministers and friends. The charge once
made, however, could only be met by ordeal of battle. The encounter took
place at Reading; Henry of Essex went down before his accuser’s lance; and
all that his sovereign could do for him was to save his life by letting the
monks of the neighbouring abbey carry his body off the field as if for
burial, and when he proved to be still alive, suffering him to remain as a
brother of the house, while his property was confiscated to the Crown and
his services were lost to the state.[243] The king’s mother died in the autumn
of 1167;[244] his old friend and adviser Earl Robert of Leicester passed away
in 1168.[245] A desperate attempt was even made to part him from his wife,
in order to get rid of his rights over Aquitaine;[246] while the man who had
once been his most successful diplomatic agent and his unfailing helper
against the wiles of all his enemies was now the most formidable tool in
their hands.

[243] Rob. Torigni, a. 1163. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 108).
Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode, Camden Soc.), pp. 50–52. For date see Palgrave,
Eng. Commonwealth, vol. ii. pp. xxii, xxiii.

[244] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Draco Norm., l. iii. c. 1, vv. 1–12 (Howlett, Will.
Newb., vol. ii. p. 711). Chron. S. Serg., a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150).

[245] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ann. Waverl. a. 1168 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol.
ii. p. 239). Chron. Mailros, a. 1168.

[246] See the Gradus cognationis inter regem et reginam (Robertson, Becket,
vol. vi. p. 266). “Hanc computationem præsentaverunt Pictavenses cardinalibus
quando S. Thomas exsulabat, sed non sunt auditi.” The “computation” as there
stated is wrong; but the right one really does leave Henry and Eleanor within the
forbidden degrees. (See above, vol. i. p. 393, note 2{1161}, and p. 445, note
11{1418}). They were cousins in the fifth degree, their common ancestress being
Herleva of Falaise.

It was for his children’s sake that Henry at last bent his pride to do what
he had vowed never to do again. At Montmirail, on the feast of Epiphany
1169, he renewed his homage to Louis, made full submission to him, and
promised compensation to the Breton and Poitevin barons for their losses in
the recent wars.[247] Next day young Henry did homage to the French king
for the counties of Anjou and Maine,[248] and, as it seems, of Britanny,
which his brother Geoffrey was to hold under him.[249] Richard did the like
for Aquitaine, of which Louis granted him the investiture,[250] together with
a promise of Adela’s hand.[251] Three weeks later young Henry, in his new
capacity of count of Anjou, officiated in Paris as seneschal to the king of
France;[252] he afterwards repeated his homage to Louis’s son and heir, and
received that of his own brother Geoffrey for the duchy of Britanny.[253]

[247] Ep. cccclxi. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 506, 507.

[248] Ib. p. 507. Rob. Torigni a. 1169. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 208.

[249] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169, and Gerv. Cant. (as above) say that young Henry
did homage to Louis for Britanny; Normandy was not mentioned, the homage
done for it by young Henry in 1160 being counted sufficient (ibid.). The elder
king himself kept Touraine on the old terms of homage to Theobald of Blois (Ep.
cccclxi. as above).

[250] Ep. cccclxi., Rob. Torigni and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[251] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[252] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

[253] Ibid.

One thing alone was now lacking to the completion of Henry’s scheme:
the crowning of his heir. There can be no doubt that when he sent Thomas
and the child to England together—the one to be chosen king and the other
to be made primate—he intended the coronation to take place as soon as he
himself could rejoin them. Its performance, delayed by his own continued
absence on the continent, had however been made impossible by his quarrel
with Thomas. That the archbishop of Canterbury alone could lawfully
crown a king of England was a constitutional as well as an ecclesiastical
tradition so deeply rooted in the minds of Englishmen that nothing short of
absolute necessity had induced Henry I. to set it aside in his own case; and
still less could Henry II. venture to risk such an innovation in the case of his
son.[254] Yet the prospect of a reconciliation with the primate seemed at this
moment further off than ever.

[254] The historical arguments on this subject may be seen in Will. Fitz-Steph.
(Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 110, and Ep. dclxxxiv. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 328–
330. Henry was once said to have projected getting the Pope himself to crown
the child; Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 100. Against this, of course, Canterbury could
have had nothing to say.

Thomas’s first impulse on entering Pontigny had been to give himself up
to a course of study, devotion and self-discipline more severe than anything
which he had yet attempted. He secretly assumed the habit of the “white
monks,”[255] and nearly ruined his delicate constitution by a rash endeavour
to practise the rigorous abstinence enjoined by the rules of the order.[256] He
grew more diligent than ever in prayer, meditation, and study of Holy
Scripture.[257] But his restless, impetuous nature could not rise to the serene
heights of more than worldly wisdom urged upon him by John of Salisbury,
who truly insisted that such occupations alone were worthy of a true
confessor.[258] In spite of John’s warnings and pleadings, he still kept all his
friends—John himself included—ceaselessly at work in his behalf; and
while he sought out in every church and convent in Gaul every rare and
valuable book that he could hear of, to be copied for his cathedral library, he
was also raking together for the same collection all the privileges, old or
new, that could be disinterred from the Roman archives or extorted from the
favour of the Pope.[259] Until Easter 1166 Alexander restrained him from

any direct measures against the king;[260] then, unable to keep silence any
longer, Thomas again took the matter into his own hands and wrote to
Henry himself, earnestly imploring him to consider his ways and to grant
his old friend a personal interview.[261] Henry was inexorable; Thomas
wrote again, this time a torrent of mingled warnings, intreaties and
remonstrances,[262] and with just as little effect. Then, towards the end of
May, as the king was holding council with his barons at Chinon, a
barefooted monk came to him with a third letter from the primate.[263] Once
again Thomas expressed his longing for a personal meeting; once again he
set forth the doctrine of the divine rights and duties of kings, and charged
Henry, by the solemn memory of his coronation-vows, to restore to the
English Church her privileges and her chief pastor. Only in the last sentence
came a significant warning: “If not, then know of a surety that you shall feel
the severity of Divine vengeance!”[264] And there was no doubt about its
meaning; for the Empress Matilda had already transmitted to her son a
threat sent to her by Thomas in plain words, that unless she could bring him
to acknowledge his error, “shortly, yea, very shortly” the “sword of the
Spirit” should be drawn against his dominions and even against himself.
[265]

[255] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 345. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.),
p. 64. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 315.

[256] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 126, 127. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.),
pp. 412, 413. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 376–379. Thomas Saga (as above), p.
317.

[257] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 77. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.),
p. 379.

[258] Ep. lxxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 163, 164.

[259] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[260] Ep. xcv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 179, 180.

[261] Ep. clii. (ib. pp. 266–268).

[262] Ep. cliii. (ib. pp. 269–278), translated by Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 100–
106.

[263] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 106. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 419.
Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 383–385. Eyton (Itin. Hen. II., p. 93) dates this

council June 1, but this cannot be reconciled with Thomas’s subsequent
proceedings.

[264] Ep. cliv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 278–282), translated by Garnier
(Hippeau), pp. 109–111.

[265] Ep. clxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 361).

Harassed by disaster and revolt, provoked by the primate’s former letters,
Henry, upon reading this one and hearing the messenger’s comment upon it
—for Thomas had charged him to say a good deal more than he wrote[266]
—might well feel that he was standing on the brink of a volcano. He turned
desperately upon the bishops around him, half imploring, half commanding
them to help him out of his strait, abusing them for a pack of traitors who
would not trouble themselves to rid him of this one unmanageable foe, and
exclaiming with a burst of tears that the archbishop was destroying him soul
and body together; for he naturally expected nothing less than an interdict
on his dominions and an anathema against himself, and both sanctioned by
the Pope. When Henry was thus at his wits’ end, the only one among his
continental advisers who was likely to have any counsel to offer him was
Arnulf of Lisieux. Once more Arnulf proved equal to the occasion; he
suggested that the primate’s intended censures should be forestalled by an
appeal to the Pope. The remedy was a desperate one, for, as John of
Salisbury triumphantly remarked when he heard of it, the king was flying in
the face of his own Constitutions and confirming that very right of appeal
which he was so anxious to abolish, by thus having recourse to it for his
own protection. But there was no other loophole of escape; so the appeal
was made, a messenger was despatched to give notice of it in England,
close the ports and cut off all communication with Thomas and with the
Pope; while the bishops of Lisieux and Séez set out for Pontigny to bid the
primate stay his hand till the octave of Easter next, which was fixed for the
term of Henry’s appeal.[267]

[266] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 385.

[267] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 381, 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib.
vol. iii.), p. 393, confuses this appeal with a later one.

They were too late. No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned
with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to
Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:—those of the Blessed
Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he
learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the
patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury
and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the
power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer
before his relics. Before each of these shrines Thomas, like a warrior
preparing for mortal combat, passed a night in solemn vigil, the last night
being that of the festival of S. Drausius, and also of Ascension-day.[268] On
the morrow he left Soissons;[269] on Whitsun-eve[270] he reached Vézelay, a
little town distant only a day’s journey from Pontigny, and made famous by
its great abbey, which boasted of possessing the body of S. Mary
Magdalene. Thomas found the place crowded with pilgrims assembled to
keep the Whitsun feast on this venerated spot. He was invited by the abbot
to celebrate High Mass and preach on the festival day;[271] his sermon
ended, he solemnly anathematized the royal customs and all their
upholders, and excommunicated by name seven persons whom he
denounced as special enemies to the Church; the two first being Henry’s
confidential envoys John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester, who had been
the medium of his communications with the Emperor; while a third, Jocelyn
de Bailleul, was one of his chief advisers, and a fourth was no less a
personage than the justiciar, Richard de Lucy.[272] Thomas had set out from
Soissons in the full determination to excommunicate Henry himself at the
same time; but on his way he learned that the king was dangerously ill; he
therefore contented himself with a solemn warning publicly addressed to
him by name, calling him to repentance for the last time, and in default,
threatening him with immediate excommunication.[273]

[268] It was also the anniversary of his own ordination to the priesthood—
June 2.

[269] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, vol. v.), p. 382.

[270] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 391, says “proximâ ante festum die,” and he
makes the festival that of S. Mary Magdalene, the patron of the place. Tempting,
however, as his version is—for it would explain at once Thomas’s otherwise

rather unaccountable choice of Vézelay for the scene of his proceedings, and the
great concourse of people who evidently were assembled there—it is quite
irreconcileable with the minute chronological details of John of Salisbury’s letter
(Ep. cxciv. as above), written within a few weeks of the events, while Herbert’s
story was written from memory, many years after. On the other hand, R. Diceto’s
date (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 318), Ascension-day, is more impossible still.

[271] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 391.

[272] The details of the sentence are in Thomas’s own letters, Epp. cxcv.,
cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 386–391, 392–397. Cf. Ep. cxciv.
(ibid.), p. 383. The other excommunicated persons were Ralf de Broc, Hugh of
S. Clare and Thomas Fitz-Bernard. Their crime was invasion of Church property.
Richard of Ilchester and John of Oxford were condemned for their dealings with
the schismatics; Richard de Lucy and Jocelyn de Bailleul, as being the authors of
the Constitutions.

[273] Epp. cxciv., cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 382, 383,
391, 396. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 391, 392.

The news of these proceedings reached Henry when, sick and anxious, he
was trying to gather up strength and energy for a campaign against the
Bretons. He instantly despatched another messenger to England, bidding
Richard de Lucy call an assembly of the bishops and clergy and compel
them to make a general appeal to the Pope against the authority and
jurisdiction of their primate.[274] The meeting was held in London[275] at
midsummer.[276] The appeal was made and sent to the Pope in the name of
all the bishops and clergy of England; but it is tolerably clear that the main
body were merely passive followers, more or less willing, of Gilbert of
London and Jocelyn of Salisbury, the former of whom was almost certainly
the writer of the letter which conveyed the appeal to the Pope, as well as of
that which announced it to the primate.[277] The hand of Gilbert Foliot was
indeed so plainly visible that Thomas’s reply was addressed with equal
plainness to him personally.[278] The long and sarcastic letter with which he
retorted[279] was answered in a yet more startling fashion at the opening of
the next year. As Gilbert stood before the high altar of his cathedral church
on the feast of its patron saint a paper was thrust into his hand; to his
dismay it proved to be a papal brief granting to Archbishop Thomas a
commission as legate for all England, and commanding the bishops to
render him unqualified obedience and to resign within two months
whatever confiscated church property had been placed in their charge by the
king. In an agony of distress Gilbert, who himself had the custody of the

Canterbury estates, sent this news to the king, imploring him to grant
permission that the Pope’s mandate might be obeyed, at least till some
method could be devised for escaping from a dilemma which now looked
well-nigh hopeless.[280] Henry, absorbed in a struggle with the Bretons, had
already been provoked into a vengeance as impolitic as it was mean. He
threatened the Cistercian abbots assembled on Holy Cross day at the
general chapter of their order that if Thomas were not immediately expelled
from Pontigny, he would send all the White Monks in his dominions to
share the primate’s exile.[281] When the abbot of Pontigny carried this
message home, Thomas could only bid him farewell and betake himself to
the sole protection left him—that of the king of France. He left Pontigny on
S. Martin’s day[282] 1166, and took up his abode as the guest of Louis in the
abbey of S. Columba at Sens.[283]

[274] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200.

[275] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol.
i.), p. 56.

[276] Ep. ccix. (ib. vol. v.), p. 421.

[277] Epp. cciv., ccv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 403–413. Cf. Ep. ccix. (ibid.), p. 241,
and Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 56, 57. The bishop of Exeter consented to appeal,
but in a fashion of his own, of which however there is no trace in the letter
actually sent to the Pope. Two prelates were absent: Walter of Rochester, who
pleaded illness, and Henry of Winchester, who wrote in excuse: “Vocatus a
summo Pontifice, nec appello nec appellare volo.” The others thought he meant
that the Pope had cited him; “ipse vero summum Pontificem, summum Judicem
intelligebat, ad cujus tribunal jamjam trahebatur examinandus, tanquam qui in
multis diebus processerat et vitæ metis appropinquaret.” So says Will. Cant.; but
John of Salisbury says distinctly that the letter of appeal was sealed by London,
Winchester and Hereford (Ep. cclii., Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 65). Can
William have founded his pretty story on the old confusion (which is perpetually
breaking out in his favourite authority, Garnier, and in other writers who have
less excuse for it) between Wincestre and Wirecestre—and was Roger of
Worcester the real absentee? He certainly did not share in the obloquy which this
appeal brought upon Robert of Hereford, with whom hitherto he had usually
been coupled by Thomas; on the contrary, he and Bartholomew of Exeter are
henceforth always coupled together as fellow-sufferers for their loyalty to the
primate.

[278] Epp. ccxxiii., ccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 490–520).

[279] The famous “Multiplicem nobis et diffusam.” Ep. ccxxv. (ib. pp. 521–
544).

[280] Ep. ccviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 417, 418). The Pope’s brief is
Ep. clxxii. (ib. pp. 328, 329); it is dated “Anagniæ, vii. Idus Octobris,” but its
true date is Easter-day, April 24 (see editor’s note, p. 329) —the actual date of
the letter whereby Alexander notified his act to the English bishops; Ep. clxxiii.
(Robertson, as above, pp. 229–231). The diocese (not the province) of York was
exempted from Thomas’s legatine jurisdiction—the reason being that Roger of
York was legate for Scotland (Ep. cclxx., ib. vol. vi. p. 119). Thomas sent the
brief over to his friends Robert of Hereford and Roger of Worcester, bidding
them communicate it to their brethren, beginning with London (Ep. clxxix., ib.
vol. v. pp. 344–346). Canon Robertson supposes this brief to have been delivered
to Gilbert on the feast of the Commemoration of S. Paul, i.e. June 30, 1166.
Gilbert himself says merely “die beati Pauli”; and his letter has no date. But it
mentions “legatos qui diriguntur ad nos”; and there is no hint elsewhere of any
talk about sending legates till late in the autumn, or even winter. There really
seems to be no reason why we should not adopt a more obvious rendering of the
date, as representing the greater and better-known festival of S. Paul’s
Conversion. In that case, of course, the year must be 1167.

[281] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 50. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p.
414. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 83. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 397. Anon. I.
(ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 371.

[282] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 201, 202.

[283] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 415. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.),
pp. 403, 404; etc.

Henry saw his own blunder as soon as it was made, and endeavoured to
neutralize its effects by despatching an embassy to the Pope, requesting that
he would send a legatine commission to settle the controversy. One of his
envoys was the excommunicate John of Oxford; to the horror of Thomas
and the indignation of Louis, John came back in triumph, boasting not only
that he had been absolved by the Pope, but that two cardinals, William and
Otto—the former of whom was a determined opponent of Thomas—were
coming with full powers to sit in judgement on the case between primate
and king and decide it without appeal.[284] The first half of the boast was
true, but not the second; the cautious Pope instructed his envoys to do
nothing more than arbitrate between the contending parties, if they could.
[285]
They did not reach Normandy till the autumn of 1167; Thomas came to
meet them on the French border on November 18; he refused to enter upon
any negotiations till the property of the metropolitan see was restored;[286]
the legates carried their report to the king at Argentan, and were dismissed
with an exclamation of disappointment and disgust—“I wish I may never
set eyes upon a cardinal again!”[287] Five of the English bishops whom

Henry had summoned to advise him renewed their appeal,[288] its original
term having expired six months ago; and the legates insisting that Thomas
should respect the appeal,[289] another year’s delay was gained.

[284] Epp. cclxxx., cclxxxiii., cclxxxv., ccxcii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.),
pp. 140, 146, 147, 151–153, 170, 171.

[285] Ep. cccvii. (ibid.), p. 201. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 65, and Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 202, 203.

[286] Epp. cccxxxi., cccxxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 247–251, 256–
258.

[287] Ep. cccxxxix. (ibid.), pp. 269, 270.

[288] Epp. cccxxxix., cccxli.–cccxlv. (ibid.), pp. 270–272, 276, 277, 283–288.

[289] Ep. cccxliii. (ibid.), pp. 284, 285.

At last, when the two kings made their treaty at Montmirail at Epiphany
1169, Thomas, who had come to the spot under the protection of Louis,
suddenly entered the royal presence and fell at Henry’s feet, offering to
place himself unreservedly in his hands. All parties thought the struggle was
over, till the archbishop added once again the words which had so
exasperated Henry at Oxford and at Clarendon: “Saving God’s honour and
my order.” The king burst into a fury, and the meeting broke up in
confusion.[290] Three months later, on Palm Sunday, from the high altar of
Clairvaux, Thomas excommunicated ten of his opponents, first among
whom was Gilbert Foliot.[291] Gilbert, who knew that the sentence had been
hanging over him for more than a year, had appealed against it before it was
uttered;[292] the king, too, was forewarned, and at every seaport guards were
set to catch and punish with the utmost rigour any messenger from the
primate. It was not till Ascension-day that a young layman named Berengar
made his way up to the altar of Gilbert’s cathedral church in the middle of
High Mass and thrust into the hand of the celebrant the archbishop’s letter
proclaiming the excommunication of the bishop.[293] On that very day
Thomas issued another string of excommunications.[294] Gilbert, driven to
extremity, renewed his appeal two days later; and he added to it a formal
refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a metropolitan to whom he had

made no profession, and a declaration—so at least it was reported in Gaul—
of his intention to claim the metropolitical dignity for his own see, as an
ancient right of which it had been unjustly defrauded by Canterbury.[295] A
storm of indignant protest and vehement denunciation arose from the
archbishop’s party; and the terrified Pope checked further proceedings by
despatching another pair of envoys, who as usual failed to agree either with
the king, with the archbishop, or even with each other, and after wasting the
summer in misunderstandings and recriminations left the case just where
they had found it.[296] By this time king and primate were both weary of
their quarrel, and still more weary of mediation. In November they had
another personal interview at Montmartre, and the archbishop’s
unconditional restoration was all but decided.[297] Thomas, however, rashly
attempted to hasten the completion of the settlement by a threat of interdict;
[298]
and the threat stung Henry into an act of far greater rashness. He had
met Louis, as well as Thomas, at Montmartre, and had gained his
immediate object of restraining the French king yet a little longer from
direct hostilities; the settlement of Britanny was completed at Christmas,
that of Aquitaine was so far secure that its conclusion might safely be left to
Eleanor’s care; in March 1170 Henry went to England[299] with the fixed
determination of seeing his eldest son crowned there before he left it again.

[290] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 418–427. Epp. ccccli., cccclxi. (ib. vol.
vi.), pp. 488, 489, 507–509. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 73, 74, and Thomas
Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 427–433.

[291] Ep. cccclxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 558, 559). See also
Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 87, and for date, R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
333.

[292] Ep. dxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 614.

[293] Compare the account given by “Magister Willelmus” in Ep. dviii.
(ibid.), pp. 603, 604, with that of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 89, 90. They
are clearly from the same hand.

[294] Epp. dii., dvii. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 594, 601–603. For date cf. Ep.
cccclxxxviii. (ib. pp. 558, 559).

[295] Ep. dviii. (ibid.), pp. 604–606 —a very circumstantial account, yet one
can scarcely understand how a man so wise and so learned as Gilbert can really
have made such an utterly unhistorical claim. He must have known that it had no
shadow of foundation, the nearest approach to such a thing being S. Gregory’s

abortive scheme for fixing the two archbishoprics at London and York. Gilbert’s
opponents, on the other hand, declared that he derived his claim from the
archpriests of Jupiter who had their seat in the Roman Londinium, and
denounced him as their would-be representative and successor. Epp. dxxxv.,
dxlvi. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 10, 41.

[296] On this legation of Gratian and Vivian see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
335; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 212, 213; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket,
vol. iii.), pp. 441–445; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 72, 73; Epp. ccccxci., ccccxcii.
(ib. vol. vi.), pp. 563, 564, 567; dlx., dlxi., dlxiii.–dlxviii., dlxxxi., dlxxxiv., dci.,
dcii. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 70–76, 78–92, 115, 116, 124, 125, 151–154, etc.

[297] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 97, 98; Herb. Bosh.
(ibid.), pp. 445–451; Epp. dciv.–dcvii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 158–168). Thomas Saga
(Magnusson), vol. i. p. 447. R. Diceto as above, pp. 335–337. Gerv. Cant. as
above, p. 213.

[298] Epp. dlxxiii.–dlxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 97–109), etc.

[299] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3.
Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 216.

Three years before, he had wrung from the Pope—then blockaded in
Rome by the Imperial troops, and in the last extremity of peril—a brief
authorizing young Henry’s coronation by the archbishop of York, in default
of the absent primate of all England.[300] In face of a mass of earlier and
later rescripts from Alexander’s predecessors and Alexander himself, all
strenuously confirming the exclusive privileges of Canterbury, Henry had
never yet ventured to make use of this document; like Adrian’s bull for the
conquest of Ireland, it had been kept in reserve for a future day; and that
day had now come. In vain did Thomas proclaim his threatened interdict;
[301]
in vain did the Pope ratify it;[302] in vain did both alike issue
prohibitions to all the English bishops against the act which they knew to be
in contemplation.[303] The vigilance of the justiciars, quickened by a fresh
set of stringent injunctions sent over by the king in the previous autumn,
[304]
made the delivery of letters from either primate or Pope so difficult that
Thomas at last could intrust it to no one but a nun, Idonea, whom he
solemnly charged with the duty of presenting to Roger of York the papal
brief in which the coronation was forbidden.[305] The ceremony was fixed
for Sunday, June 14. A week before that date young Henry, who with his
girl-bride Margaret of France had been left at Caen under the care of his
mother and Richard of Hommet the constable of Normandy, was summoned

to join his father in England.[306] On S. Barnabas’s day the bishops and
barons assembled at Westminster in obedience to the royal summons;[307]
on Saturday, the 13th, the Pope’s letter was at last forced upon the
archbishop of York;[308] but none the less did he on the following morning
crown and anoint young Henry in Westminster abbey; while Gilbert of
London, who had managed to extort conditional absolution in the Pope’s
name from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen,[309] once more stood openly by
his side in the foremost rank of the English bishops.[310]

[300] Ep. cccx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 206, 207). See the editor’s note
as to the date.

[301] Epp. dclxxviii.–dclxxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 320–325).

[302] Epp. dcxxviii.–dcxxx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 210–214).

[303] Epp. dcxxxii., dcxxxiii., dcxlviii.–dcli. (ib. pp. 216, 217, 256–264).
Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 462, puts this interdict too late.

[304] The “ten ordinances”; Ep. dxcix. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 147–149); Will. Cant.
(ib. vol. i.), pp. 53–55; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 214–216; Rog. Howden
(Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 231–236; on the date see Bishop Stubbs’s note at last
reference.

[305] Ep. dclxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 307–309). See the editor’s
note.

[306] Ep. dclxxiii. (ibid.), pp. 309, 312.

[307] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5.

[308] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 103.

[309] Ibid. Epp. dclviii.–dclx. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 275–277).

[310] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 103; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5;
Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs) vol. i. p. 219. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 338, Chron.
Mailros, a. 1170, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 4, Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169
(Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), all give different dates, and all wrong.

The elder king only waited to see the tenants-in-chief, with the king of
Scots at their head, swear fealty to his new-made colleague ere he hurried
back to Normandy to meet the fast-gathering storm.[311] Louis, incensed
that his daughter’s husband should have been crowned without her, was

already threatening war;[312] Thomas, seeing in the king’s action nothing
but the climax of Canterbury’s wrongs, was overwhelming the Pope with
complaints, reproaches, and intreaties for summary vengeance upon all who
had taken part in the coronation; and the majority of the cardinals strongly
supported his demands.[313] Henry saw that he must make peace at any
price. Two days before the feast of S. Mary Magdalene he held a conference
with Louis near Fréteval, on the borders of the Vendômois and the county of
Chartres;[314] they were reconciled, and as they parted Henry said jestingly
to the French king: “That rascal of yours, too, shall have his peace to-
morrow; and a right good peace shall it be.”[315] At dawn on S. Mary
Magalene’s day[316] he met Thomas in the “Traitor’s Meadow,”[317] close to
Fréteval; they rode apart together, and remained in conference so long that
the patience of their followers was all but exhausted, when at last Thomas
was seen to dismount and throw himself at the king’s feet. Henry sprang
from his horse, raised the archbishop from the ground, held his stirrup while
he remounted, and rode back to tell his followers that peace was made, on
terms which practically amounted to a complete mutual amnesty and a
return to the state of affairs which had existed before the quarrel.[318]

[311] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 6. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 220.
Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 83. Henry landed at Barfleur about
Midsummer; Gesta Hen. as above.

[312] Gesta Hen. as above.

[313] Ep. dccvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 373, 374).

[314] “In limitibus suis inter Firmitatem, oppidum scilicet in pago Carnotensi,
et Fretivalle, castrum videlicet in territorio Turonensi.” Ep. dclxxxv. (ibid.), p.
339. This Firmitas must be La Ferté-Villeneuil, and Turonensi should be
Vindocinensi. Herb. Bosh., who lays the scene “in confinio Carnotusiæ et
Cenomanniæ, inter duo castella quorum unum nominatur Viefui” [Viévy-le-
Rayé] “et alterum Freteval” (ib. vol. iii. p. 466), is no nearer to the true
geography.

[315] “Et crastinâ die habebit pacem suam latro vester; et quidem bonam
habebit.” Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 108.

[316] Ep. dclxxxv. (ib. vol. vii.), p. 340.

[317] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 466. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p.
461.

[318] Epp. dclxxxiv., dclxxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 326–334,
340–342. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 108–111. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 466.
Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 150, 151. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 461–465.

Henry had no sooner returned to Normandy than he fell sick almost to
death; on his recovery he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady at
Rocamadour in the Quercy,[319] and it was not until October that Thomas
again saw him at Tours, on his way to a conference with Count Theobald of
Blois at Amboise.[320] A difficulty had arisen about the restitution of the
confiscated Church property and the absolution of the persons whom
Thomas had excommunicated, each party insisting that the other should
make the first step in conciliation.[321] There was also a difficulty about the
kiss of peace, which Thomas required as pledge of Henry’s sincerity, but
which Henry seemed desirous of postponing indefinitely.[322] Nevertheless,
a letter from Henry to his son, announcing the reconciliation and bidding
the young king enforce the restoration of the archiepiscopal estates, was
drawn up in Thomas’s presence at Amboise and sent over to England by the
hands of two of his clerks,[323] who presented it at Westminster on October
5.[324] The restoration was, however, not effected until Martinmas, and then
it comprised little more than empty garners and ruined houses.[325] Thomas
saw the king once more, at Chaumont,[326] and Henry promised to meet him
again at Rouen, thence to proceed with him to England in person.[327]
Before the appointed time came, however, fresh complications had arisen
with the king of France; Henry was obliged to give up all thought of going
not only to England but even to Normandy, and delegated the archbishop of
Rouen and the dean of Salisbury to escort Thomas in his stead.

[319] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 6, 7.

[320] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) pp. 468, 469. Will. Fitz-Steph.
(ibid.), p. 114. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 154. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p.
469. The writer of the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 8) gives the date of this
meeting as Tuesday, October 12. But this must be quite ten days too late, for we
shall see that a letter drawn up after the meeting was received in England on
October 5.

[321] Ep. dclxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 333–337.

[322] Henry alleged that he had publicly sworn never to give Thomas the kiss
of peace, and could not face the shame of breaking his oath. Garnier (Hippeau),

p. 150; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 450; Ep. dcxxiii. (ib. vol.
vii.) pp. 198, 199; Thomas Saga, as above, p. 449. See in Herb. Bosh. (as above),
p. 469, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 115, and Thomas Saga (as above), p. 469, the
contrivance by which he avoided it at Tours—or Amboise, in William’s version.

[323] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 156, 157. The letter, of which Garnier gives a
translation, is Ep. dcxc. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.) pp. 346, 347; also in Will.
Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 85; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 112; Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 221; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339.

[324] Ep. dccxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 389.

[325] Ep. dccxxxiii. (ibid.), p. 402.

[326] Chaumont on the Loire, seemingly. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 470. Cf.
Thomas Saga, as above, pp. 471–473.

[327] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 115, 116.

The duty finally devolved solely upon the dean, who was no other than
Thomas’s old opponent John of Oxford.[328] Naturally enough, the primate
was deeply hurt at being thus sent back to his see under the protection of a
man who, as he truly said, ought to have been thankful for the privilege of
travelling in his suite.[329] Thomas, however, was in haste to be gone,
although fully persuaded that he was going to his death. He seems indeed to
have been weary of life; the tone of his letters and of his parting words to
the friends whom he was leaving in France indicates not so much a morbid
presentiment of his fate as a passionate longing for it. Yet it can hardly have
been from him alone that the foreboding communicated itself to so many
other minds. Warnings came to him from all quarters; one voice after
another, from the king of France[330] down to the very pilot of the ship in
which he took his passage, implored him not to go; Herbert of Bosham
alone upheld his resolution to the end.[331]

[328] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 116. Epp. dccxxii.,
dccxxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 400, 403. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 160.

[329] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[330] Ib. p. 113.

[331] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 472–476.

We may put aside at once all the wild talk of the archbishop’s
biographers about plots against his life in which the king had a share. Even
if Henry’s sudden willingness for his return was really suggested by words
said to have been uttered by one of his counsellors—“Why keep the
archbishop out of England? It would be far better to keep him in it”—there
is no need to assume that those words bore even in the speaker’s mind, far
less in that of the king, the horrible meaning which they were afterwards
supposed to have covered;[332] for they were true in the most literal sense.
The quarrel of king and primate would have mattered little had it been
fought out on English ground; it was the archbishop’s exile which rendered
him so dangerous. Thomas had dealt his most fatal blow at Henry by flying
from him, and Henry, as he now perceived, had made his worst blunder in
driving Thomas into France. Of the infinitely greater blunder involved in
the archbishop’s murder—setting the criminal aspect of the deed altogether
aside—it is enough to say that Henry was wholly incapable. The same may
be said of Roger of York and Gilbert of London, although, like the king
himself, they were urged by dread of the archbishop into making common
cause with men of a very different stamp:—men who hated the primate with
a far more intense personal hatred, and who were restrained by no
considerations either of policy or of morality:—men such as Ralf de Broc, a
ruffian adventurer who had served as the tool of Henry’s vengeance upon
the archbishop’s kinsfolk, had resumed the custody of the archiepiscopal
estates when it was resigned by Gilbert Foliot, had been for the last four
years at once fattening upon the property of Thomas and smarting under his
excommunication, and was ready to commit any crime rather than disgorge
his ill-gotten gains.[333] It was known that Thomas had letters from the Pope
suspending all those bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the
young king, and replacing Gilbert of London, Jocelyn of Salisbury, and all
whom Thomas had excommunicated under the sentences from which they
had been irregularly released by some of the Papal envoys.[334] Gilbert,
Jocelyn and Roger of York now hurried to Canterbury, intending to proceed
to Normandy as soon as Thomas set foot in England; while Ralf de Broc,
Reginald de Warren and Gervase of Cornhill the sheriff of Kent undertook
to catch him at the moment of landing, ransack his baggage, search his
person, and seize any Papal letters which he might bring with him. Thomas,
however was warned; he sent the letters over before him, and the three
prelates at Canterbury read their condemnation before their judge quitted

Gaul.[335] Next day he sailed from Wissant, and on the morning of
December 1 he landed at Sandwich.[336] His enemies were ready to receive
him; but at the sight of John of Oxford they stopped short, and John in the
king’s name forbade all interference with the primate.[337] Amid the
rapturous greetings of the people who thronged to welcome their chief
pastor, he rode on to Canterbury; there some of the royal officials came to
him in the king’s name, demanding the absolution of the suspended and
excommunicate bishops. Thomas at first answered that he could not annul a
Papal sentence; but he afterwards offered to take the risk of doing so, if the
culprits would abjure their errors in the form prescribed by the Church.
Gilbert and Jocelyn were inclined to yield; but Roger refused, and they
ended by despatching Geoffrey Ridel to enlist the sympathies of the young
king in their behalf, while they themselves carried their protest to his father
in Normandy.[338]

[332] Will Fitz-Steph. as above, pp. 106, 107.

[333] On Ralf de Broc see Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p.
75; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 360; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.) p. 65; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.),
p. 404; Epp. lxxviii. (ib. vol. v. p. 152), cccxli., ccccxcviii. (ib. vol. vi. pp. 278,
582), dccxviii., dccxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 394, 402). In the last place Thomas says
that Ralf “in ecclesiam Dei . . . per septem annos licentius debacchatus est”;
and the writer of the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 321, seems to have
understood this as meaning that Ralf had had the stewardship of the Canterbury
property throughout the archbishop’s exile. This, however, does not appear to
have been the case. Ralf certainly had the stewardship for a short time at first;
but it was, as we have seen, soon transferred to Gilbert Foliot, and only restored
to Ralf when Gilbert resigned it early in 1167.

[334] Epp. dccxx., dccxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 397–399).

[335] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 410. Cf.
Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 87–89; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 117; Herb.
Bosh.(ibid.), pp. 471, 472; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 68; Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 123;
Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 161, 163. The version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol.
i. p. 483, seems founded on a confusion between the delivery of these Papal
letters and that which Berengar delivered in S. Paul’s on the Ascension-day of
the previous year.

[336] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 118. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 476. Anon. I.
(ib. vol. iv.), p. 68. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 164. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339.
Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 222. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 489–491. The
date is from Will. Fitz-Steph., R. Diceto and the Saga; Gervase makes it
November 30, and Herbert “two or three days after the feast of S. Andrew.”

[337] Will. Fitz-Steph. and Garnier, as above. Ep. dccxxiii. (Robertson,
Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 404. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 491.

[338] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 404–406, 411,
412. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 102–105. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 120,
121. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 480. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 497–501.
Garnier (Hippeau), p. 172, erroneously thinks the censures on the bishops were
not issued till Christmas-day.

The young king was preparing to hold his Christmas court at Winchester.
[339]
Thomas proposed to join it, but was stopped in London by a
peremptory command to “go back and mind his own business at
Canterbury.”[340] He obeyed under protest, and on Christmas-day again
excommunicated the De Brocs and their fellow-robbers.[341] The elder king
was keeping the feast at his hunting-seat of Bures near Bayeux.[342] There
the three bishops threw themselves at his feet; Roger of York spoke in the
name of all, and presented the Papal letters;[343] the courtiers burst into a
confused storm of indignation, but not one had any counsel to offer. In his
impatience and disappointment Henry uttered the fatal words which he was
to rue all his life: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in
my house, that none of them can be found to avenge me of this one upstart
clerk!”[344]

[339] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 166. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p.
106. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 126. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 342, says the
young king was at Woodstock when Thomas sought for an interview; he was,
however, certainly at Winchester at Christmas.

[340] “Fère vostre mestier à Cantorbire alez.” Garnier (Hippeau), p. 171. Cf.
Ep. dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 412; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.) pp.
106–113; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 121–123; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp.
482, 483; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 13; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol.
i. pp. 505–507.

[341] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 120. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 428. Will. Fitz-
Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 484, 485. R. Diceto (as
above), p. 342. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 511–513.

[342] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 481. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Gesta Hen.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 11. Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[343] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 175–177. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 122, 123.
Cf. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 501–503.

[344] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 121. E. Grim (ib.
vol. ii.), p. 429. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 487.

The words were hardly more than he had used at Chinon four years
before, but they fell now upon other ears. Four knights—Hugh de Morville,
William de Tracy, Reginald Fitz-Urse and Richard le Breton[345]—took
them as a warrant for the primate’s death. That night—it was Christmas-
eve[346]—they vowed to slay him, no matter how or where;[347] they left the
court in secret, crossed to England by different routes,[348] and met again at
Saltwood, a castle which the archbishop had been vainly endeavouring to
recover from the clutches of Ralf de Broc, and where Ralf himself was
dwelling amid a crowd of his kinsfolk and dependents. There the final plot
was laid.[349] How it was executed is a tale which has been told so often that
its details may well be spared here. On the evening of December 29, after a
scene in his own hall scarcely less disgraceful than the last scene in the
king’s hall at Northampton, the primate of all England was butchered at the
altar’s foot in his own cathedral church.[350]

[345] In Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 128, 129, is a “descriptio
spiculatorum,” in which the only point of interest is the English speech of Hugh
de Morville’s mother.

[346] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 123.

[347] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 124. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p.
429. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 128. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p.
487. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 517.

[348] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p.
124, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Thomas Saga as above.

[349] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; cf. ib. p. 126. Thomas Saga, as above, pp.
517–519. Saltwood was mentioned, as a special subject for inquiry and
restitution, in the king’s letter commending Thomas to his son.

[350] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 131–135. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 319,
320. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 430–438. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 132–142.
Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 488 et seq. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 70–77. Anon. II.
(ibid.), pp. 128–132. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 179–195. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i.
pp. 343, 344. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 224–227. Thomas Saga as above,
pp. 523–549.

The ill news travelled fast. It fell like a thunderbolt upon the Norman
court still gathered round the king at Argentan,[351] whither the assembly
had adjourned after the Christmas feast at Bures. Henry stood for a moment
speechless with horror, then burst into a frenzy of despair, and shut himself
up in his own rooms, refusing to eat or drink or to see any one.[352] In a few
days more, as he anticipated, all Christendom was ringing with execration
of the murder and clamouring for vengeance upon the king who was
universally regarded as its instigator. The Pope ordered an interdict upon
Henry’s continental dominions, excommunicated the murderers and all who
had given or should henceforth give them aid, shelter or support, and was
only restrained from pronouncing a like sentence upon the king himself by
a promise that he would make compurgation and submit to penance.[353]
Two cardinal-legates charged with the enforcement of these decrees were at
once despatched to Normandy;[354] but when they arrived there, Henry was
out of their reach. The death of Duke Conan in February had thrown
Britanny completely into his hands; he only stayed to secure Geoffrey’s
final establishment there as duke[355] before he called a council at Argentan
and announced that he was going to Ireland.[356] He quitted Normandy just
as the legates reached it,[357] leaving strict orders that the ports should be
closed to all clerks and papal envoys, and that no one should dare to follow
him without special permission.[358] Landing at Portsmouth in the first days
of August,[359] he hurried to Winchester for a last interview with the dying
Bishop Henry,[360] closed the English ports as he had closed those of
Normandy,[361] then plunged once more into the depths of South Wales, and
on October 16 sailed from Milford Haven for Waterford.[362]

[351] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i., p. 345. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 14.

[352] Ep. dccxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 438. Cf. MS.
Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 159, 160, and Gesta Hen. as above.

[353] Epp. dccl., dccli. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 471–478).

[354] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 233. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 346.
Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 24.

[355] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171. Conan died February 20; Chron. Kemperleg. ad
ann. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 563). The Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169
(Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), places the event two years too early. Cf. Chron.

Britann. a. 1170, 1171 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560; Morice, Hist.
Bretagne, preuves, vol. i. col. 104).

[356] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[357] MS. Lansdown. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 169. Gerv. Cant. (as
above), pp. 233, 234. The Gesta Hen. (as above), and Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol.
ii. pp. 28, 29) seem to imply that they arrived just before Henry left; but they are
rather confused about these legates. They make two pairs of them come to
Normandy this summer—first, Vivian and Gratian, who come with hostile intent,
and from whom Henry runs away (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 24; Rog.
Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 29); and secondly, Albert and Theodwine, who
apparently supersede them later in the year, and whom Henry hurries to meet
(Gesta Hen. as above, p. 29; Rog. Howden as above, p. 34). But the MS.
Lansdown. (which is the fullest account of all), Gerv. Cant. and R. Diceto
distinctly make only one pair of legates, Albert and Theodwine. The confusion in
Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. ii. pp. 31–33, is greater still.

[358] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 24. Cf. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 29.

[359] Gesta Hen. as above, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 234, say August
3; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 347, says August 6.

[360] R. Diceto as above. Bishop Henry died on August 8; ibid.

[361] Gerv. Cant., Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above.

[362] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 25.

The elements favoured his escape; for five months a persistent contrary
wind hindered all communication to Ireland from any part of his dominions.
[363]
The bishops and the ministers were left to fight their own battles and
make their own peace with the legates in Normandy until May 1172, when
the king suddenly reappeared[364] to claim the papal absolution and offer in
return not only his own spiritual obedience and that of his English and
continental realms, but also that of Ireland, which he had secured for Rome
as her share in the spoils of a conquest won with Adrian’s bull in his hand.
[365]
The bargain was soon struck. On Sunday May 21 Henry met the
legates at Avranches, made his purgation for the primate’s death, promised
the required expiation, and abjured his obnoxious “customs,” his eldest son
joining in the abjuration.[366] To pacify Louis, young Henry and Margaret
were sent over sea with the archbishop of Rouen and by him crowned
together at Winchester on August 27;[367] and the Norman primate returned
to join a great council of the Norman clergy assembled at Avranches to

witness there, two days before Michaelmas, a public repetition of their
sovereign’s purgation and his final absolution by the legates.[368]

[363] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350. Gir. Cambr., Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c.
36 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 284).

[364] R. Diceto (as above), p. 351.

[365] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 28.

[366] Ep. dcclxxi.–dcclxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 513–522). MS.
Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 173, 174.

[367] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 31; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34; Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 237. R. Diceto (as above), p. 352, makes it August 21.

[368] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 32, 33. Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 35–37.
Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 238. These three are the only writers who mention this
purgation in September, and they say nothing of the one in May. That it took
place is however clear from the letter of the legates themselves (Ep. dcclxxiv.
Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. p. 521), giving its date, “Vocem jucunditatis,” i.e.
Rogation-Sunday. On the other hand, the MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv. pp. 173,
174) mentions only one purgation, and this clearly is the earlier one, for it is
placed before the re-crowning of young Henry. The explanation seems to be that
this was a private ceremony between the king and the legates, with a few chosen
witnesses; the legates say in their letter that Henry promised to repeat it publicly
at Caen; he probably did so at Avranches instead. On the other hand, Rob.
Torigni (a. 1172) says: “Locutus est cum eis primo Savigneii, postea Abrincis,
tercio Cadomi, ubi causa illa finita est;” and seems to make the Michaelmas
council at Avranches a mere ordinary Church synod, where moreover “obsistente
regis infirmitate parum profecerunt.” To add to the confusion, Gir. Cambr.
(Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 39; Dimock, vol. v. p. 289) says the purgation was made
at Coutances.

CHAPTER III.
THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND.
795–1172.

Map III.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

It is in the history of the settlements formed on the Irish coast by the
northern pirates in the ninth century that we must seek for the origin of
those relations between England and Ireland which led to an English
invasion of the latter country in the reign of Henry II. The earliest
intercourse between the two islands had been of a wholly peaceful
character; but it had come utterly to an end when Bishop Colman of
Lindisfarne sailed back to his old home at Iona after the synod of Whitby in
664. From the hour when her missionary work was done, Ireland sank more
and more into the isolation which was a natural consequence of her
geographical position, and from which she was only roused at the opening
of the ninth century by the coming of the wikings. In the early days of the
northmen’s attack upon the British isles it was the tradition of Ireland’s
material prosperity and wealth, and the fame of the treasures stored in her
religious houses, that chiefly tempted the “white strangers” from the
Norwegian fiords across the unknown perils of the western sea; and the
settlement of Thorgils in Ulster and those of his fellow-wikings along the
eastern and southern coasts of Ireland formed a chief basis for the
operations of the northmen upon Britain itself. The desperate fighting of the
Irish succeeded in freeing Ulster after Thorgils’s death; but by the middle of
the ninth century the wikings were firmly established at four points on the
Irish coast, Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.[369] Under the leadership
of Olaf the Fair, Dublin became the head of a confederacy which served as
a starting-point and furnished a constant supply of forces for the Danish
conquests in England;[370] and for a hundred years afterwards, throughout
the struggle of the house of Ælfred for the recovery of the Danelaw, the
support given by the Ostmen or wikings of Ireland to their brethren across
the channel was at once the main strength of the Northumbrian Danes and
the standing difficulty of the English kings.[371]

[369] On Thorgils and the wiking settlements in Ireland see Wars of the
Gaedhil with the Gaill (Todd), and Green, Conquest of England, pp. 66, 67, 74,
76.

[370] Green, Conquest of England, pp. 90, 91, 107.

[371] Ib. pp. 213, 242, 252–254, 270–272.

To Ireland itself the results of the wiking invasions were far more
disastrous than either to Britain or to Gaul. Owing to the peculiar physical
character of their country, to their geographical remoteness from the rest of
Europe, and to the political and social isolation which was a consequence of
these, the Irish people had never advanced beyond the primitive tribal mode
of life which had once been common to the whole Aryan race, but which
every European branch of that race, except the Irish, had long since
outgrown. In the time of Ecgberht and of Charles the Great Ireland was still,
as at the very dawn of history, peopled by a number of separate tribes or
septs whose sole bond of internal cohesion was formed by community of
blood;—whose social and political institutions had remained purely
patriarchal in character, unaffected by local and external influences such as
had helped to mould the life of England or of Gaul:—who had never yet
coalesced into any definite territorial organization, far less risen into
national unity under a national sovereign. The provincial kings of Ulster,
Connaught, Leinster and Munster were merely the foremost chieftains
among the various groups of tribes over whom they exercised an ever-
shifting sway; while the supremacy of the Ard-Righ or chief monarch, to
whom in theory was assigned the overlordship of the whole island, was
practically little more than a sort of honorary pre-eminence attached to
certain chosen descendants of an early hero-king, Niall “of the Nine
Hostages”; it carried with it little effective authority, and no territorial
power; for the monarch’s traditional seat at Tara had long been a heap of
ruins, and a tribal under-king had ousted him from the plain of Meath which
in legal theory formed his royal domain.[372] Neither in the monarch himself
nor in the provincial chieftains of a state thus constituted could there be
found, when the storm-cloud from the north burst upon Ireland, a centre of
unity even such as the peoples of Gaul found in their Karolingian
sovereigns, far less such as the West-Franks found in the dukes of the
French, or such as the English found in their kings of the house of Ecgberht.
The stress of the northmen’s attack, which elsewhere gave a fresh impulse
to the upgrowth of national life, crushed out all hope of its developement in
Ireland. The learning and the civilization of ages perished when Columba’s
Bangor, Bridget’s Kildare, Ciaran’s Clonmacnoise, Patrick’s own Armagh,
shared the fate of Bæda’s Jarrow and Hild’s Streoneshealh, of Cuthbert’s
Melrose and Aidan’s Lindisfarne; and in Ireland there was no Wessex and
no Ælfred.

[372] Maine, Early Hist. of Institutions, lect. i.–x.; O’Donovan, Introd. to
Book of Rights; Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, with Mr. Kelly’s notes; O’Donovan,
notes to Four Masters, vols. i. and ii.

On the other hand, the concentration of the wiking forces upon Britain
had given to the Irish an advantage which enabled them to check the spread
of wiking settlements in their country; and the failure of all attempts to
establish a Scandinavian dominion in Britain destroyed all chance of a
Scandinavian conquest of Ireland. The Ostmen never even gained such a
footing in Ireland as the followers of Hrolf gained in Frankland: their
presence never received the sanction of any Ard-Righ; they were not a
compact body occupying the whole of an extensive and well-defined
territory, but a number of separate groups settled here and there along the
coast, and holding their ground only by sheer hard fighting against a ring of
implacable foes. The long struggle may be said to have ended in a defeat of
both parties. The Irish kings of Munster succeeded in establishing a more or
less effective overlordship over the Scandinavian communities of Limerick
and Waterford; and in 989 Malachi II., supreme monarch of Ireland, reaped
his reward for nine years of desperate fighting in the submission of the
Ostmen of Dublin. The city was blockaded and starved into surrender, and a
yearly tribute was promised to Malachi and his successors.[373] Six years
later “the ring of Tomar and the sword of Carl”—two heathen relics
probably of ancient heroes, which seem to have been treasured as sacred
emblems of sovereignty by the Ostmen[374]—were carried off by Malachi
as trophies of another victory;[375] and in 999 or 1000 a renewal of the strife
ended in a rout of the Ostmen and a great slaughter of their leaders, and
Dublin was sacked and burnt by the victorious Irish.[376]

[373] Tighernach, a. 989 (O’Conor, Rer. Hibern. Scriptt., vol. ii. pp. 264, 265).

[374] See O’Donovan’s introduction to the Book of Rights, pp. xxxviii, xxxix.

[375] Tighernach, a. 995 (as above, p. 267).

[376] Ib. a. 998, 999 (p. 268). Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill (Todd), pp. 109–117.

Malachi’s triumph, however, was gained at the cost of a disruption of the
monarchy. Malachi himself was displaced by a king of the rival house of
Munster, his colleague in the sack of Dublin, the famous Brian Boroimhe;
[377]
Brian’s career of conquest ended in 1014 on the field of Clontarf,
where he was slain in battle with the men of Leinster and the Ostmen;[378]
and when Malachi, who now resumed his place, died in 1022,[379] the
downfall of the Irish monarchy was complete.[380] The tradition which had
so long linked it to the house of Niall had been shattered by Brian’s
successes; and Brian had not lived to consolidate in his own house the
forces which had begun to gather around himself. Thenceforth the
Scandinavian colonies simply furnished an additional element to the strife
of the Irish chieftains, and to the rivalry between the O’Briens of Munster
and the O’Neills of Ulster for the possession of a shadowy supremacy,
claimed by the one house as descendants of Brian Boroimhe and by the
other as heirs of Malachi II. and of his great ancestor Niall.

[377] Tighernach, a. 1000, 1001 (as above, pp. 269, 270). Wars of Gaedhil
with Gaill (Todd), p. 119. Brian’s victory was won by the help of the Ostmen,
with whom he stooped to ally himself for the sake of overcoming his rival; but
the alliance was only momentary. On Brian’s reign see Wars of Gaedhil with
Gaill, pp. 119–155.

[378] Wars of Gaedhil with Gaill (Todd), pp. 155–211. Four Masters, a. 1013
(O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 773–781). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1014 (Hennessy, vol. i. pp.
1–13).

[379] Tighernach, a. 1022 (as above, p. 274). Four Masters, a. 1022 (as above,
p. 800). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1022 (as above, p. 23).

[380] “From the death of Maelseachlainn II. the legitimate monarchy of all
Ireland departed from all families during seventy-two years, until the joint reigns
of Muircheartach O’Briain and Domhnall MacLochlainn; during that time no
Feis or general assembly, so agreeable to the people, was held, because Ireland
had no supreme king.” Quoted by Mr. Kelly, note to Cambrensis Eversus, vol. ii.
p. 38, from Gilla-Modud, an Irish poet of the twelfth century.

The social and political system of Ireland was powerless either to expel
or to absorb the foreign element thus introduced within its borders. Not only
was such an union of the two peoples as had at last been effected in
England simply impossible in Ireland; the Irish Danelaw was parted from
its Celtic surroundings by barriers of race and speech, of law and custom

and institutions, far more insuperable than those which parted the settlers in
the “northman’s land” at the mouth of Seine from their West-Frankish
neighbours. Even the Irish Church, which three hundred years before had
won half England—one might add half Europe—to the Faith, had as yet
failed to convert these pagans seated at her door. At the close of the tenth
century the Ostmen were still for the most part heathens in fact if not in
name, aliens from whatever culture or civilization might still remain in the
nation around them. Meanwhile their relations with England had wholly
altered in character. The final submission of the English Danelaw to Eadred
carried with it the alliance of the Irish Danelaw; it seems that the Ostmen in
their turn endeavoured to strengthen themselves against the attacks of the
Irish princes by securing a good understanding with the English king, if not
actually by putting themselves under his protection; for the fact that Eadgar
coined money in Dublin[381] indicates that his authority must have been in
some way or other acknowledged there. The years of the Ostmen’s struggle
with Malachi and Brian Boroimhe were the years of England’s struggle
with Swein and Cnut; but the two strifes seem to have been wholly
unconnected; and throughout the long peace which lasted from Cnut’s final
triumph until the coming of the Normans, new ties sprang up between the
Ostmen and the sister-isle. Owing to their position on the sea-coast and to
the spirit of merchant enterprise which was, quite as much as the spirit of
military enterprise, a part of the wiking-heritage of their inhabitants, the
towns of the Irish Danelaw rose fast into importance as seats of a
flourishing trade with northern Europe, and above all with England through
its chief seaports in the west, Bristol and Chester. The traffic was chiefly in
slaves, bought or kidnapped in England to be sold to the merchants of
Dublin or Waterford, and by these again to their Irish neighbours or to
traders from yet more distant lands.[382] Horrible as this traffic was,
however, even while filling the Irish coast-towns with English slaves it
helped to foster a more frequent intercourse and a closer relation between
Ostmen and Englishmen; and the shelter and aid given to Harold and
Leofwine in 1151 by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo,[383] a prince of the royal
house of Leinster who had acquired the sovereignty over both Leinstermen
and Danes, shews that the political alliance established in Eadgar’s day had
been carefully renewed by Godwine.

[381] Green, Conquest of England, p. 323.

[382] Green, Conquest of England, pp. 440, 443, 444.

[383] See Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. ii. pp. 154.

To these commercial and political relations was added soon afterwards an
ecclesiastical tie. The conversion of the Ostmen to Christianity, completed
in the early years of the eleventh century, was probably due to intercourse
with their Christianized brethren in England rather than to the influence of
the Irish clergy, whose very speech was strange to them; and their adoption
of their neighbours’ creed, instead of drawing together the hostile races,
soon introduced a fresh element into their strife. About the year 1040 the
Ostmen of Dublin set up a bishopric of their own. Their first bishop,
Donatus, was probably Irish by consecration if not by birth.[384] But when
he died, in 1074,[385] the Ostmen turned instinctively towards the
neighbouring island with which they had long been on peaceful terms,
where the fruits of the warfare waged by generation after generation of
wikings upon the shores of Britain were being reaped at last by Norman
hands, where William of Normandy was entering upon the inheritance alike
of Ælfred and of Cnut, and where Lanfranc was infusing a new spirit of
discipline and activity into the Church of Odo and Dunstan. The last
wiking-fleet that ever sailed from Dublin to attack the English coast—a
fleet which Dermot Mac-Maelnambo, true to his alliance with their father,
had furnished to the sons of Harold—had been beaten back six years before.
[386]
Since then Dermot himself was dead;[387] the Ostmen were once more
free, subject to no ruler save one of their own choice and their own blood;
with the consent of their king, Godred,[388] they chose a priest named
Patrick to fill Donatus’s place, and sent him to be consecrated in England
by the archbishop of Canterbury.[389] No scruples about infringing the rights
of the Irish bishops were likely to make Lanfranc withhold his hand. At the
very moment when the Ostmen’s request reached him, he had just been
putting forth against the archbishop of York a claim to metropolitical
jurisdiction over the whole of the British isles, founded on the words of S.
Gregory committing “all the bishops of the Britains” to S. Augustine’s
charge.[390] He therefore gladly welcomed an opportunity of securing for
the authority of his see a footing in the neighbour-isle. He consecrated

Patrick of Dublin and received his profession of obedience;[391] and for the
next seventy-eight years the bishops of Dublin were suffragans not of
Armagh but of Canterbury. When in 1096 the Ostmen of Waterford also
chose for themselves a bishop, they too sought him beyond the sea; an
Irishman, or more probably an Ostman by birth, a monk of Winchester by
profession, Malchus by name, he was consecrated by S. Anselm and
professed obedience to him as metropolitan.[392]

[384] That is, he was certainly not consecrated in England; Lanigan, Eccles.
Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 433–436. But might he not have been consecrated by
some of the bishops in Scotland and the Isles, with which the Ostmen were in
constant intercourse and alliance?

[385] Tighernach, a. 1074 (O’Conor, Rer. Hibern. Scriptt.), vol. ii. p. 309.
Four Masters, a. 1074 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 907).

[386] Eng. Chron. (Worc.) a. 1067, 1068; Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 2;
Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 513; Will. Jumièges, l. vii. c. 41
(ib. p. 290); Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. iv. pp. 225–227, 243–245, 788–790.

[387] He fell in battle with the king of Meath in 1072, according to the Four
Masters ad ann. (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 901–903), and the Ann. Loch Cé
(Hennessy, vol. i. p. 67). The Chron. Scot. (Hennessy, p. 291) places his death in
1069; Mr. Freeman (as above, p. 245) adopts this date.

[388] At the time of Donatus’s appointment in 1040, one Sihtric ruled in
Dublin (see Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 434, 435)—doubtless
under the overlordship of Dermot. On Dermot’s death the Ostmen flung off the
Irish supremacy and took for their king, first a jarl named Godred, who died in
1072, and then another of the same name, who seems to have been already king
of Man. (Freeman, as above, p. 528 and note 5). Lanfranc addresses this Godred
as “King of Ireland” (Lanfranc, Ep. 43, Giles, vol. i. p. 61); and no other prince
is mentioned in connexion with Patrick’s consecration. But it is plain from
Lanfranc’s correspondence, if from nothing else, that Terence O’Brien was
acknowledged overlord of Dublin for some time before his death (see Lanfranc,
Ep. 44, ib. p. 62; and Lanigan, as above, p. 474 et seq.); and he died in 1086.

[389] Lanfranc, Ep. 43 (as above, p. 61). Eng. Chron. Winch., Appendix
(Thorpe, vol. i. p. 387). Cf. Lanigan, as above, pp. 457, 458.

[390] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 464–466.

[391] Ib. p. 458. Eng. Chron. Winch., Appendix (Thorpe, vol. i. p. 387).

[392] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 76, 77. Cf. Lanigan, as above, vol. iv. pp.
15, 16.

Through the medium of these Irish suffragans the archbishops of
Canterbury endeavoured to gain a hold upon the Irish Church by cultivating
the friendship of the different Irish princes who from time to time
succeeded in winning from the Ostmen an acknowledgement of their
overlordship. In the struggles of the provincial kings for the supreme
monarchy of Ireland it was always the Ostmen who turned the scale; their
submission was the real test of sovereignty. The power which had been
wielded by Dermot Mac-Maelnambo passed after his death first to Terence
or Turlogh O’Brien, king of Munster,[393] a grandson of Brian Boroimhe,
and then to Terence’s son Murtogh.[394] Both were in correspondence with
the successive English primates, Lanfranc and Anselm,[395] and both were
recognized as protectors and patrons, in ecclesiastical matters at least, by
the Ostmen,[396] whose adherence during these years enabled the O’Briens
to hold their ground against the advancing power of Donnell O’Lochlainn,
king of Aileach or western Ulster,[397] a representative of the old royal
house of the O’Neills which had fallen with Malachi II. On Murtogh’s death
in 1119[398] a new aspirant to the monarchy appeared in the person of the
young king of Connaught, Terence or Turlogh O’Conor. A year before,
Terence had won the submission of the Ostmen of Dublin;[399] in 1120 he
celebrated the fair of Telltown,[400] a special prerogative of the Irish
monarchs; and from the death of Donnell O’Lochlainn next year[401]
Terence was undisputed monarch till 1127, when a joint rising of Ostmen
and Leinstermen enabled both to throw off his yoke.[402] Meanwhile
Murtogh O’Lochlainn, a grandson of Donnell, was again building up a
formidable power in Ulster; at last, in 1150, all the provincial kings,
including Terence, gave him hostages for peace;[403] and Terence’s throne
seems to have been only saved by a sudden change in the policy of the
Ostmen, whose independent action enabled them for a moment to hold the
balance and act as arbitrators between northern and southern Ireland.[404]
Four years later, however, they accepted Murtogh as their king,[405] and two
years later still he was left sole monarch by the death of Terence O’Conor.
[406]

[393] Four Masters, a. 1073–1086 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 905–927).

[394] Ib. a. 1087–1119 (pp. 929–1009).

[395] Lanfranc, Ep. 44 (Giles, vol. i. pp. 62–64); Anselm, Epp. l. iii., Epp.
cxlii., cxlvii. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clix., cols. 173, 174, 178–180); Lanigan, as
above, vol. iii. pp. 474 et seq., vol. iv. pp. 15, 19, 20.

[396] Samuel of Dublin in 1095 and Malchus of Waterford in 1096 were both
elected under Murtogh’s sanction and sent to England for consecration with
letters of commendation from him. Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), pp. 73–76;
Lanigan, as above, vol. iv. pp. 12–15.

[397] Four Masters, a. 1083–1119 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 921–1009). Cf.
Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1083–1119 (Hennessy, vol. i. pp. 73–111).

[398] Four Masters, a. 1119 (as above, p. 1009). Ann. Loch. Cé, a. 1119 (as
above, p. 111).

[399] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. p. 48, says: “The Annals of
Innisfallen have at A. 1118, ‘Turlogh O’Conor became king of the Danes of
Dublin.’” (This passage does not occur in either of the two editions of Ann.
Inisfal. printed by O’Conor.) The Four Masters, a. 1118 (as above, p. 1007), say
that Terence took hostages from the Ostmen in that year. He was, at any rate,
acknowledged as their overlord by 1121, for it was he who in that year sent
Gregory, bishop-elect of Dublin, to England for consecration. Lanigan, as above,
p. 47.

[400] Four Masters ad ann. (as above, p. 1011).

[401] Ib. a. 1121 (p. 1013). Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1121 (as above, p. 113).

[402] Ann Loch Cé, a. 1127 (p. 123).

[403] Four Masters, a. 1150 (as above, p. 1093).

[404] Something of this kind must be meant by the phrase of the Four Masters
(ib. p. 1095): “The foreigners made a year’s peace between Leath-Chuinn and
Leath-Mhogha.” This is in 1150, after Murtogh’s appearance as “King of
Ireland” and the Ostmen’s submission to Terence (II.) O’Brien, whom his
namesake of Connaught had set up as king in Munster.

[405] Four Masters, a. 1154 (as above, p. 1113).

[406] Four Masters, a. 1156 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1119).

The anarchy of the Irish state was reflected in that of the Church. If
Lanfranc, when he consecrated Patrick of Dublin, knew anything at all of
the ecclesiastical condition of Ireland, he may well have thought that it
stood in far greater need of his reforming care than England itself. The Irish
Church had never felt the organizing hand of a Theodore; its diocesan and
parochial system was quite undeveloped; it had in fact scarcely advanced
beyond the primitive missionary stage. Six centuries after S. Patrick’s death,

the Irish clergy were still nothing but a band of mission-priests scattered
over the country or gathered together in vast monastic establishments like
Bangor or Durrow or Clonmacnoise; the bishops were for the most part
merely heads of ever-shifting mission-stations, to whose number there was
no limit; destitute of political rank, they were almost equally destitute of
ecclesiastical authority, and differed from the ordinary priesthood by little
else than their power of ordination. At the head of the whole hierarchy
stood, as successor and representative of S. Patrick, the archbishop of
Armagh. But since the death of Archbishop Maelbrigid in 927 the see of
Armagh had been in the hands of a family of local chieftains who occupied
its estate, usurped its revenues, handed on its title from father to son, and
were bishops only in name.[407] The inferior members of the ecclesiastical
body could not escape the evil which paralyzed their head. The bishops and
priests of the Irish Church furnished a long roll of names to the catalogue of
saints; but they contributed little or nothing to the political developement of
the nation, and scarcely more to its social developement. The growth of a
class of lay-impropriators ousted them from the management and the
revenues of their church-lands, reduced them to subsist almost wholly upon
the fees which they received for the performance of their spiritual functions,
stripped them of all political influence, and left them dependent solely upon
their spiritual powers and their personal holiness for whatever share of
social influence they might still contrive to retain.[408] The Irish Church, in
fact, while stedfastly adhering in doctrinal matters to the rest of the Latin
Church, had fallen far behind it in discipline; to the monastic reforms of the
tenth century, to the struggle for clerical celibacy and for freedom of
investiture in the eleventh, she had remained an utter stranger. The long-
continued stress of the northern invasions had cut off the lonely island in
the west from all intercourse with the world at large, so completely that
even the tie which bound her to Rome had sunk into a mere vague tradition
of spiritual loyalty, and Rome herself knew nothing of the actual condition
of a Church which had once been her most illustrious daughter.

[407] S. Bernard, Vita S. Malach., c. 10 (Mabillon, vol. i. col. 667). Cf.
Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iii. p. 382.

[408] On these lay impropriators, “comorbas” and “erenachs,” see Lanigan,
Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 79–86.

But it was the northmen, too, who were now to become the means of
knitting up again the ties which had been severed by their fathers’ swords.
The state of things in Ireland, as reported to Canterbury from Dublin and
Waterford, might well seem to reforming churchmen like Lanfranc and
Anselm too grievous to be endured. Lanfranc had urged upon Terence
O’Brien the removal of two of its worst scandals, the neglect of canonical
restraints upon marriage and the existence of a crowd of titular bishops
without fixed sees;[409] Anselm used all his influence with Murtogh O’Brien
for the same end;[410] at last, finding his efforts unavailing, he seems to
have laid his complaints before the Pope. The result was that, for the first
time, a papal legate was appointed for Ireland. The person chosen was
Gilbert, who some two or three years before Anselm’s death became the
first bishop of the Ostmen of Limerick. Gilbert seems, like the first Donatus
of Dublin, to have been himself an Irish prelate; he lost no time, however, in
putting himself in communication with Canterbury,[411] and displayed an
almost exaggerated zeal for the Roman discipline and ritual.[412] In 1118 he
presided over a synod held at Rathbreasil, where an attempt was made to
map out the dioceses of Ireland on a definite plan.[413] Little, however,
could be done till the metropolitan see was delivered from the usurpers who
had so long held it in bondage; and it was not until 1134 that the evil
tradition was broken by the election of S. Malachi.

[409] Lanfranc, Ep. 44 (Giles, vol. i. p. 63).

[410] Anselm, Epp. l. iii., Epp. cxlii., cxlvii. (Migne, Patrol., vol. clix., cols.
173, 174, 178–180).

[411] On Gilbert’s relations with Anselm see Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland,
vol. iv. pp. 23–26.

[412] Ib. pp. 26–29.

[413] Ib. pp. 38, 40–43.

Malachi was the wisest and most enlightened as well as the most saintly
Irish prelate of his time; he had already been labouring for nearly ten years
at the reform of the diocese of Connor; in that of Armagh itself he had
earlier still, as vicar to Archbishop Celsus, laid the foundations of a similar

work which he now took up again as primate.[414] After a successful
pontificate of three years he again retired to the humbler position of a
diocesan bishop at Down;[415] but he still continued to watch over the
interests of the whole Irish Church; and in 1139 he went to Rome specially
to lay its necessities before the Pope, and if possible to obtain from him the
gift of a pallium for the archbishop of Armagh, and another for the bishop
of Cashel as metropolitan of southern Ireland.[416] The pallium was now
generally regarded as an indispensable note of metropolitical rank, but it
had never been possessed by the successors of S. Patrick.[417] Innocent II.
refused to grant it save at the request of the Irish clergy and people in
council assembled; he sanctioned, however, the recognition of Cashel as
metropolis of southern Ireland, and moreover he transferred to Malachi
himself the legatine commission which Gilbert of Limerick had just
resigned.[418] Gilbert seems to have died shortly afterwards: his successor in
the see of Limerick went to Theobald of Canterbury for consecration; but
his profession of obedience was the last ever made by an Irish bishop to an
English metropolitan.[419] In 1148 a synod held at Inispatrick by Archbishop
Gelasius of Armagh, with Malachi as papal legate, decided upon sending
Malachi himself to the Pope once more, charged with a formal request for
the two palls, in the name of the whole Irish Church. Malachi died on the
way, at Clairvaux;[420] but he left his commission in safe hands. Nine years
before, when on his first journey to Rome he had passed through the “bright
valley,” its abbot had recognized in him a kindred spirit.[421] From that
moment S. Bernard’s care of all the churches extended itself even to the far-
off Church of Ireland; and if it was not he who actually forwarded his dying
friend’s petition to Eugene III., there can be little doubt that Eugene’s
favourable reception of it was chiefly owing to his influence. The result was
the mission of John Paparo as special legate to Ireland. Stephen’s refusal to
let John pass through his dominions caused another year’s delay;[422] but at
the close of 1151 John made his way through Scotland safe to his
destination.[423] In March 1152 he held a synod at Kells, in which the
diocesan and provincial system of the Irish Church was organized upon
lines which remained unaltered till the sixteenth century. The episcopal sees
were definitely fixed, and grouped under not two but four archbishoprics.
The primacy of all Ireland, with metropolitical authority over Ulster and
Meath, was assigned to Armagh; Tuam became the metropolis of

Connaught, Cashel of Munster; while the rivalry of Armagh and Canterbury
for the spiritual obedience of the Ostmen was settled by the grant of a
fourth pallium, with metropolitical jurisdiction over the whole of Leinster,
to Bishop Gregory of Dublin himself.[424]

[414] For S. Malachi see his Life by S. Bernard, Vita S. Malach., c. 10
(Mabillon, vol. i. col. 667), and Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv., pp. 59 et
seq.

[415] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 14 (Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 671–672).

[416] Ib. c. 15 (col. 672).

[417] Ibid. Cf. Lanigan’s note, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 110, 111.

[418] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 16 (as above, col. 674). Lanigan, as above,
p. 112.

[419] Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 114, 115, 116.

[420] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., cc. 30, 31 (Mabillon, vol. i. cols. 687–692).
Lanigan, as above, pp. 129, 130.

[421] S. Bern., Vita S. Malach., c. 16 (as above, cols. 673, 674).

[422] See above, vol. i. p. 380.

[423] Four Masters, a. 1151 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1095).

[424] On the synod of Kells see Four Masters, a. 1152 (as above, p. 1101);
Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 212; and Lanigan, as above, pp. 139–151.

It is plain that Bernard and Eugene aimed at applying to Ireland’s
troubles the same remedy which they were at that very time applying to
those of England. They hoped to build up an united nation and a strong
national government on the basis of a free and united national Church. But
the foundation-stone of their work for Ireland was scarcely laid at Kells
when both the wise master-builders were called away. On the other hand,
their labours for England were crowned by the accession of the young
Angevin king, whose restless temper, before he had been nine months on
his throne, was already seeking for another sphere of activity still further
beyond the sea; overwhelming the newly-crowned, English-born Pope with
suggestions of work and offers of co-operation in every quarter of

Christendom,[425] and proposing to begin at once with the reduction of
Ireland to political, ecclesiastical and social order after the pattern of
England and Normandy.[426] Adrian IV. would have needed a wisdom and a
foresight greater than those of S. Bernard himself to enable him to resist the
attractions of such an offer. The so-called “Donation of Constantine”—a
donation which is now known to be forged, but whose genuineness no one
in Adrian’s day had ever thought of doubting—vested the ultimate
sovereignty of all islands in the Papacy.[427] The best and greatest Popes,
from S. Gregory down to Adrian himself, seem to have interpreted this as
making them in a special way responsible for the welfare of such outlying
portions of Christendom, and bound to leave no means untried for
providing them with a secure and orderly Christian government.[428] The
action of Alexander II. in sanctioning the Norman conquest of England was
a logical outcome of this principle, applied, however unwisely or unjustly,
to a particular case. But there was infinitely greater justification for
applying the same principle, in the same manner, to the case of Ireland.
Neither the labours of S. Malachi, nor the brief visit of John Paparo, nor the
stringent decrees passed at the synod of Kells, could suffice to reform the
inveterate evils of Ireland’s ecclesiastical system, the yet more inveterate
evils of her political system, or the intellectual and moral decay which was
the unavoidable consequence of both. On the Pope, according to the view of
the time, lay the responsibility of bringing order out of this chaos—a chaos
of whose very existence he had but just become fully conscious, and which
no doubt looked to him far more hopeless than it really was. In such
circumstances Henry’s proposal must have sounded to Adrian like an offer
to relieve him of a great weight of care—to cut at one stroke a knot which
he was powerless to untie—to clear a path for him through a jungle-growth
of difficulties which he himself saw no way to penetrate or overcome. John
of Salisbury set forth the plan at Rome, in Henry’s name, in the summer of
1155; he carried back a bull which satisfied all Henry’s demands. Adrian
bade the king go forth to his conquest “for the enlargement of the Church’s
borders, for the restraint of vice, the correction of morals and the planting of
virtue, the increase of the Christian religion, and whatsoever may tend to
God’s glory and the well-being of that land;”[429] and he sent with the bull a
gold ring, adorned with an emerald of great price, as a symbol of investiture
with the government of Ireland.[430]

[425] Pet. Blois, Ep. clxviii. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 116–118). See above, vol. i. p.
497.

[426] “Significâsti siquidem nobis, fili in Christo carissime, te Hiberniæ
insulam, ad subdendum illum populum legibus et vitiorum plantaria inde
exstirpanda, velle intrare; et de singulis domibus annuam unius denarii beato
Petro velle solvere pensionem; et jura ecclesiarum illius terræ illibata et integra
conservare.” Bull of Adrian IV. to Henry (“Laudabiliter”), in Gir. Cambr.
Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 317), etc.

[427] “Nam omnes insulæ, de jure antiquo, ex donatione Constantini qui eam
fundavit et dotavit, dicuntur ad Romanam ecclesiam pertinere.” Joh. Salisb.
Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

[428] “Sane Hiberniam et omnes insulas, quibus sol justitiæ Christus illuxit, et
quæ documenta fidei Christianæ ceperunt, ad jus beati Petri et sacrosanctæ
Romanæ ecclesiæ, quod tua etiam nobilitas recognoscit, non est dubium
pertinere. Unde tanto in eis libentius plantationem fidelem et germen gratum Deo
inserimus quanto id a nobis interno examine districtius prospicimus exigendum.”
Bull “Laudabiliter,” Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock, vol. v. p.
317).

[429] Bull “Laudabiliter,” Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. c. 5 (Dimock,
vol. v. pp. 317, 318); R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 300, 301; Pet. Blois, Ep.
ccxxxi. (Giles, vol. ii. pp. 201, 202); Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 19; etc. Its
authenticity has been fiercely disputed, but is now admitted by all Irish scholars.
See proofs in Lanigan, Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 165, 166, and
O’Callaghan’s edition of Macariæ Excidium (Irish Archæol. Soc.), pp. 242, 245,
where it is reprinted from Baronius’s copy, found by him in the Vatican archives.

[430] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

This strange crusade was postponed for the moment, as we have seen, in
deference to objections made by the Empress Matilda.[431] Adrian’s bull and
ring were stored up in the English chancery, and there, long after Adrian
was dead, they still lay,[432] unused and, as it seemed, forgotten amid an
ever-increasing throng of more urgent cares and labours which even Henry
found to be quite as much as he was capable of sustaining. At last, however,
the course of political events in Ireland itself took a turn which led almost
irresistibly to a revival of his long-forsaken project. Two years before
Henry’s accession Dermot Mac-Murrough, king of Leinster, had made a
raid upon the district of Breffny in Connaught, on the borders of Ulster and
Meath, and carried off Dervorgil, the wife of its chieftain Tighernan
O’Ruark.[433] From that hour Tighernan’s vengeance never slept. During the

next fourteen years, while Murtogh O’Lochlainn was striving for the
mastery first against the veteran Terence O’Conor and after Terence’s death
with his son Rory or Roderic, the swords of the men of Breffny were
thrown alternately into either scale, as their chieftain saw a hope of securing
the aid of either monarch to avenge him of his enemy.[434] In 1166 the crisis
came. Murtogh drew upon himself the wrath of his people by blinding the
king of Uladh, for whose safety he was pledged to the archbishop of
Armagh; Ulster, Meath, Leinster and Dublin rose against him all at once; he
was defeated and slain in a great battle at the Fews; the Ostmen of Dublin
acknowledged Roderic as their king, and all the princes of southern Ireland
followed their example. Dermot’s submission, however, was in vain; the
first act of the new monarch was to banish him from the realm.[435] The
Leinstermen forsook him at once, for their loyalty had long been alienated
by his harsh government and evil deeds.[436] Left alone to the justice of
Roderic and the vengeance of O’Ruark, he fled to Cork and thence took
ship to Bristol. Here he found shelter for a while in the priory of S.
Augustine, under the protection of its founder Robert Fitz-Harding;[437] at
the close of the year he made his way to Normandy, and thence, with some
difficulty, tracked Henry’s restless movements into the depths of Aquitaine,
[438]
where he at last laid his appeal for succour at the feet of the English
king.

[431] Rob. Torigni, a. 1155. See above, vol. i. p. 431.

[432] Joh. Salisb. Metalog., l. iv. c. 42 (Giles, vol. v. p. 206).

[433] Four Masters, a. 1152 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1103). Cf. Gir. Cambr.,
Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 225, 226), and the elaborately
romantic account in the Anglo-Norman Poem on the Conquest of Ireland, edited
by M. Francisque Michel, pp. 2–6. The two last-named authorities represent this
affair as the immediate cause of Dermot’s overthrow, and of all the consequent
troubles. Chronology shews this to be mere romance; yet, notwithstanding the
criticisms of some modern writers, there still seems to be some ground for the
earlier view which looked upon Dervorgil as a sort of Irish Helen. If we follow
carefully the thread of the story in the Four Masters from 1153 to 1166 we can
hardly avoid the conclusion that throughout those years the most important
personage in Irish politics, the man whose action turned the scale in nearly all the
ups and downs of fortune between Murtogh of Ulster and the kings of
Connaught, was the border-chieftain whose position made him the most
dangerous of foes and the most indispensable of allies—Tighernan O’Ruark; and
we can hardly help seeing in Dermot’s banishment the vengeance less of Roderic

O’Conor himself than of a supporter whom Roderic could not afford to leave
unsatisfied. On the other hand, it is perfectly true that the opportunity for
executing that vengeance was given by the disaffection of Dermot’s own subjects
—and, as usual, more especially by the rising of the Ostmen of Dublin.

[434] See Four Masters, a. 1153–1166 (as above, pp. 1107–1159).

[435] Four Masters, a. 1166 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1159–1163).

[436] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 225, 226).
For specimens of his misdeeds see Four Masters, a. 1141 (as above, p. 1065),
and Ann. Clonmacnoise, a. 1135 (ib. p. 1051, note f).

[437] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 12.

[438] “In remotis et transmarinis Aquitannicæ Galliæ partibus.” Gir. Cambr. as
above (p. 227). Henry was in Aquitaine from December 1166 till May 1167; see
Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 103–106. The chase which he characteristically led the
Irish king is amusingly described in the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 13:
“Bien est, seignurs, ke jo vus die
Cum Dermod va par Normandie;
Li rei Henri va dunc quere,
A munt, à val, avant, arere;
Tant ad mandé et enquis
Que trové ad li rei Henris,
A une cité l’ad trové,
Que seignur esteit clamé.”
On the last line the editor (notes, p. 168) remarks: “Seignur (seigñ, MS.)? Is it
not: of which he was called lord?” One feels tempted to suggest that it might be
meant for the name of the place; but if so, what can it be? Saintes?

At the crisis of his struggles with Thomas of Canterbury, with Louis of
France and with the rebel barons of Poitou, all that Henry could do was to
accept Dermot’s offer of homage and fealty,[439] promise to send him help
as soon as possible,[440] and furnish him with a letter authorizing any loyal
English, Norman, Welsh, Scottish or Angevin subjects who might be so
disposed to join the standard of the Irish prince, as of a faithful vassal of
their sovereign.[441] Another stay of some weeks in Bristol[442] convinced
Dermot that his best chance of aid lay beyond the Severn. Wales was still in
the main a Celtic land, ruled in primeval Celtic fashion by native princes
under little more than nominal subjection to the king of England. The
Norman conquest of Wales, so far as Wales could be said to have been
conquered at all, had been effected not by the royal power but by the daring
and prowess of individual adventurers who did, indeed, seek the royal
sanction for their tenure of the lands which they had won, but who were

scarcely more amenable to the royal authority than their Welsh neighbours,
with whom they not unfrequently made common cause against it. It was
Robert of Bellême’s connexion with Wales, through his border-earldom of
Shrewsbury and his brother’s lordship of Pembroke, which had made him
so formidable to Henry I.; it was Robert of Gloucester’s tenure of the great
Welsh lordship of Glamorgan, even more than his English honours, which
had enabled him to act as an independent potentate against Stephen.
Another border-chieftain who played some part in the civil war was Gilbert
de Clare, whose father had received a grant of Cardigan from Henry I. in
1107,[443] and upon whom Stephen in 1138 conferred the title of earl of
Pembroke.[444] His son Richard appears under the same title among the
witnesses to Stephen’s proclamation of the treaty of Wallingford in 1153;
[445]
the writers of the time, however, usually describe him as earl of
Striguil, a fortress which seems to have occupied the site whence the ruins
of Chepstow castle now look down upon the Wye. His earldom of
Pembroke, indeed, as one of Stephen’s fictitious creations, must have been
forfeited on Henry’s accession; but the lord of Striguil was still a mighty
man on the South-Welsh border when in the spring of 1167 he promised to
bring all the forces which he could muster to aid in restoring Dermot, who
in return offered him his daughter’s hand, together with the succession to
his kingdom.[446] A promise of the town of Wexford and its adjoining
territory won a like assurance of aid from two half-brothers in whose veins
the blood of Norman adventurers was mingled with the ancient royal blood
of South-Wales: Maurice Fitz-Gerald, a son of Gerald constable of
Pembroke by his marriage with Nest, aunt of the reigning prince Rees Ap-
Griffith, and Robert Fitz-Stephen, son of the same Nest by her second
husband, Stephen constable of Cardigan.[447] Another Pembrokeshire
knight, Richard Fitz-Godoberd, volunteered to accompany Dermot at once
with a little band of Norman-Welsh followers.[448] With these Dermot
returned to Ireland in August 1167;[449] he was defeated in a pitched battle
with Roderic O’Conor and Tighernan O’Ruark;[450] but in his own
hereditary principality of Kinsellagh[451] he was safe; there throughout the
winter he lay hid at Ferns,[452] and thence, when spring returned, he sent his
bard Maurice Regan to claim from his Welsh allies the fulfilment of their
promises.[453]

[439] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 1 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 227). Anglo-
Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 15.

[440] Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above.

[441] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 227, 228).

[442] Ib. c. 2 (p. 228). He was at Bristol “quinzein u un meins”; Anglo-Norm.
Poem (Michel), p. 16.

[443] Brut y Tywys., a. 1107 (Williams, p. 105).

[444] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 917.

[445] Rymer, Fœdera, vol. i. p. 18. Richard de Clare became known to later
generations by the nickname of “Strongbow.” Its use is convenient, as helping to
avoid confusion with the other Richards of the period; but it seems to have no
contemporary authority. See Mr. Dimock’s note, Gir. Cambr., vol. v. p. 228, note
4.

[446] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 228). Anglo-
Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 17.

[447] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 229). The circumstances of Fitz-Stephen’s
enlistment illustrate the condition of South-Wales at this time. He had been cast
into prison three years before by his cousin Rees, and at the moment of Dermot’s
arrival had just been released on condition of joining Rees in an attack upon
England. His Norman blood, however, was loyal enough to revolt against the
fulfilment of the condition; and Rees, who had warmly espoused Dermot’s
interest, was persuaded to allow its exchange for service in Ireland. Ibid.; cf.
Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 19, 20. For pedigree of Nest’s descendants see
Mr. Dimock’s edition of Gir. Cambr. Opp., vol. v. App. B. to pref., pp. c, ci.

[448] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 21.

[449] About August 1, according to Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2
(Dimock, vol. v. p. 229).

[450] Four Masters, a. 1167 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. pp. 1165–1167). Among the
slain they mention “the son of the king of Britain, who was the battle-prop of the
island of Britain, who had come across the sea in the army of Mac Murchadha.”
This can only mean a son or brother of Rees; but neither Gerald nor the Welsh
chronicles make any mention of such a person in Ireland.

[451] The modern county of Wexford, or rather the diocese of Ferns. The Four
Masters (as above, p. 1165) say that Dermot “returned from England with a force
of Galls, and he took the kingdom of Ui-Ceinnsealaigh.”

[452] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 2 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 230).

[453] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 21.

In the first days of May[454] Robert Fitz-Stephen landed at Bannow,
between Wexford and Waterford, with thirty picked knights of his own
immediate following, and a body of auxiliaries to the number of sixty men-
at-arms and three hundred archers.[455] With him came three of his
nephews, Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David[456] and Robert de Barri;[457]
and also a ruined knight called Hervey of Mountmorris, uncle of Richard de
Clare.[458] Next day an independent adventurer, Maurice de Prendergast,
arrived from Milford with ten more knights and a band of archers.[459]
Dermot himself came to meet them with some five hundred Irishmen. The
united force marched upon Wexford, and took it in two days;[460] they then
established their head-quarters at Ferns,[461] and thence made an expedition
into Ossory, whose chieftain was specially hostile to Dermot. In spite of
overwhelming odds, through all the difficulties of an unknown country full
of woods and marshes, and traps laid against them by their skilful foes, the
Norman-Welsh knights and archers made their way into the heart of Ossory;
and a great battle ended in the rout of the Irish and the bringing of two
hundred heads to Dermot’s feet in his camp on the banks of the Barrow.[462]
A successful raid upon Offaly was followed by one upon Glendalough, and
a third upon Ossory again,[463] till in the following year the state of affairs
in Leinster had become threatening enough to drive all the Irish princes and
the Ostmen of Dublin into a confederacy under Roderic O’Conor for the
expulsion of the intruders.[464] Dermot pledged himself to acknowledge
Roderic as monarch of Ireland, and was in his turn acknowledged by
Roderic as king of Leinster on condition that he should dismiss his foreign
allies.[465] The agreement was however scarcely made when Maurice Fitz-
Gerald landed at Wexford with some hundred and forty men;[466] these at
once joined Dermot in an expedition against Dublin, and harried the
surrounding country till the citizens were reduced to promise obedience.
[467]
Early in the next year Dermot’s son-in-law Donell O’Brien, king of
Limerick or Northern Munster, succeeded by the help of Robert Fitz-
Stephen in throwing off the authority of Roderick O’Conor.[468] Encouraged
by these successes, Dermot now began to aspire in his turn to the monarchy
of all Ireland;[469] but his auxiliaries were numerically insufficient; and the
one from whom he had expected most had as yet failed to appear at all.

[454] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 230). All the
later Irish historians, as well as Lord Lyttelton and Mr. Dimock (ib. margin) date
the arrival of Fitz-Stephen in May 1169. The reason apparently is that, as far as
Dermot and his English auxiliaries are concerned, the year 1168 is a blank in the
Four Masters, while under 1169 they say: “The fleet of the Flemings came from
England in the army of Mac Murchadha, i.e. Diarmaid, to contest the kingdom of
Leinster for him; they were seventy heroes clad in coats of mail.” But seeing that
in the following year, 1170, they for the first time mention Robert Fitz-Stephen,
and represent him as coming over with Richard of Striguil (O’Donovan, vol. ii.
pp. 1173–1175), it is by no means evident that the foregoing entry has any
reference to him. It may just as well apply to Maurice Fitz-Gerald, who certainly
followed him after an interval of some months at least. Gerald (as above, c. 2, p.
229) says that Fitz-Stephen and Fitz-Gerald both promised, in the summer of
1167, to join Dermot “cum zephyris et hirundine primâ.” Maurice undoubtedly
made a long delay; but there is not a word to shew that Robert did otherwise than
fulfil his engagement to the letter. Nay, Gerald pointedly introduces him (ib. c. 3,
p. 230) as “nec promissionis immemor nec fidei contemptor.” He also tells us (c.
2, ibid.) that Dermot had wintered at Ferns. Why then are we to assume that by
“wintered” he means “wintered, summered, and wintered again”? What could
Dermot possibly have been doing there for more than twenty months?

[455] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 3 (p. 230). For account of Fitz-Stephen himself
see ib. c. 26 (pp. 271, 272).

[456] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 22. On Meiler see Gir. Cambr. as
above, l. ii. c. 9 (pp. 324, 325); and for pedigree, Mr. Dimock’s App. B. to pref.
(ib. pp. c., ci.).

[457] Gir. Cambr. as above, l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 232). Cf. App. B. to
pref., ib. p. c.

[458] Gir. Cambr. as above, l. i. c. 3 (p. 230). See also l. ii. c. 11 (pp. 327,
328).

[459] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 3 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 232).

[460] Ibid. (pp. 232, 233). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 24, 25.

[461] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 25, 26.

[462] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 4 (p. 234). Cf. the long account in Anglo-Norm.
Poem (Michel), pp. 27–38.

[463] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 42–51.

[464] Roderic, in 1169, met the northern chieftains at Tara, thence marched to
Dublin, and afterwards proceeded into Leinster; and Tighernan O’Ruark, Dermot
king of Meath, and the Ostmen of Dublin “went to meet the men of Munster,
Leinster and Osraigh” [Ossory], “and they set nothing by the Flemings.” Four
Masters, a. 1169 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1173).

[465] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 10 (p. 244).

[466] Ten knights, thirty “arcarii” or mounted archers, and about a hundred
“sagittarii pedestres.” Ib. c. 11 (pp. 244, 245).

[467] Ibid. (p. 245).

[468] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 11 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 245). The
date, 1170, comes from the Four Masters (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1175), who
however do not mention Fitz-Stephen’s share in the matter.

[469] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 12 (p. 246).

The history of Richard of Striguil is far from clear. From the number of
troops which eventually accompanied him to Ireland it is evident that he
had been during these two years actively preparing for his expedition; and it
may even be that the extent of his preparations had drawn upon him the
suspicions of King Henry. We only know that, for some cause or other, he
was now a ruined man; his lands were forfeited to the Crown;[470] and he
seems to have lingered on, absorbed in a desperate effort to regain Henry’s
favour, and clinging to his lost home with a feeling that if he once turned
his back upon it, he would never be allowed to see it again. A letter from
Dermot, telling of the successes of his party in Leinster and renewing his
former offers, forced him into action.[471] He made a last appeal to the king,
intreating either for restoration of his lands or for the royal license to go and
repair his fortunes elsewhere. Henry ironically bade him go, and he went.
[472]
On S. Bartholomew’s eve, 1170, he landed at Waterford with twelve
hundred men;[473] next day he was joined by Raymond “the Fat,” a young
warrior whom he had sent over three months before[474] with ten knights
and seventy archers, and who with this small force had contrived to beat
back an assault of three thousand Irishmen of Decies and Ostmen of
Waterford upon his camp of wattle and thatch, hastily thrown up on the
rocky promontory of Dundonulf.[475] On August 25 Richard and Raymond
attacked Waterford; three assaults in one day carried both town and citadel;
[476]
seven hundred citizens were slaughtered,[477] and the officers of the
fortress, whose names tell of northern blood, were made prisoners.[478] A
few days later Richard was married at Waterford to Dermot’s daughter Eva.
[479]
He then joined his father-in-law in a circuitous march across the hills
and through Glendalough,[480] whereby they avoided a great host which

Roderic had gathered at Clondalkin to intercept them, and arrived in safety
on S. Matthew’s day beneath the walls of Dublin.[481] Dermot sent his bard
to demand the instant surrender of the town, with thirty hostages for its
fidelity. A dispute arose, probably between the Irish and Danish inhabitants,
as to the selection of the hostages;[482] Archbishop Laurence was
endeavouring to compose the difficulty,[483] and Hasculf Thorgils’ son, a
chieftain of northern blood who commanded the citadel, had actually
promised to surrender it on the morrow,[484] when a sudden attack made by
Raymond the Fat on one side and by a knight called Miles Cogan on the
other carried the town before the leaders of either party knew what had
happened.[485] A second rush won the citadel; Hasculf escaped by sea and
took refuge in the Orkneys;[486] Dublin was sacked,[487] and left throughout
the winter under the command of Miles Cogan,[488] while Richard of
Striguil was guarding Waterford against the men of Munster,[489] and
Dermot, from his old head-quarters at Ferns,[490] was making raid after raid
upon Meath and Breffny.[491]

[470] The cause of Richard’s disgrace seems to be nowhere stated, except by
William of Newburgh. He has (l. ii. c. 26; Howlett, vol. i. pp. 167, 168), as usual,
an independent version of the whole affair. According to him, Richard’s chief
motive for going to Ireland was to escape from his creditors, he being deep in
debt; he went in defiance of an express prohibition from Henry, and it was on
hearing of his victories—i.e. some time in the latter part of 1170—that Henry
confiscated his estates. Dugdale (Baronage, vol. i. p. 208) gives 1170 as the date
of the forfeiture, on the authority of a MS. in the Bodleian library. But this is
irreconcileable with the very circumstantial story of Gerald. Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 234, dates the forfeiture three years before Henry’s visit to
Ireland, i.e. 1168.

[471] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 12 (as above, pp. 246, 247).

[472] Ib. cc. 12, 13 (pp. 247, 248). Cf. Gerv. Cant. as above.

[473] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 16 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 254). Anglo-
Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 72. The latter gives the number of troops as fifteen
hundred; Gerald makes them two hundred knights and a thousand foot-men.

[474] So says Gerald, as above, c. 13 (p. 248); but Mr. Dimock (ib. note 2)
thinks this too early.

[475] Ibid. (pp. 248, 249). There is however a less heroic version of this affair
in the Anglo-Norman Poem (Michel), pp. 68–70. We are there told that Raymond
and his men had provided themselves with food by “lifting” all the cattle in the

neighbourhood and penning them within the camp. At the sound of arms these
creatures rushed out in a wild stampede, and it was this which put the assailants
to flight. On the site of Dundonulf see Mr. Dimock’s Glossary to Gir. Cambr.,
vol. v. p. 421.

[476] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 16 (ib. pp. 254, 255).

[477] Four Masters, a. 1170 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1177).

[478] Ragnald and “the two Sihtrics”; Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 255). The Four
Masters (as above) give to the commandant of the citadel—which Gerald calls
“Ragnald’s tower”—the name of Gillemaire. In the Anglo-Norm. Poem
(Michel), p. 72, we read that “les plus poanz de la cité” were Regenald and
“Smorch.”

[479] Gir. Cambr. as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 73. Four Masters,
a. 1170 (as above).

[480] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 17 (p. 256).

[481] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 75–78. Cf. Gir. Cambr. and Four
Masters as above. The latter say that “there was a challenge of battle between
them” (i.e. between Roderic and the foreigners) “for three days, until lightning
burned Ath-Cliath” [Dublin].

[482] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 79, 80.

[483] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 17 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 256).

[484] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 80. He is there called “Hesculf”; in p.
79, “Mac Turkil Esculf.” In the Four Masters, a. 1170 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p.
1177), he is “Asgall, son of Raghnall, son of Turcaill.” Gir. Cambr. (as above)
calls him simply “Hasculphus.”

[485] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 256, 257). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp.
80, 81.

[486] Four Masters, as above. Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 257).

[487] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 81, 82.

[488] Gir. Cambr. as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 82.

[489] “A victory was gained by the son of Cormac, grandson of Carthach, and
the people of Desmond, over the knights who were left to defend Port Lairge”
[i.e. Waterford]. Four Masters, as above. Earl Richard returned thither early in
October; Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 82.

[490] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 83.

[491] Four Masters, a. 1170 (as above, pp. 1177, 1179).

In vain did the Irish clergy meet in synod at Armagh and strive to avert
the wrath which seemed to have been revealed against their country by a
solemn decree for the liberation of the English slaves with whom, even yet,
the houses of the Irish chieftains were filled.[492] One sentence from an Irish
record of the next year may serve to illustrate the condition of the country:
“Seven predatory excursions were made by the Ui-Maine into Ormond
from Palm Sunday till Low Sunday.”[493] It made but little difference when
at Whitsuntide Dermot, “by whom a trembling sod was made of all
Ireland,” died at Ferns “of an insufferable and unknown disease—without a
will, without penance, without the Body of Christ, without unction, as his
evil deeds deserved.”[494] At that very moment a wiking fleet gathered from
all the lands where the old sea-rovers’ life still lingered—Norway, the
Hebrides, Orkney, Man—appeared in Dublin bay under the command of
Hasculf, the exiled leader of the Ostmen, and of a northern chief whose
desperate valour won him the title of “John the Furious”—in the English
speech of that day, John the Wode.[495] Something of the spirit of the old
northern sagas breathes again in the story of this, the last wiking-fight ever
fought upon the soil of the British isles. Bard and historian alike tell of the
mighty strokes dealt by the battle-axes of John and his comrades,[496] and
how they had almost hewed their way into Dublin once more, when a well-
timed sally of the besieged caught them at unawares in the rear;[497]—how
an Irish chief named Gillamocholmog, whom Miles Cogan had posted on a
neighbouring hill, chivalrously bidding him watch the course of the battle
and join the winning side, rushed down with his followers at the critical
moment and helped to complete the rout of the Ostmen;[498]—how John the
Wode fell by the hand of Miles Cogan;[499]—how Hasculf was taken
prisoner by Miles’s brother Richard and brought back to be reserved for
ransom, and how his hot wiking-blood spoke in words of defiance which
goaded his captors to strike off his head.[500] Fifteen hundred northmen fell
upon the field; five hundred more were drowned in trying to regain their
ships.[501] From the shores of Ireland, as from those of England, the last
northern fleet was driven away by Norman swords.

[492] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 18 (p. 258).

[493] Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185). The Ui-Maine were
a tribe in south-eastern Connaught.

[494] Ibid. (p. 1183). Cf. Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145). The
date, “circa Kalendas Maiæ,” is given by Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 20
(Dimock, vol. v. p. 263).

[495] “Duce Johanne agnomine the Wode,” Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 21 (p.
264). “Johan le Devé,” Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 108. It is there added
that, “solum les Yrreis,” he was a nephew of the king of “Norwiche,” i.e.
Norway. The Four Masters, a. 1171 (as above, p. 1185) describe him as “Eoan, a
Dane from the Orkney Islands.”

[496] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 116. Gir. Cambr. as above.

[497] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 111–114. Gir. Cambr. as above.

[498] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 109–111, 115.

[499] Ib. p. 117.

[500] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 117, 118. (On his captor cf. ib. p. 111).
Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 21 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 264, 265).

[501] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 116, 118. The date of this siege is
given by Gir. Cambr. (as above, p. 263) as “eâdem fere tempestate” (i.e. about
the time of Dermot’s death), “circa Pentecosten.” This would be at the beginning
of May. In the Poem it comes much later in the year. There seems however no
reason to upset Gerald’s arrangement of events. See Mr. Dimock’s remarks, Gir.
Cambr. as above, note 2.

The garrison of Dublin fought in truth even more desperately than their
assailants; for they were fighting for their all. A remonstrance addressed by
some of the Irish princes to the king of England against the aggressions of
his subjects[502] can hardly have been needed to open Henry’s eyes to the
danger gathering for him and his realm beyond the western sea. This little
band of adventurers, almost all bound together by the closest ties of
kindred,[503] were conquering Leinster neither for its native sovereign nor
for their own, but were setting up a new feudal state independent of all
royal control, under the leadership of a disgraced English baron. Such a
state, if suffered to grow unhindered, would soon be far more dangerous to
England than to Ireland, for it would be certain to play in every struggle of
the feudal principle against the royal authority in England the part which
the Ostmen had played of old in the struggles of the Danelaw. At the
beginning of the year 1171 therefore Henry issued an edict prohibiting all

further intermeddling of his subjects in Ireland, and bidding those who were
already there either return before Easter or consider themselves banished
for life.[504] Not a man went back; Richard of Striguil sent Raymond over to
Normandy with a written protest to the king, pleading that his conquests
had been undertaken with the royal sanction and that he was ready to place
them at the king’s disposal;[505] but the “Geraldines,” as the kindred of
Maurice Fitz-Gerald called themselves, seem to have at once accepted their
sentence of exile and resolved to hold by their swords alone the lands which
those swords had won.[506]

[502] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 234, 235.

[503] The close kindred of these Norman-Welsh settlers in Ireland is a very
remarkable feature of their settlement. Robert Fitz-Stephen and Maurice Fitz-
Gerald were half-brothers (Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 2, p. 229); the two Fitz-
Henrys, Raymond the Fat, Miles Fitz-David and Robert de Barri were their
nephews (ib. cc. 4, 13, and l. ii. c. 10, pp. 234, 248, 335); Richard of Striguil was
nephew to Hervey of Mountmorris (ib. l. i. c. 3, p. 230), who afterwards married
a daughter of Maurice Fitz-Gerald, while Maurice’s eldest son married Richard’s
daughter Alina (ib. l. ii. c. 4, p. 314); another daughter of Richard married his
constable Robert de Quincy (Anglo-Norm. Poem, Michel, p. 130); and his sister
Basilea became the wife of Raymond the Fat (ib. p. 145, and Gir. Cambr. as
above, l. ii. c. 3, pp. 312, 313).

[504] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 19 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 259).

[505] Ibid. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235. Raymond was back again in
time to share in the defence of Dublin against Roderic O’Conor—i.e. by the end
of May or beginning of June. Gerald says he had to seek the king in “Aquitanic
Gaul,” but this time the phrase cannot be taken literally. Eyton’s Itinerary shews
plainly that throughout 1171 Henry never was further south than the Norman, or,
at the utmost, the Breton border.

[506] This seems to be the key-note of a speech which Gerald puts into
Maurice’s mouth; Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 23 (as above, pp. 266, 267).

The hostility of the Ostmen had apparently ended with Hasculf’s defeat;
thenceforth they seem to have made common cause with the new-comers in
whom they were perhaps already beginning to recognize the stirrings of
kindred blood. But, on the other hand, the position of Earl Richard and his
comrades had been seriously weakened by Dermot’s death. The king of
Leinster’s devise of his kingdom to his son-in-law was, like the grants

which he had made to the Geraldines and like his own homage to King
Henry, void in Irish law. In Irish eyes his death removed the last shadow of
excuse for the presence of the strangers on Irish soil; their allies rapidly fell
away;[507] and by midsummer the whole country rose against them as one
man. Roderic O’Conor mustered the forces of the north; Archbishop
Laurence of Dublin, whose family occupied an influential position in
Leinster, called up the tribes of the south; while a squadron of thirty ships
was hired from Jarl Godred of Man.[508] The aim of the expedition was to
blockade Dublin, whither Earl Richard had now returned, and where almost
all the leaders of the invasion, except Robert Fitz-Stephen and Hervey of
Mountmorris, were now gathered together. The whole Irish land-force
amounted to sixty thousand men; half of these were under the immediate
command of Roderic, encamped at Castle-Knock;[509] Mac-Dunlevy, the
chieftain of Uladh, planted his banner on the old battle-field of Clontarf;
[510]
Donell O’Brien, the king of North Munster, posted himself at
Kilmainham; and Murtogh Mac-Murrough, a brother of Dermot, whom
Roderic had set up as king of Leinster in 1167, took up his position at
Dalkey.[511] To these were added, for the northern division, the men of
Breffny and of East Meath under Tighernan O’Ruark, those of Oiriel or
southern Ulster under Murtogh O’Carroll,[512] and those of West Meath
under Murtogh O’Melaghlin; while the archbishop’s call had brought up the
whole strength of Leinster except the men of Wexford and Kinsellagh;[513]
and even these, as the sequel proved, were preparing to fight the same battle
on other ground.

[507] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 83.

[508] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 22, 24 (pp. 265, 266, 269). This is the
archbishop afterwards canonized as S. Laurence O’Toole.

[509] Cf. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 84, with Gerald’s reckoning of
Roderic’s own forces at thirty thousand. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock,
vol. v. p. 268).

[510] “A Clontarf ficha sa banere.” Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above.

[511] Ibid.

[512] Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185). Gir. Cambr.
Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 269).

[513] Gir. Cambr. as above.

For nearly two months[514] the English knights were thus blockaded in
Dublin. Their sole hope of relief was in Robert Fitz-Stephen, who had been
left in command at Wexford. They were all but starving when Donell
Kavanagh, a half-brother of Eva Mac-Murrough and a devoted adherent of
her husband, slipped into the city with tidings that Wexford had risen;
Robert Fitz-Stephen was blockaded in the little fort of Carrick by the
townsfolk and the men of Kinsellagh, to the number of three thousand;
unless he could be succoured within three days, all would be over with him
and his men.[515] Earl Richard at once called a council of war. It comprised
nearly all the leaders of the English and Welsh forces in Ireland:—Richard
of Striguil himself; Maurice Fitz-Gerald with three of his gallant nephews,
Meiler Fitz-Henry, Miles Fitz-David and Raymond the Fat; Miles Cogan,
the captor of Dublin and its chief defender in the recent siege; Maurice de
Prendergast,[516] who two years before had thrown up the adventure and
gone home in disgust at the faithlessness of his allies,[517] but had returned,
it seems, in Earl Richard’s train, and was yet to leave, alone of all the
invading band, an honoured memory among the Irish people;[518] and some
fourteen others.[519] They decided upon sending Maurice de Prendergast
and Archbishop Laurence to Roderic with an offer of surrender on condition
that Richard of Striguil should hold the kingdom of Leinster under Roderic
as overlord. Roderic rejected the proposal with scorn; the knights might
hold what the earlier pirates had held—Dublin, Waterford and Wexford; not
another rood of Irish land should be granted to the earl and his company;
and if they refused these terms, Dublin should be stormed on the morrow.
[520]
That afternoon the little garrison—scarce six hundred in all[521]—
sallied forth and surprized Roderic’s camp while he and his men were
bathing; Roderic himself escaped with great difficulty; fifteen hundred
Irishmen were slain, many of them perishing in the water; while at sunset
the victors returned, after a long pursuit, with scarcely a man missing, and
laden with provisions enough to supply all Dublin for a year.[522] The rest of
the besieging army dispersed at once, and the very next morning Earl
Richard was free to set out for the relief of Robert Fitz-Stephen.[523]

[514] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 22 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 266). This
would bring the beginning of the siege to Midsummer at latest, for it was
certainly over by the middle of August. The Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan,
vol. ii. p. 1185) make it last only a fortnight.

[515] Gir. Cambr. as above. The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 85, 86,
gives a very hasty and confused sketch of this Wexford affair.

[516] Earl Richard, Meiler, the two Mileses and Maurice Prendergast are
mentioned in the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 86, 87. Raymond is named
by Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 22 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 266), as “a curiâ jam
reversus”; his presence also appears later in the Poem. Gerald alone mentions the
presence of Maurice Fitz-Gerald, whom the Poem never names throughout the
siege; while Gerald never names Maurice de Prendergast. Is it possible that he
has transferred to his own uncle the exploits of his namesake? But if so, where
can Fitz-Gerald have been?

[517] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 51–67.

[518] Ib. pp. 97–103.

[519] The Poem (as above), p. 87, reckons them at twenty in all, and names
four besides those already mentioned, viz., Robert de Quincy, Walter de
Riddlesford, Richard de Marreis and Walter Bluet.

[520] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 87–90.

[521] The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 90, 91, describes the force as
composed of three divisions, each consisting of forty knights, sixty archers and a
hundred “serjanz.” Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 24 (p. 268), makes the three bands of
knights contain respectively twenty, thirty and forty, each accompanied by as
many archers and citizens as could be spared from guarding the walls.

[522] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 24 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 268, 269).
Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 90–94. Cf. the brief account in Four Masters,
a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1185).

[523] Gir. Cambr. as above (pp. 269, 270). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p.
95.

He was however already too late. Three thousand men of Wexford and
Kinsellagh, finding that they could make no impression by fair means upon
Robert Fitz-Stephen shut up in the fort of Carrick with five knights and a
handful of archers, at length had recourse to fraud. Two bishops and some
monks were made to stand under the walls of the fort and swear upon relics
brought for the purpose that Dublin was taken, the earl and his comrades
slain, and Roderic on the march to Wexford at the head of his victorious

host. On a promise of liberty to escape to Wales[524] Robert in his despair
surrendered, only to see his little band of humbler followers slaughtered to a
man, and himself and his five knights cast into chains. The men of Wexford
then fired their town and took refuge with their captives on the
neighbouring island of Beg-Erin,[525] whence they sent word to Richard of
Striguil that if he dared to approach them he should immediately receive the
heads of his six friends.[526] Notwithstanding this disaster at Wexford, and
the failure of a plot to entrap the chief of Ossory—a well-deserved failure,
due to the loyalty of Maurice de Prendergast[527]—the invaders were
rapidly gaining ground. The king of North Munster, who was married to
Eva’s sister, again forsook Roderic and made alliance with his English
brother-in-law;[528] an attempt made by Tighernan O’Ruark to renew the
siege of Dublin ended in failure;[529] and at last Murtogh of Kinsellagh was
reduced to make a surrender of his principality into Richard’s hands and
accept a re-grant of it from him as overlord, while Donell Kavanagh was
invested on like terms with the remaining portion of Leinster.[530]

[524] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 25 (pp. 270, 271).

[525] Ibid. (p. 271). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 85, 97.

[526] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 28 (p. 273).

[527] See the story in Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 97–103.

[528] Ib. pp. 97, 98.

[529] Four Masters, a. 1171 (as above, pp. 1185–1187). Gir. Cambr. as above,
c. 29 (p. 274).

[530] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 103.

The earl’s triumphs, however, met with an abrupt check from over sea.
His uncle Hervey of Mountmorris, who had gone to plead his cause with
the king after the failure of Raymond’s mission, returned to Waterford[531]
with tidings that Henry himself was on his way to Ireland and required the
self-styled earl of Leinster to go and speak with him without delay. Richard
hurried over to Wales,[532] met Henry on the border,[533] and was forgiven
on condition that he should surrender Dublin and the other coast towns

absolutely into the king’s hands and do him homage and fealty for the rest
of Leinster;[534] he then accompanied Henry into Pembrokeshire;[535] where
the royal fleet was assembling in Milford Haven. It consisted of four
hundred ships,[536] carrying a force of about four thousand men, of whom
some five hundred were knights and the rest archers, mounted and
unmounted.[537] The king embarked on the evening of Saturday, October
16, and landed next day at Croch, eight miles from Waterford.[538] On the
morrow, S. Luke’s day, he entered the town of Waterford;[539] there he was
met by his seneschal William Fitz-Aldhelm, his constable Humfrey de
Bohun, Hugh de Lacy, Robert Fitz-Bernard, and some other officers of his
household whom he had sent over to prepare for his coming.[540] The Irish
of the district and the Ostmen of the town, in the person of their chieftain
Ragnald, made submission to him as their sovereign;[541] while Richard of
Striguil formally surrendered the place into the king’s hands and did
homage to him for the earldom of Leinster.[542] The men of Wexford now,
according to an agreement which they had made with Henry while he was
waiting for a wind at Pembroke,[543] brought their captive Robert Fitz-
Stephen to his sovereign’s feet, to be by him dealt with as a rebel and a
traitor. Henry loaded him with reproaches and imprisoned him afresh, but
his anger was more assumed than real, and the captive was soon released.
[544]
The submission of the English adventurers was followed by that of the
Irish princes. Dermot MacCarthy, king of Cork or South Munster, was the
first of them who came to Henry’s feet at Waterford, swore him fealty, gave
hostages and promised tribute.[545] On November 1[546] Henry advanced to
Lismore, and thence, two days later, to Cashel, where at the passage of the
Suir he was met by the king of Limerick or of Northern Munster, Donell
O’Brien, with offers of tribute and obedience. The lesser chieftains of
southern Ireland followed the example of the two kings; in three weeks
from his arrival all Munster was at his feet, and its coast-towns, Wexford,
Waterford, Limerick and Cork, were all in the custody of his own officers.
[547]
At Martinmas he reached Dublin;[548] before Christmas he received
hostages from all the princes of Leinster and Meath, from Tighernan
O’Ruark of Breffny, from O’Carroll of Oiriel, and from the king of Uladh
or eastern Ulster;[549] his new vassals built him a dwelling of wattle or

wicker-work, after the manner of their country, outside the walls of Dublin,
and there in their midst he held his Christmas court.[550]

[531] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 28 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 273). Hervey
must have gone before Midsummer; he was clearly not in Dublin during the
second siege, and returned shortly after its conclusion.

[532] Ibid. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 105, 106.

[533] At Newnham in Gloucestershire, according to Gerald (as above). The
Anglo-Norm. Poem (p. 106), however, says they met at Pembroke. This would
make a difference of at least ten days in the date. From the account of Henry’s
movements in the Brut y Tywys., a. 1171 (William, pp. 211–213), it seems that he
crossed the border about September 8 and reached Pembroke on September 20.

[534] Gir. Cambr. as above. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 26 (Howlett, vol. i. pp.
168, 169).

[535] Brut y Tywys., a. 1171 (Williams, p. 215).

[536] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 25; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29;
Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235. The Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol.
ii. p. 1187), and Ann. Loch. Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145), give the
number as two hundred and forty.

[537] Gerald (Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 30, Dimock, vol. v. p. 275) reckons five
hundred knights, with “arcariis [var. satellitibus equestribus] quoque et sagittariis
multis.” The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 123, makes the knights four
hundred, and a few lines later sums up the whole force as “quatre mil Engleis.”
Mr. W. Lynch (View of Legal Inst. in Ireland under Hen. II., p. 2) argues from the
payments for arms, provisions, shipping, etc. recorded in the Pipe-Rolls for 1171,
that the army must have numerically “far exceeded the force described in our
printed historians.” He gives a few details of these payments, extracted from the
Pipe-Roll in question (17 Hen. II., a. 1171); some more, from this and the next
year’s roll, maybe seen in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 161, 163. The host was no
doubt composed almost wholly of English tenants-in-chivalry; but whatever may
have been its numbers, there was a large proportion of these tenants who had
nothing to do with it except by paying its expenses next year with a great
scutage. See in Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. pp. 629–632, the extracts from Pipe
Roll 18 Hen. II. “de scutagio militum qui nec abierunt in Hyberniam nec
denarios” (in some cases “nec milites nec denarios”) “illuc miserunt.”

[538] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 25; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 29.
R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 348, makes October 16 the day of Henry’s arrival in
Ireland; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 235, makes it “about S. Calixtus’s day”
(October 16 would be two days after). Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 30
(Dimock, vol. v. p. 275) makes him reach Waterford “circa kalendas Novembris,
die videlicet S. Lucæ.” The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel, p. 123) turns this into
“à la Tusseinz”; the Four Masters, a. 1171 (O’Donovan, vol. ii. p. 1187) record

his coming without any date at all; and the Brut y Tywys. a. 1171 (Williams, p.
217), absurdly says he sailed on Sunday, November 16. The Anglo-Norman poet
seems to have taken Croch—“à la Croiz” as he calls it—for the place of
embarkation.

[539] Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden and Gir. Cambr. as above.

[540] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel),
p. 124.

[541] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 30.

[542] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 124.

[543] See the curious story of their envoy’s arrival and reception at Pembroke,
ib. pp. 119–123.

[544] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. cc. 31, 32 (Dimock, vol. v. pp. 276,
277, 278). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 125, 126.

[545] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 31 (p. 277).

[546] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 30, says he stayed at Waterford fifteen
days.

[547] Gir. Cambr. as above, cc. 31, 32 (pp. 277, 278). He adds that Henry
returned to Waterford, where he released Robert Fitz-Stephen, and thence
proceeded to Dublin. The Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 126, 127, places this
progress through Cashel and Lismore in inverse order, after Henry’s first visit to
Dublin, and says nothing of a second visit to Waterford. Its account is however
much less circumstantial than Gerald’s. The Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden only
name two places where Henry stayed—Waterford and Dublin; and as they both
say he reached the latter at Martinmas, while Roger says he left Waterford when
he had been there a fortnight (i.e. on November 1), Gerald’s story fills up the
interval very well.

[548] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 28. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 32.

[549] Gerald (as above, c. 33, p. 278) enumerates the princes who submitted at
Dublin as follows: “Machelanus Ophelan [O’Phelan], Machtalewi, Otuetheli
[O’Toole], Gillemoholmoch [Gillamocholmog of Fingal by Dublin—see above,
p. 106], Ocathesi [O’Casey], Ocaruel Urielensis [O’Carroll of Oiriel], et
Ororicius Medensis [O’Ruark]”. He then relates the half-submission of Roderic
of Connaught (of which more later), and adds: “sic itaque, præter solos
Ultonienses, subditi per se singuli.” (Ib. p. 279.) He need not however have
excepted the Ulstermen; for the Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1171 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 145)
—copying, it seems, the old Annals of Ulster (see Four Masters, O’Donovan,
vol. ii. p. 1187, note c, and O’Kelly’s note to Lynch’s Cambr. Evers., vol. ii. p.
472, note d)—say that Henry while at Dublin received hostages from “Leinster,
Meath, Breffny, Oiriel and Uladh.” This leaves only Connaught and Aileach
unsubdued. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 235) and the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs, vol.
i. p. 25) lump all these submissions together, and the latter seems to place them

all, as well as the submission of the bishops, during Henry’s stay in Waterford.
Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 30) not only does the same still more distinctly,
but he does worse; he places the submission of the bishops first, and then says
that the lay princes submitted “exemplo clericorum.” It is he, not Gerald or any
one else, who is responsible for this misrepresentation, which the champions of
the Irish Church have been justly denouncing ever since Dr. Lynch’s time.

[550] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 28, 29. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p.
32. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 236. Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 33
(Dimock, vol. v. p. 279).

Early in November two royal chaplains had been despatched to summon
the Irish bishops to a council and claim their submission.[551] We hear not a
word of Pope Adrian’s bull; but we can hardly doubt that its existence and
its contents were in some way or other certified to the Irish prelates before,
in response to the royal mandate, they met in council at Cashel in the first
weeks of 1172.[552] The archbishop of Armagh absented himself on the plea
of extreme age and infirmity;[553] all his episcopal brethren, however, made
full submission to Henry, pledged themselves to conform in all things to the
pattern of the English Church,[554] gave written promises to support the
English king and his heirs as lawful sovereigns of Ireland,[555] and joined
with him in sending to Rome a report of his proceedings and their own.[556]

[551] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs) vol. i. p. 28. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 31.
The messengers were Nicolas, a chaplain of the king, and Ralf archdeacon of
Landaff. They were sent out “circa festum S. Leonardi” (November 6). Gesta
Hen. as above.

[552] The Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden as above, both place this council
before Christmas 1171. Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 35 (p. 281), and R. Diceto
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351, date it 1172. It seems better to follow them, for though
Gerald is certainly no chronologist, he is the only writer who gives a detailed and
rational account of this synod; and the summary given by R. Diceto also shews a
fair knowledge of the subject, though he makes the synod meet at Lismore
instead of Cashel.

[553] Gir. Cambr. as above (p. 283). He adds that the primate afterwards went
to Dublin and there submitted to Henry; but see Dr. Lanigan’s comment, Eccles.
Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 205, 206.

[554] Gir. Cambr. as above. R. Diceto (as above), pp. 350, 351.

[555] They sent him “litteras suas in modum cartæ extra sigillum pendentes:”
Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 26. Cf. Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 30, 31. This is

however placed by both writers some time before the council. See above, p. 114,
note 6{549}.

[556] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 31, says that Henry sent copies of the
bishops’ letters of submission to Rome. Dr. Lanigan (Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol.
iv. pp. 217, 218) objects that this can only have been done some time later, as
Henry’s communications were cut off by the weather. But this is not borne out
either by the words of R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 350) or by those of Gerald
(Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 36, Dimock, vol. v. p. 284). They both say distinctly
that a persistent contrary wind hindered all communication from England to
Ireland. For communication in the opposite direction such a wind would surely
be most favourable. Moreover, it is quite certain that the Pope did, some time
before September 20, 1172, receive reports of Henry’s proceedings in Ireland
both from Henry himself and from the Irish bishops, for he says so in three
letters—one addressed to Henry, another to the kings and bishops of Ireland, and
the third to the legate, Christian bishop of Lismore—all dated Tusculum,
September 20, and all printed in Hearne’s Liber Niger, vol. i. pp. 42–48, as well
as in the notes to Macariæ Excidium (O’Callaghan), pp. 255–262.

In all Ireland the king of Connaught was now the only ruler, spiritual or
temporal, who had not submitted to Henry.[557] Trusting to the inaccessible
nature of his country,[558] Roderic had at first refused all dealings with the
invader, declaring that he himself was the sole rightful monarch of Ireland.
[559]
It seems however that he afterwards came to a meeting with William
Fitz-Aldhelm and Hugh de Lacy by the banks of the Shannon, on the
frontier of Connaught and Meath, and there promised tribute and fealty like
his fellow-kings.[560] The promise was however worthless until confirmed
by his personal homage; and this Henry soon perceived was only to be
extorted at the sword’s point. The impossibility of fighting to any advantage
in the wet Irish winter compelled him to postpone the attempt until the
spring;[561] and when spring came he found that his intended campaign
must be abandoned altogether. From the day when he left Milford he had
received not one word of tidings from any part of his dominions.[562] This
total isolation, welcome at first as a relief from the load of cares which
indeed he had purposely left behind him,[563] became at the end of nineteen
weeks a source of almost unbearable anxiety. On March 1 he removed from
Dublin to Wexford;[564] there for nearly a month he remained eagerly
watching for a ship from England; none came until after Mid-Lent,[565] and
then it was laden with such ill news that he could only take such hasty
measures as were possible at the moment for maintaining his hold upon
Ireland, and prepare to hurry out of it as soon as the wind would carry him.

[566]
Richard of Striguil was suffered to remain at Kildare[567] as earl of
Leinster; the general direction of government and administration throughout
the king’s Irish domains was intrusted to Hugh de Lacy,[568] who had
already received a grant of Meath in fee,[569] and who was also left in
command of the citadel of Dublin,[570] with a garrison of twenty knights,
among whom were Maurice Fitz-Gerald[571] and Robert Fitz-Stephen.[572]
The grants of territory made by Dermot to the half-brothers were of course
annulled; Waterford and Wexford were both garrisoned and placed in
charge of an officer appointed by the king;[573] and in each of these towns a
fortress was either erected or repaired by his orders.[574]

[557] Perhaps we should add the chief of Aileach; see above, p. 114, note
6{549}.

[558] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 348.

[559] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 25, 26. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
235.

[560] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 33 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 279). See Dr.
Lanigan’s refutation of Gerald’s comment on the legal effect of this transaction,
Eccles. Hist. Ireland, vol. iv. pp. 203, 204.

[561] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 26, 29.

[562] Gir. Cambr. as above, c. 36 (p. 284). R. Diceto as above, p. 350.

[563] See Gervase of Canterbury’s account of his motives for going to Ireland
(Stubbs, vol. i. p. 235).

[564] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 29; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 33.

[565] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 37 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 285).

[566] Ib. c. 37 (pp. 285, 286). In the Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 128,
129, Henry is made to receive the bad news before leaving Dublin, which is
obviously too soon. Cf. Gesta Hen. as above, and Rog. Howden (as above), pp.
33, 34.

[567] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 132.

[568] “Constituit eum justitiarium Hyberniæ.” Rog. Howden (as above), p. 34.

[569] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 30. Gir. Cambr. (as above), c. 38 (p.
286). Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 130. See the charter of donation in
Lyttelton, Hen. II., vol. iv. p. 295.

[570] Gir. Cambr., Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. Anglo-Norm.
Poem (Michel), p. 129.

[571] Gir. Cambr. as above.

[572] Anglo-Norm. Poem, as above—adding Meiler Fitz-Henry and Miles
Fitz-David.

[573] Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden and Gir. Cambr. as above.

[574] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. If we may believe the Anglo-
Norm. Poem (Michel, p. 130) Henry furthermore made a grant of Ulster to John
de Courcy—“si à force la peust conquere.”

A better mode of securing his authority in Dublin was probably suggested
to him by the ravages which war and famine had made among its
population. Eight years before he had taken the burghers of Bristol, so long
the medium of trading intercourse between England and Ireland, under his
especial patronage and protection.[575] He now granted to them the city of
Dublin, to colonize and to hold of him and his heirs by the same free
customs which they enjoyed in their own town of Bristol.[576] It is plain that
Henry was already aiming at something far other than a mere military
conquest of Ireland; and the long and varied list of English names, from all
parts of the country, which is found in a roll of the Dublin citizens only a
few years later,[577] shews how willingly his plans were taken up, not only
at Bristol but throughout his realm, by the class to which he chiefly and
rightly trusted for aid in their execution. Unluckily, they were scarcely
formed when he was obliged to leave their developement to other hands;
and the consequence was a half success which proved in the end to be far
worse than total failure. On Easter night[578] he sailed from Wexford;[579]
next day he landed at Portfinnan, hard by S. David’s;[580] before the octave
was out he had hurried through South Wales to Newport;[581] in a few days
more he was at Portsmouth;[582] and before Rogation-tide he was once more
in Normandy, ready to face the bursting of a storm whose consequences
were to overshadow all his remaining years and to preclude all chance of
his return to complete his conquest of Ireland.

[575] In January 1164 “he granted a short charter of privileges to the burghers
of Bristol, whom as sovereign lord he calls his burgesses, although they were
then under the lordship of the earl of Gloucester. This charter contains only an

exemption from toll and passage and other customary payments for themselves
and their goods through the king’s own lands, with a confirmation of their
existing privileges and liberties” (Seyer, Mem. of Bristol, vol. i. p. 494, with a
reference to “Charters of Bristol, No. 1”).

[576] Charter printed in Gilbert, Hist. and Munic. Documents of Ireland, p. 1.

[577] Ib. p. 3 et seq.

[578] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351, says at sunset on Easter day (April
16); the Ann. Loch Cé, a. 1172 (Hennessy, vol. i. p. 147), say on Easter day
“after Mass.” Gerald, Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 38 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 286), the
Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 30, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34, say
he sailed early on the Monday morning, the two latter adding a reason—he
would not travel on the feast-day, though he had suffered his household to do so.
Most probably he sailed at midnight, as seems to have been often done. The Brut
y Tywys. a. 1172 (Williams, p. 217), makes him reach Pembroke on Good Friday,
but this is impossible.

[579] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 30. Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 131. The
household had sailed from Croch to Milford; ibid. Cf. Rog. Howden as above, p.
34.

[580] Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
351. The name of the place, Portfinnan, is given only in the Anglo-Norm. Poem
(as above).

[581] See the itinerary in Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. cc. 38–40
(Dimock, vol. v. pp. 286–291), compared with Brut y Tywys. a. 1172 (Williams,
pp. 217–219).

[582] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 30. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34.
It is Porchester in R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 351.

CHAPTER IV.
HENRY AND THE BARONS.
1166–1175.

For the last eight years Henry had been literally, throughout his English
realm, over all persons and all causes supreme. From the hour of Thomas’s
flight, not a hand, not a voice was lifted to oppose or to question his will;
England lay passive before him; the time seemed to have come when he
might work out at leisure and without fear of check his long-cherished plans
of legal, judicial and administrative reform. In the execution of those plans,
however, he was seriously hampered by the indirect consequences of the
ecclesiastical quarrel. One of these was his own prolonged absence from
England, which was made necessary by the hostility of France, and which
compelled him to be content with setting his reforms in operation and then
leave their working to other hands and other heads, without the power of
superintending it and watching its effects with his own eyes, during nearly
six years. He had now to learn that the enemy with whom he had been
striving throughout those years was after all not the most serious obstacle in
his way;—that the most threatening danger to his scheme of government
still lay, as it had lain at his accession, in that temper of the baronage which
it had been his first kingly task to bring under subjection. The victory which
he had gained over Hugh Bigod in 1156 was real, but it was not final. The
spirit of feudal insubordination was checked, not crushed; it was only
waiting an opportunity to lift its head once more; and with the strife that
raged around S. Thomas of Canterbury the opportunity came.
Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of
necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main
thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy
which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own
hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the

people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of
closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and
counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other
hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the
support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and
had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to
have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most
powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side
of the ecclesiastical movement—its introduction of a separate system of law
and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform
regal administration—which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its
anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of
men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the
nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his
natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the
council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the
barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that
he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the
Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely
knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might
strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while
Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they
never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of
Henry II.[583]

[583] “The government party was made up of two elements—the higher order
of the Clergy, who joined the king out of cowardice, having more at stake than
they could make up their minds to lose; and the higher order of the Laity, who in
this instance sided with the king against the Church, that when they had removed
this obstacle they might afterwards fight him single-handed.” (R. H. Froude,
Remains, vol. iv. p. 30). Which is just what Arnulf of Lisieux saw from the first
(Ep. clxii., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 309, 310), and what Henry learned to
his cost in 1173.

As yet, however, there was no token of the strife to come. In February
1166, two years after the publication of the Constitutions of Clarendon,
Henry assembled another council at the same place and thence issued an
ordinance[584] for carrying out a reform in the method of bringing to justice

criminals in general, similar to that which he had in the Constitutions
sought to apply to criminals of one particular class. By the Assize of
Clarendon it was enacted that the king’s justices and the sheriffs should in
every shire throughout the kingdom make inquiry concerning all crimes
therein committed “since our lord the king was king.”[585] The method of
their investigations was that of inquest by sworn recognitors chosen from
among the “lawful men” of each hundred and township, and bound by oath
to speak the truth according to their knowledge of the fact in question. This
mode of legal inquiry had been introduced into England by William the
Conqueror for fiscal purposes, such as the taking of the Domesday survey,
and its employment for similar objects was continued by his successors.
Henry II. had in the early years of his reign applied the same principle to
the uses of civil litigation by an ordinance known as the “Great Assize,”
whereby disputes concerning the possession of land might, if the litigants
chose, be settled before the justices of the king’s court by the unanimous
oath of twelve lawful knights chosen according to a prescribed form from
among those dwelling in the district where the land lay, and therefore
competent to swear to the truth or falsehood of the claim.[586] This
proceeding seems to be assumed as already in use by the ninth Constitution
of Clarendon, which ordains its application to disputes concerning Church
lands.[587] The Assize of Clarendon aimed at bringing criminals to justice
by the help of the same machinery. It decreed that in every hundred of every
shire inquest should be made by means of twelve lawful men of the hundred
and four from each township, who should be sworn to denounce every man
known in their district as a robber, thief or murderer, or a harbourer of such;
on their presentment the accused persons were to be arrested by the sheriff,
and kept by him in safe custody till they could be brought before the
itinerant justices, to undergo the ordeal of water and receive legal
punishment according to its results.[588] The inquest was to be taken and the
session of the justices held in full shire-court; no personal privileges of any
kind were to exempt any qualified member of the court from his duty of
attendance and of service on the jury of recognitors if required;[589] and no
territorial franchise or private jurisdiction, whether of chartered town or
feudal “honour,” was to shelter a criminal thus accused from the pursuit of
the sheriffs on the authority of the justices.[590]

[584] On the date see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pp. lix.–
lxi. The Assize is printed in an appendix to same preface, pp. cxlix–cliv, and in
Select Charters, pp. 143–146.

[585] Assize of Clarendon, c. 1 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 143).

[586] Glanville, De legibus Angliæ, l. ii. c. 7 (ib. p. 161). Cf. Stubbs, Constit.
Hist., vol. i. p. 616.

[587] Constit. Clar. c. 9 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 139). See above, pp. 26,
27.

[588] Assize Clar. cc. 1, 2, 4, 6 (as above, pp. 143, 144).

[589] Ib. c. 8 (p. 144).

[590] Ib. cc. 9–11 (as above).

As was the case with most of Henry’s reforms, none of the methods of
procedure adopted in this Assize were new inventions. Not only had the
inquest by sworn recognitors been in use for civil purposes ever since the
Norman conquest; it may even be that the germ of a jury of presentment in
criminal cases, which in its modern shape appears for the first time in the
Assize of Clarendon, is to be traced yet further back, to an ordinance of
Æthelred II., whereby the twelve senior thegns in every wapentake were
made to swear that they would “accuse no innocent man nor conceal any
guilty one.”[591] The mission of itinerant justices—derived in principle from
the early days of English kingship, when the sovereign himself
perambulated his whole realm, hearing and deciding whatever cause came
before him as he passed along—had been employed by Henry I., and
revived by Henry II. immediately after his accession. A visitation of the
greater part of England had been made by two of the chief officers of the
Curia Regis in the first year of his reign, and again in the second; another
circuit seems to have been made in 1159 by William Fitz-John; and in 1163
Alan de Neville held pleas of the forest in Oxfordshire, while the justiciar
himself, Richard de Lucy, made a journey into Cumberland to hold the
pleas of the Crown there, for the first time since the district had passed into
the hands of the king of Scots.[592] From the date of the Assize of
Clarendon, however, these journeys became regular and general,[593] and

the work of the judges employed on them became far more extensive and
important.

[591] Laws of Æthelred II., l. iii. c. 3 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 72). See
Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 103, 115, 396, 611, 614.

[592] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxiv.

[593] Ib. pp. lxiii, lxiv.

The first visitation under the assize was at once begun by Richard de
Lucy and Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex;[594] and the Pipe Roll of
the year furnishes some indications of its immediate results. The sums
credited to the treasury for the pleas of the Crown reach a far greater
amount than in the earlier rolls, and its receipts are further swelled by the
goods and chattels of criminals condemned under the assize,[595] which
were explicitly declared forfeit to the king.[596] The clause binding all
qualified persons to be ready to serve on the juries was strictly enforced;
one attempt to evade it was punished with a fine of five marks.[597] Another
clause, enjoining upon the sheriffs the construction and repair of gaols for
the detention of criminals, was carried into effect with equal vigour.[598]
The work of the two justiciars was apparently not completed till the
summer of 1167.[599] In that year pleas of the forest were held throughout
the country by Alan de Neville; and in 1168 seven barons of the Exchequer
made a general visitation of the shires for the collection of an aid on the
marriage of the king’s eldest daughter.[600] This last was primarily a fiscal
journey; the aid itself was a strictly feudal impost, assessed at one mark on
every knight’s fee.[601] It was however levied in a remarkable manner. The
Domesday survey, which by a few modifications in practice had been made
to serve as the rate-book of the whole kingdom for eighty years, was at last
found inadequate for the present purpose. A royal writ was therefore
addressed to all the tenants-in-chief, requiring from them an account of the
knights’ fees which they held and the services due upon them, whether
under the “old infeoffment” of the time of Henry I., or under the “new
infeoffment” since the resettlement of the country by his grandson.[602] The
answers were enrolled in what is known as the Black Book of the
Exchequer[603] and the aid was levied in accordance with their contents.

The whole process occupied a considerable time; the preparations seem to
have begun shortly after Matilda’s betrothal, for we hear of the purchase of
“a hutch for keeping the barons’ letters concerning their knights” as early as
1166,[604] yet the collection of the money was not finished till the summer
of 1169,[605] a year and a half after her marriage. The labours of the barons
employed in it were however not confined to this one end; as usual, their
travels were turned to account for judicial purposes,[606] and the system
begun by the assize of Clarendon was by no means suffered to fall into
disuse.

[594] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 470. Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. pp. lxiv,
lxv.

[595] See Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 471.

[596] Ass. Clar., c. 5 (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 143, 144).

[597] “Homines de Tichesoura debent v marcas quia noluerunt jurare assisam
regis.” Pipe Roll a. 1166, quoted in Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 470, note 1.

[598] “The expenses of gaols at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon,
Cambridge, Sarum, Malmesbury, Aylesbury and Oxford are accounted for in the
Roll of 1166.” Ib. p. 471, note 5.

[599] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. pp. lxiv, lxv and note 1.

[600] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 471 and note 6.

[601] Ib. p. 472. Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 572.

[602] The tenour of the king’s writ is shewn by a typical answer, printed by
Bishop Stubbs in his Select Charters, p. 146, from Hearne’s Liber Niger
Scaccarii (2d ed.), vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

[603] Liber Niger Scaccarii, edited by Hearne. A roll of the Norman tenants-
in-chivalry was compiled in the same manner in 1172; see Stapleton, Magni
Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniæ, vol. i., Observations, p. xxxiv.

[604] Madox, Hist. Exch., vol. i. p. 576, and Stubbs, Constit. Hist., p. 471,
note 7, from Pipe Roll a. 1166.

[605] Stubbs, as above, p. 472, and Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. lxv and note 2.
Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 117.

[606] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxv, note 2.

It was too soon as yet for the beneficial results of these measures to
become evident to the people at large; but it was not too soon for them to
excite the resentment of the barons. The stringency with which in the assize
of Clarendon every claim of personal exemption or special jurisdiction was
made to give way before the all-embracing authority of the king’s supreme
justice shewed plainly that Henry still clave to the policy which had led him
to insist upon the restoration of alienated lands and the surrender of
unlicensed castles in England, to lose no opportunity of exercising his ducal
right to seize and garrison the castles of his vassals in Normandy[607]—in a
word, to check and thwart in every possible way the developement of the
feudal principle. The assessment of the aid for his daughter’s marriage
seems indeed at first glance to have been based on a principle wholly
favourable to the barons, for it apparently left the determination of each
landowner’s liabilities wholly in his own hands. But the commissioners
who spent nearly two years in collecting the aid had ample power and
ample opportunity to check any irregularities which might have occurred in
the returns; and the impost undoubtedly pressed very heavily upon the
feudal tenants as a body. Its proceeds seem, however, not to have come up
to Henry’s expectations, and the unsatisfactory reports which reached him
from England of the general results of his legal measures led him to suspect
some failure in duty on the part of those who were charged with their
execution.

[607] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. xlvii, note.

A large share of responsibility rested with the sheriffs; and the sheriffs
were still for the most part, as they had been in his grandfather’s days, the
chief landowners in their respective shires, men of great local importance,
and only too likely to have at once the will and the power to defeat the ends
of the very measures which by their official position they were called upon
to administer. Henry therefore on his return to England at Easter 1170
summarily deposed all sheriffs of counties and bailiffs of royal demesnes,
pending an inquisition into all the details of their official conduct since his
own departure over sea four years ago. The inquiry was intrusted not to any
of the usual members of the King’s Court and Exchequer, but to a large
body of commissioners specially chosen for the purpose from the higher

ranks of both clergy and laity.[608] These were to take pledges of all the
sheriffs and bailiffs that they would be ready to appear before the king and
make redress on an appointed day; an oath was also to be exacted from all
barons, knights and freemen in every shire that they would answer
truthfully and without respect of persons to all questions put to them by the
commissioners in the king’s name.[609]

[608] The list of commissioners for seven of the southern shires is in Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 216. See also Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 473 and
note 2.

[609] Inquest of sheriffs, Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 148. Gerv. Cant. (as
above), p. 217.

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]

[610] Inquest of sheriffs, cc. 1, 4, 9, 10 ( Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 148–
150).

[611] Ib. cc. 5, 6, 7 (p. 149).

[612] Ib. c. 12 (p. 150).

[613] Ib. c. 11 (p. 150).

[614] Ib. cc. 2, 3 (pp. 148, 149).

[615] See the list, and Bishop Stubbs’s analysis of it, in his preface to Gesta
Hen., vol. ii. p. lxvii, note 3.

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.

[616] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

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.

[617] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 24, note 2.

[618] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 162, 166. He kept Christmas at Bures; Rob.
Torigni, a. 1172 (i.e. 1171).

[619] Ep. ciii., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 197. Cf. Ep. cclxxvii., ib. vol. vi.
p. 131.

[620] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350.

[621] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 37 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 285). Anglo-
Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 128, 129.

[622] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 30.

[623] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 34. This writer says they went over—
young Henry much against his will—about All Saints’ day, and were sent to the
king of France both together. Rob. Torigni, a. 1172, says they crossed at
Martinmas, and paid their visits to Louis separately, Henry at Gisors, Margaret at
Chaumont.

[624] Summoned, it seems, by Henry, “timens fraudem et malitiam regis
Franciæ, quas sæpe expertus fuerat.” Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 35.

[625] Ib. p. 41. Cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242. The Gesta say the
demand was made “per consilium regis Francorum, et per consilium comitum et
baronum Angliæ et Normanniæ, qui patrem suum odio habebant.”

[626] Gesta Hen. and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[627] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 318).

[628] “Quartum natu minimum Johannem Sine Terrâ agnominans.” Will.
Newb., l. ii. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 146).

[629] There is some doubt as to the date of John’s birth. Rob. Torigni (ad ann.)
places it in 1167; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 325) in 1166. The prose addition to
Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle (Hearne, vol. ii. p. 484) says that he was born
at Oxford on Christmas Eve. As Eleanor seems to have been in England at
Christmas-tide in both years, this gives us no help. Bishop Stubbs (Introd. to W.
Coventry, vol. ii. p. xvii, note 3) adopts the later date.

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]

[630] “Comes Maurianensis et Marchio Italiæ” is Count Humbert’s style in the
marriage-contract of his daughter with John: Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 36.

[631] All these places are named in the marriage-contract of John and Alice of
Maurienne; Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 36–40.

[632] As says Rob. Torigni, a. 1171: “Nec aliquis potest adire Italiam, nisi per
terram ipsius” [sc. comitis].

[633] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 37. Humbert “concedit eis” [i.e. to John and
Alice, in case he himself should have a son who must oust them from
Maurienne] “in perpetuum et hæredibus eorum Russillun cum toto mandato suo
sive pertinentiis suis omnibus,” as if he actually had it in his own hands. I have
however failed to discover any connexion between Roussillon and Maurienne.

In 1171[634] Henry’s diplomatic relations with the Alpine princes bore
fruit in a proposal from Humbert of Maurienne for the marriage of his
eldest daughter with the king’s youngest son. Humbert himself had no son,
and by the terms of the marriage-contract his territories, Alpine and
Pyrenean, were to be settled upon his daughter and her future husband,[635]
in return for five thousand marks of English silver.[636] The contract was

signed and ratified before Christmas 1172,[637] and soon afterwards Henry
summoned his eldest son to join him in a journey into Auvergne for a
personal meeting with Humbert. They reached Montferrand before
Candlemas, and were there met not only by Humbert and his daughter but
also by the count of Vienne,[638] the count of Toulouse and the king of
Aragon.[639] How high the English king’s influence had now risen in these
southern lands may be judged by the fact that not only King Alfonso of
Aragon, a son of his old ally Raymond-Berengar, but also his former enemy
Raymond of Toulouse, could agree to choose him as arbiter in a quarrel
between themselves.[640] Raymond in truth saw in Henry’s alliances with
Aragon and Maurienne a death-blow to his own hopes of maintaining the
independence of Toulouse. Hemmed in alike to south and east by close
allies of the English king whose own duchy of Aquitaine surrounded almost
the whole of its north-western border, the house of St.-Gilles felt that it was
no longer possible to resist his claim to overlordship over its territories.
Henry carried his guests back with him to Limoges; there he settled the
dispute between Raymond and Alfonso; and there Raymond did homage to
the two Henrys for Toulouse,[641] promising to do the like at Whitsuntide to
Richard as duke of Aquitaine, and pledging himself to military service and
yearly tribute.[642]

[634] Rob. Torigni ad ann.

[635] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 36–40.

[636] Ib. p. 36.

[637] Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 44), in copying from the Gesta Hen. (as
above, p. 40) an account of the ratification of the contract, heads the paragraph
“De adventu nunciorum comitis Mauriensis in Angliam.” If he is right, it must
have taken place in April; but he may mean only “to the king of England.”

[638] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 353.

[639] Ibid. Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 35, 36.

[640] This seems to be the meaning of Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 36: “Venerunt
etiam illuc ad regem rex Arragoniæ et comes de S. Ægidio, qui inimici erant ad
invicem, et rex duxit eos secum usque Limoges, et ibi pacem fecit inter eos.”

[641] Ibid. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 45. R. Diceto, as above, says only
“fecit homagium regi Anglorum Henrico patri regis Henrici.” Geoff. Vigeois, l. i.

c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319), gives the date, the first Sunday in
Lent, February 25.

[642] Gesta Hen. as above. “Sed quia Ricardus dux Aquitaniæ, cui facturus
esset homagium comes S. Egidii, præsens non erat, usque ad octavas Pentecostes
negotii complementum dilationem accepit,” says R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. pp.
353, 354). The Gesta and Rog. Howden make Raymond do homage to the two
Henrys and to Richard all at once. They alone give full details of the services
promised.

The infant heiress of Maurienne was now placed under the care of her
intended father-in-law;[643] Henry’s political schemes seemed to have all
but reached their fulfilment, when suddenly Count Humbert asked what
provision Henry intended to make for the little landless bridegroom to
whom he himself was giving such a well-dowered bride.[644] That question
stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest till the
child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart. Henry
proposed to endow John with the castles and territories of Chinon, Loudun
and Mirebeau.[645] But the Angevin lands, with which the younger Henry
had been formally invested, could not be dismembered without his consent;
and this he angrily refused.[646] The mere request, however, kindled his
smouldering discontent into a flame[647] which seems to have been fanned
rather than quenched by the suggestions of Eleanor; yet so blind was the
indulgent father that, if we may venture to believe the tale, nothing but a
warning from Raymond of Toulouse opened his eyes to the danger which
threatened him from the plots of his own wife and children. Then, by
Raymond’s advice, he started off at once with a small escort, under pretence
of a hunting-party,[648] and carried his son back towards Normandy with the
utmost possible speed. They reached Chinon about Mid-Lent; thence young
Henry slipped away secretly by night to Alençon; his father flew after him,
but when he reached Alençon on the next evening the son was already at
Argentan; and thence before cock-crow he fled again over the French
border, to the court of his father-in-law King Louis.[649] Henry in vain sent
messengers to recall him: “Your master is king no longer—here stands the
king of the English!” was the reply of Louis to the envoys.[650]

[643] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 36.

[644] Ib. p. 41.

[645] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242, turns these into “tria castella in
Normanniâ.”

[646] Ibid.

[647] According to Rob. Torigni, a. 1173, the young king was further offended
because his father removed from him some of his favourite counsellors and
friends, Hasculf of St. Hilaire and some other young knights.

[648] Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319).

[649] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 41, 42. R. Diceto (as above), p. 355. The
chronology is here in great confusion. The Gesta tell us that the two kings
reached Chinon just before Mid-Lent (which in 1173 was on March 16), that
young Henry was next day at Alençon, the day after that at Argentan, and that on
the third night, “circa gallicantum,” he went off again, “octavâ Idus Martii, feriâ
quintâ ante mediam Quadragesimam.” (In the printed edition by Bishop Stubbs
—vol. i. p. 42— the word mediam has been accidentally omitted; see note to his
edition of R. Diceto, vol. ii. pref. p. xxxvi, note 6). It is of course impossible to
make anything of such a contradiction as this. On the other hand, R. Diceto gives
only one date, that of the young king’s flight from Argentan, which he places on
March 23. Now in 1173 March 23 was the Friday after Mid-Lent Sunday.
Reckoning backwards from this—i.e. from the night of Thursday-Friday, March
22–23, for it is plain that the flight took place before daybreak—we should find
the young king at Alençon on Wednesday, March 21, and at Chinon on Tuesday,
March 20; that is, four days after Mid-Lent. It looks very much as if the author or
the scribe of the Gesta had written “ante” instead of “post” twice over.

[650] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 170).

Henry at once made a circuit of his Norman fortresses, especially those
which lay along the French border, put them in a state of defence, and
issued orders to all his castellans in Anjou, Britanny, Aquitaine and
England, to do the like.[651] Before Lent had closed the old prophecy which
Henry’s enemies were never weary of casting in his teeth was fulfilled: his
own “lion-cubs” were all openly seeking to make him their prey.[652]
Whether sent by their mother, with whom they had been left behind in
Aquitaine, or secretly fetched by their eldest brother in person,[653] both
Richard and Geoffrey now joined him at the French court.[654] Eleanor
herself was caught trying to follow them disguised as a man, and was by her
husband’s order placed in strict confinement.[655] Louis meanwhile openly
espoused the cause of the rebels; in a great council at Paris he and his
nobles publicly swore to help the young king and his brothers against their
father to the utmost of their power, while the three brothers on their part

pledged themselves to be faithful to Louis, and to make no terms with their
father save through his mediation and with his consent.[656] Young Henry at
once began to purchase allies among the French feudataries and supporters
among the English and Norman barons, by making grants of pensions and
territories on both sides of the sea: grants for which the recipients did him
homage and fealty,[657] and which he caused to be put in writing and sealed
with a new seal made for him by order of Louis[658]—his own chancellor,
Richard Barre, having loyally carried back the original one to the elder king
who had first intrusted it to his keeping.[659]

[651] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 42.

[652] See the quotation from Merlin’s prophecy, and the comment on it, ib. pp.
42, 43.

[653] The first is the version of the Gesta Hen. (as above); the second that of
Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 170, 171).

[654] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 42. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 355. Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 242.

[655] Gerv. Cant. as above. He adds a comment: “Erat enim prudens femina
valde, nobilibus orta natalibus, sed instabilis.”

[656] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 44.

[657] See the list, ib. pp. 44, 45; and cf. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 243.

[658] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 43 and 45.

[659] Ib. p. 43.

Nearly three months passed away before war actually broke out; but
when the outburst came, the list of those who were engaged in it shews that
the whole Angevin empire had become a vast hotbed of treason; though, on
the other hand, it shews also that the treason was almost entirely confined to
one especial class. Its local distribution, too, is significant. The restless
barons of Aquitaine, still smarting under their defeat of 1169, were but too
eager, at the instigation of their duchess and their newly-crowned duke, to
renew their struggle against the king. Foremost among them were, as
before, the count of Angoulême,[660] the nobles of Saintonge, and Geoffrey
of Lusignan, beside whom there stood this time his young brother Guy, now

to begin in this ignoble strife a career destined to strange vicissitudes in far-
off Palestine.[661] The heart of the old Angevin lands, Anjou itself, was in
the main loyal; we find there the names of only five traitors; and three of
these, Hugh, William and Jocelyn of Ste.-Maure, came of a rebellious
house, and were only doing over again what their predecessors had done in
the days of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s youth.[662] The same may be said of
Henry’s native land, Maine; this too furnished only seven barons to the
traitor’s cause; and five of these again are easily accounted for. It was
almost matter of course that in any rising against an Angevin count the lord
of Sablé should stand side by side with the lord of Ste.-Maure. Brachard of
Lavardin had a fellow-feeling with undutiful sons, for he was himself at
strife with his own father, Count John of Vendôme, a faithful ally of Henry
II.; the same was probably the case of Brachard’s brother Guy.[663] Bernard
of La Ferté represented a family whose position in their great castle on the
Huisne, close to the Norman border, was almost as independent as that of
their neighbours the lords of Bellême, just across the frontier. Hugh of Sillé
bore a name which in an earlier stage of Cenomannian history—in the days
of the “commune,” just a hundred years before—had been almost a by-
word for feudal arrogance; and whether or not he inherited anything of his
ancestor’s spirit, he had a personal cause for enmity to the king if, as is
probable, he was akin to a certain Robert of Sillé, whose share in the
southern revolt of 1169 was punished by Henry, in defiance of treaties, with
an imprisonment so strict and cruel that it was speedily ended by death.[664]

[660] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 47.

[661] Ib. p. 46. The other Aquitanian rebels, besides the count of Angoulême
and the two Lusignans, were Geoffrey of Rancogne, the lords of Coulonges and
Rochefort in Saintonge, of Blaye (“Robertus de Ble”—this might possibly be
Blet in Berry) and Mauléon in Gascony, and of Chauvigny in Poitou, with
Archbishop William of Bordeaux and Abbot Richard of Tournay (ib. pp. 46, 47);
to whom we may add Ralf of Faye.

[662] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 46, 47. The other Angevin rebels are
Vivian and Peter of Montrévault: to whom may be added John of Lignières and
Geoffrey of La Haye in Touraine. Ibid. p. 46.

[663] Ib. pp. 47, 63.

[664] “Robertum de Selit quâdam occasione captum rex Henricus crudeliter
ferro indutum, pane arcto atque aquâ breve cibavit donec defecit.” Geoff.

Vigeois, l. i. c. 66 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 318). “Robertus de Silliaco
redeat in mentem . . . quem nec pacis osculum publice datum, nec fides
corporaliter regi Francorum præstita, fecit esse securum.” Ep. dcx., Robertson,
Becket, vol. vii. p. 178. Cf. Epp. dcvi., dcxliv., ib. pp. 165, 247. The other
Cenomannian rebels are Gwenis of Palluau and Geoffrey of Brulon; Gesta Hen.
(as above), p. 46.

Across the western border of Maine, in Geoffrey’s duchy, Ralf of
Fougères was once more at the head of a band of discontented Breton
nobles, chiefly, it seems, belonging to that old seed-plot of disturbance, the
county of Nantes.[665] The true centre and focus of revolt, however, was as
of old the duchy of Normandy. Almost all the great names which have been
conspicuous in the earlier risings of the feudal baronage against the
repressive policy of William and of Henry I. re-appear among the partizans
of the young king. The house of Montfort on the Rille was represented by
that Robert of Montfort[666] whose challenge to Henry of Essex ten years
before had deprived the king of one of his most trusty servants. The other
and more famous house of Montfort—the house of Almeric and of Bertrada
—was also, now as ever, in opposition in the person of its head, Count
Simon of Evreux.[667] He, like his fellow-traitor the count of Eu,[668] to
whom, as after-events shewed, may be added the count of Aumale,
represented one of those junior branches of the Norman ducal house which
always resented most bitterly the determination of the dukes to concentrate
all political power in their own hands. The counts of Ponthieu[669] and of
Alençon[670] inherited the spirit as well as the territories of Robert of
Bellême. Count Robert of Meulan[671] was the son of Waleran who in 1123
had rebelled against Henry I., and the head of the Norman branch of the
great house of Beaumont, which for more than half a century had stood in
the foremost rank of the baronage on both sides of the sea. The chief of the
English Beaumonts was his cousin and namesake of Leicester, soon to
prove himself an unworthy son of the faithful justiciar who had died in
1168; while the countess of Leicester, a woman of a spirit quite as
determined and masculine as her husband’s, was the heiress of the proud
old Norman house of Grandmesnil[672]—a granddaughter of that Ivo of
Grandmesnil who had been banished by Henry I. for trying to bring into
England the Norman practice of private warfare. Of the other English
rebels, Hugh of Chester[673] was a son of the fickle Ralf, and had at stake
besides his palatine earldom in England his hereditary viscounties of

Bayeux and Avranches on the other side of the Channel. Hugh Bigod, the
aged earl of Norfolk, untaught by his experiences of feudal anarchy in
Stephen’s day and undeterred by his humiliation in 1157, was ready to
break his faith again for a paltry bribe offered him by the young king.[674]
Earl Robert of Ferrers, Hamo de Massey, Richard de Morville, and the
whole remnant of the great race of Mowbray—Geoffrey of Coutances,
Roger de Mowbray and his two sons—were all men whose grandfathers
had “come over with the Conqueror,” and determined to fight to the
uttermost for their share in the spoils of the conquest. All these men were,
by training and sympathy, if not actually by their own personal and
territorial interests, more Norman than English; and the same may probably
be said of the rebels of the second rank, among whom, beside the purely
Norman lords of Anneville and Lessay in the Cotentin, of St.-Hilaire on the
Breton frontier, of Falaise, Dives, La Haye and Orbec in Calvados, of
Tillières, Ivry and Gaillon along the French border, we find the names of
Ralf of Chesney, Gerald Talbot, Jordan Ridel, Thomas de Muschamp, Saher
de Quincy the younger, Simon of Marsh, Geoffrey Fitz-Hamon, and Jocelyn
Crispin, besides one which in after-days was to gain far other renown—
William the Marshal.[675]

[665] Hardwin of Fougerai, Robert of Tréguier, Gwiounon of Ancenis, Joibert
of La Guerche; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 46, 47. To these we afterwards
find added several others; ib. pp. 57, 58.

[666] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45.

[667] Ib. p. 47.

[668] Ib. p. 45.

[669] Ibid.

[670] Called simply “William Talvas” in the Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 46, and
“John count of Sonnois” by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 371. John was his real
name.

[671] Gesta Hen. and R. Diceto, as above.

[672] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168.

[673] R. Diceto, as above.

[674] Young Henry promised him, and received his homage for, the hereditary
constableship of Norwich castle; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45. This writer
adds the honour of Eye; Rog. Howden, however ( Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 46), says this
was granted to Matthew of Boulogne.

[675] All these names are given in the list of the young king’s partizans in
Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 45–48. The remaining names are: William de
Tancarville the chamberlain of Normandy, of whom more presently; Eudo,
William, Robert, Oliver and Roland Fitz-Erneis (see Liber Niger, Hearne, pp.
142, 295, and Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 186 and 251); Robert of Angerville (he
seems to have been the young king’s steward or seneschal—see quotations from
Pipe Roll a. 1172 in Eyton, as above, pp. 166, 167, 168); Solomon Hostiarius
(probably also an attendant of young Henry); Gilbert and Ralf of Aumale:
“Willelmus Patricius senior” (he appears in Pipe Rolls 3 Hen. II., Hunter, p. 81, 4
Hen. II., p. 118—Berks and Wilts); William Fitz-Roger (Pipe Roll 4 Hen. II., p.
172, Hants); Robert “de Lundres” (is this some mighty London citizen?); Peter
of St.-Julien (may be either St.-Julien in Gascony, in eastern Touraine, or in the
county of Nantes); Hugh “de Mota” (La Mothe on the lower Garonne, La Motte
Archard in the county of Nantes, or La Motte de Ger in Normandy); Robert of
Mortagne (possibly the Norman Mortagne, possibly a place of the same name in
Anjou close to the Poitevin border); William of “Tibovilla” (probably Thiberville
in the county and diocese of Lisieux); John and Osbert “de Praellis” (possibly
Pradelles in Auvergne, more likely Préaux in Normandy); Almeric Turel, Robert
Bussun, Guy of Curtiran, Fulk Ribule, Adam de Ikobo, Robert Gerebert, William
Hagullun, Baldric of Baudemont, Geoffrey Chouet, “Bucherius,” and William de
Oveneia, whom I cannot identify.

One other rebel there was who stood indeed on a different footing from
all the rest, and whose defection had a wider political significance. The king
of Scots—William the Lion, brother and successor of Malcolm IV.—had
long been suspected of a secret alliance with France against his English
cousin and overlord. The younger Henry now offered him the cession of all
Northumberland as far as the Tyne for himself, and for his brother David
confirmation in the earldom of Huntingdon,[676] with a grant of the earldom
of Cambridge in addition, in return for the homage and services of both
brothers:—offers which the king of Scots accepted.[677] Only three prelates,
on either side of the sea, shewed any disposition to countenance the
rebellion; in the south, William, the new-made archbishop of Bordeaux;[678]
in the north, Arnulf of Lisieux[679] and Hugh of Durham. Arnulf’s influence
at court had long been on the wane; all his diplomacy had failed, as far as
his personal interest with King Henry was concerned; but he possessed the
temporal as well as the spiritual lordship of his see; and the man’s true
character now shewed itself at last, justifying all Henry’s suspicions, in an

attempt to play the part of a great baron rather than of a bishop—to use his
diplomatic gifts in temporizing between the two parties, instead of seeking
to make peace between them or to keep his straying flock in the path of
loyalty as a true pastor should. He did but imitate on a smaller scale and
under less favourable conditions the example set by Hugh of Puiset in his
palatine bishopric of Durham, where he had been throughout his career
simply a great temporal ruler, whose ecclesiastical character only served to
render almost unassailable the independence of his political position. It was
the pride of the feudal noble, not the personal sympathies of the churchman,
that stirred up both Hugh and Arnulf to their intrigues against Henry.
Personal sympathies indeed had as yet little share in drawing any of the
barons to the side of the boy-king. What they saw in his claims was simply
a pretext and a watchword which might serve them to unite against his
father. Young Henry himself evidently relied chiefly on his foreign allies—
his father-in-law, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne, and the count of
Blois, the last of whom was bribed by a promise of an annual pension and
the restitution of Château-Renaud and Amboise; while to Philip of Flanders
was promised the earldom of Kent with a pension in English gold, and to
Matthew of Boulogne the soke of Kirton-in-Lindsey and the Norman
county of Mortain.[680]

[676] To which, as will be seen later, there was a rival claimant who adhered
to Henry II.

[677] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 45. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 268, 269
(Michel, p. 14) adds Carlisle and Westmoreland to the young king’s offers, and
relates at great length how William hesitated before accepting them, how he sent
envoys to the elder king begging for a new cession of Northumberland from him,
and only upon Henry’s defiant refusal, and after long debate with his own
barons, entered upon the war. Ib. vv. 372–426 (pp. 14–22).

[678] “Willelmus archiepiscopus.” Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 47. This can be
no one else than William, formerly abbot of Reading, appointed to Bordeaux in
February 1173; Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319);
but I find no further account of his political doings.

[679] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 51, note 4.

[680] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 44, 45. Roger of Howden, as has been
said above (p. 139, note 1), adds the honour of Eye to Matthew’s intended
possessions.

The first hostile movement was made directly after Easter by a body of
Flemings who crossed the Seine at Pacy; but they had no sooner touched
Norman soil than they were driven back by the people of the town, and
were nearly all drowned in attempting to recross the river.[681] Henry
meanwhile, after spending Easter at Alençon,[682] had established his head-
quarters at Rouen, where he remained till the end of June, apparently
indifferent to the plots that were hatching around him, and entirely absorbed
in the pleasures of the chase.[683] In reality however he was transacting a
good deal of quiet business, filling up vacant sees in England;[684]
appointing a new chancellor, Ralf of Varneville, to the office which had
been in commission—that is, virtually, in the hands of Geoffrey Ridel—
ever since S. Thomas had resigned it ten years before;[685] and writing to all
his continental allies to enlist their sympathies and if possible their support
in the coming struggle.[686] One of them at least, his future son-in-law
William of Sicily, returned an answer full of hearty sympathy;[687] neither
he nor his fellow-kings, however, had anything more substantial to give.
The only support upon which Henry could really depend was that of a troop
of twenty thousand Brabantine mercenaries, who served him indeed bravely
and loyally, but by no means for nothing;[688] and if we may trust a writer
who, although remote from the present scene of action, seems to have had a
more intimate acquaintance than most of his fellow-historians with all
matters connected with the Brabantines, Henry’s finances were already so
exhausted that he was obliged to give the sword of state used at his
coronation in pledge to these men as security for the wages which he was
unable to pay them.[689] Yet he could trust no one else in Normandy; and as
yet he scarcely knew his own resources in England.

[681] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 367. He says they were drowned because
the bridge was “a quâdam mulierculâ effractus.”

[682] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i., p. 45.

[683] “Rex pater eo tempore morabatur Rothomagi, ut populo videbatur æquo
animo ferens quæ fiebant in terrâ; frequentius solito venatui totus indulgens” [see
extracts from Pipe Roll 1173 illustrating this, in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 173];
“venientibus ad se vultum hylaritatis prætendens, aliquid extorquere volentibus
patienter respondens.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 373, 374. Cf. Jordan
Fantosme, vv. 118, 119 (Michel, p. 6).

[684] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 366–368. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp.
243, 245.

[685] R. Diceto (as above), p. 367.

[686] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47. He says Henry wrote
“imperatoribus et regibus,” which we must take to include the Eastern Emperor.

[687] Letter in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 55, note 2; Rog. Howden (as
above), p. 48.

[688] Rog. Howden (as above), p. 47. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 27 (Howlett,
vol. i. p. 172). The latter does not mention their number; Jordan Fantosme, v. 67
(Michel, p. 4) makes it only ten thousand; the Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 51, says
“plus quam decem millia.”

[689] I suppose this to be the meaning of Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67 (Labbe,
Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 319): “Adeo Rex multis thesauris exhaustis nauseatus
est, ut Brabantionibus qui ei parebant pro mercede Spatham regiæ coronæ in
gagium mitteret.”

Early in June Robert of Leicester and William of Tancarville, the high-
chamberlain of Normandy, sought license from the justiciars in London to
join the king at Rouen. Immediately on landing, however, they hastened not
to Henry II., but to his son.[690] The justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, was
in such anxiety that he seems to have had some thoughts of going in person
to consult with the king.[691] The consultation however was to be held not in
Normandy but in England. In the last days of June or the first days of July,
while the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were easily overcoming the
mock resistance of Aumale and Driencourt, and Louis of France was laying
siege to Verneuil,[692] Henry suddenly crossed the sea, made his way as far
inland as Northampton, where he stayed four days, collected his treasure
and his adherents, issued his instructions for action against the rebels, and
was back again at Rouen so quickly that neither friends nor foes seem ever
to have discovered his absence.[693]

[690] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 370. He gives no date; but it must have
been quite in the beginning of June, for Mr. Eyton says (Itin. Hen. II., p. 172,
note 5): “The Dorset Pipe Roll of Michaelmas 1173 shews that the Earl of
Leicester’s manor of Kingston (now Kingston Lacy) had been confiscated four
months previously (Hutchins, iii. 233).”

[691] “Et in liberacione ix navium quæ debuerunt transfretare cum Ricardo de
Luci, et Ricardo Pictaviæ archidiacono, et Gaufrido Cantuariensi archidiacono et

aliis baronibus, precepto Regis £13: 15s. per breve Ricardi de Luci.” Pipe Roll a.
1173 (Southampton), quoted by Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 174. See Mr. Eyton’s
comment, ib. note 4, which points to the conclusion that the ships made the
voyage—doubtless with the other passengers—but that Richard “probably
thought it wise to adhere to his post of viceroy.”

[692] R. Diceto (as above), pp. 373, 374. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 49.
Rob. Torigni, a. 1173.

[693] “Et item in liberacione Esnaccæ quando transfretavit in Normanniam
contra Regem £7: 10s. per breve Regis. Et in liberacione xx. hominum qui
fuerunt missi de cremento in Esnacchâ 40s. per breve Regis. Et in liberacione iv.
navium quæ transfretaverunt cum Esnacchiâ £7: 10s. per idem breve. Et pro
locandis carretis ad reportandum thesaurum de Hantoniâ ad Wintoniam duabus
vicibus 9s. Et pro unâ carretâ locandâ ad portandas Bulgas Regis ad Winton. 9d.”
Pipe Roll a. 1173 (Southampton), quoted in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 173. “Et in
corredio Regis apud Norhanton per iv dies £32: 6: 5 per breve Regis.”
Northampton, ibid. “Et in soltis per breve Regis ipsi vicecomiti [of
Northamptonshire] £72: 11: 9, pro robbâ quam invenit Regi.” Ibid. On the
Southampton entries Mr. Eyton remarks: “The above charges, from their position
on the roll, would seem to have been incurred after July 15.” But surely if Henry
had been in England during the siege of Leicester, which lasted from July 3 to
July 28, we must have had some mention of his presence; and there is scarcely
time for it later, between the capture of Leicester and his own expedition to
Conches on August 7. Is it not much more natural to conclude that the visit took
place earlier—at the end of June—and that the orders for the Leicester
expedition, which Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. ii. p. 372) expressly says were given
by the king, were issued to Richard de Lucy in a personal interview?

Hurried, however, as was the king’s visit to England, it did its work in
bracing up the energies and determining the action of the vassals who were
faithful to him there. In personal and territorial importance indeed these
were very unequally matched with the rebels. The fidelity of the Welsh
princes, David Ap-Owen and Rees Ap-Griffith,[694] could not balance the
hostility of the King of Scots. Among the loyal English barons, the most
conspicuous were a group of the king’s immediate kinsmen, none of whom
however ranked high among the descendants of the ducal house of
Normandy:—his half-brother Earl Hameline of Warren, his uncle Reginald
of Cornwall, his cousin William of Gloucester;[695] besides Earl William of
Arundel the husband of his grandfather’s widow Queen Adeliza, his son
William, and his kinsman Richard of Aubigny. The earl of Essex, William
de Mandeville, was a son of that Geoffrey de Mandeville who had accepted
the earldom of Essex from both Stephen and Matilda, and who had been
one of the worst evil-doers in the civil war; but the son was as loyal as the

father was faithless; he seems indeed to have been a close personal friend of
the king, and to have well deserved his friendship.[696] The loyalty of Earl
Simon of Northampton may have been quickened by his rivalry with David
of Scotland for the earldom of Huntingdon. That of William of Salisbury
was an inheritance from his father, Earl Patrick, who had earned his title by
his services to the Empress, and had fallen honourably at his post of
governor of Aquitaine in the rising of 1168. The loyal barons of lesser
degree are chiefly representatives of the class which half a century before
had been known as the “new men”—men who had risen by virtue of their
services in the work of the administration, either under Henry himself or
under his grandfather. Such were the justiciar Richard de Lucy and the
constable Humfrey de Bohun; William de Vesci, son of Eustace Fitz-John,
and like his father a mighty man in the north; his nephew John, constable of
Chester;—the whole house of Stuteville, with Robert de Stuteville the
sheriff of Yorkshire at its head;[697]—and Ralf de Glanville,[698] sheriff of
Lancashire, custodian of the honour of Richmond,[699] and destined in a few
years to wider fame as the worthy successor of Richard de Lucy. The
Glanvilles, the Stutevilles and the de Vescis now wielded in Yorkshire as the
king’s representatives the influence which had been usurped there by
William of Aumale before his expulsion from Holderness; while in
Northumberland a considerable share of the power formerly exercised by
the rebellious house of Mowbray had passed to servants of the Crown such
as Odelin de Umfraville[700] and Bernard de Bailleul,[701] whose name in its
English form of Balliol became in after-times closely associated with that
borne by two other loyal northern barons—Robert and Adam de Bruce.[702]
To the same class of “new men” belonged Geoffrey Trussebut, Everard de
Ros, Guy de Vere, Bertram de Verdon, Philip de Kime and his brother
Simon.[703]

[694]In Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 51, note 4, the names are given as
“David et Evayn reges Walliæ”—a blunder probably caused by the writer’s
greater familiarity with David, owing to his later family alliance with the English
king. In the present war, however, Rees proved the more active ally of the two,
as we shall see later.

[695] It will however appear later that Gloucester’s fidelity was somewhat
doubtful.

[696] William de Mandeville is constantly found, throughout his life, in the
king’s immediate company. See Eyton, Itin. Hen. II. passim.

[697] All these names are in the list in the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 51,
note 4.

[698] Ib. p. 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33
(Howlett, vol. i. p. 184).

[699] Escheated on the death of Duke Conan of Britanny.

[700] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 51, note 4, 66.

[701] Ib. pp. 65, 66. Will. Newb. as above.

[702] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51, note 4.

[703] Ibid. The Trussebuts, de Roses and de Veres appear under Henry I.
Bertram de Verdon and Philip de Kime were employed in the Curia Regis and
Exchequer under Henry II.; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 185, 76, 130, etc.
Another name among the loyalists in the Gesta Hen. (as above) —that of
Richard Louvetot—seems to have got in by mistake; cf. ib. p. 57, where he
appears among the rebels at Dol.

Some half-dozen of the king’s English adherents—William of Essex,
William of Arundel, Robert de Stuteville and the elder Saher de Quincy,
besides two who had lately come over from Ireland, Richard of Striguil and
Hugh de Lacy—either returned with him to Rouen or had joined him there
already,[704] thus helping to swell the little group of loyalists who
surrounded him in Normandy. That group contained no Norman baron of
the first rank, and consisted only of a few personal friends and ministers:—
Richard of Hommet the constable of the duchy, with all his sons and
brothers;[705] William de Courcy the seneschal;[706] Richard Fitz-Count, the
king’s cousin;[707] Hugh de Beauchamp[708] and Henry of Neubourg,[709]
sons of the loyal house of Beauchamp which in England looked to the earl
of Warwick as its head; Richard de Vernon and Jordan Tesson;[710]—while
two faithful members of the older Norman nobility, Hugh of Gournay and
his son, had already fallen prisoners into the hands of the young king.[711] It
was in truth Henry’s continental dominions which most needed his presence
and that of all the forces which he could muster; for the two chief English
rebels, the earls of Leicester and Chester, were both beyond the Channel,
and their absence enabled the king’s representatives to strike the first blow
before the revolt had time to break forth in England at all. On July 3 the

town of Leicester was besieged by Richard de Lucy and Earl Reginald of
Cornwall at the head of “the host of England.”[712] After a three weeks’
siege and a vast expenditure of money and labour,[713] the town was fired,
and on July 28 it surrendered.[714] The castle still held out, its garrison
accepting a truce until Michaelmas; the gates and walls of the city were at
once thrown down; the citizens were suffered to go out free on payment of a
fine of three hundred marks;[715] but it was only by taking sanctuary in the
great abbeys of S. Alban or S. Edmund that their leaders could feel secure
against the vengeance of the king.[716]

[704] Essex and Arundel had both been with him since the very beginning of
the year, for they witnessed the marriage-contract of John and Alice of
Maurienne; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 39. Robert de Stuteville and Saher de
Quincy seem to have been with him in the summer of 1173 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II.,
p. 174). Hugh de Lacy was at Verneuil, defending it for the king in July (Gesta
Hen., vol. i. p. 49); and Richard of Striguil was of the party which went to its
relief in August (R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. i. p. 375).

[705] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51, note 4.

[706] Ib. p. 39. Cf. Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 170, 177.

[707] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 51.

[708] Ib. p. 49.

[709] Ib. p. 52.

[710] Ib. pp. 51, 52.

[711] Hugh of Gournay and his son, with eighty knights, fell into the young
king’s hands, “non tam inimicorum virtuti quam insidiis intercepti,” quite early
in the war; R. Diceto (as above), p. 369.

[712] “Cum exercitu Angliæ,” i.e. the national not the feudal host. Gesta Hen.
as above, p. 58. The date comes from R. Diceto (as above), p. 376.

[713] See some illustrations in the Pipe Roll of 1173, as quoted by Eyton (as
above), p. 175.

[714] R. Diceto (as above), p. 376. He seems to make the fire accidental, and
the surrender a consequence of it. In the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 58, the
victors seem to fire the town after they have captured it.

[715] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376.

[716] Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 289.

Three days before the capture of Leicester, an arrow shot by one of
Henry’s Brabantine cross-bowmen gave Matthew of Boulogne his death-
wound, and thereby caused the break-up of the Flemish expedition against
Normandy.[717] A fortnight later Henry set out at the head of all his
available forces to the relief of Verneuil, which Hugh de Lacy and Hugh de
Beauchamp were defending against the king of France. By a double
treachery Louis, under cover of a truce, gained possession of the town, set it
on fire, and retreated into his own domains before Henry could overtake
him.[718] Henry marched back to Rouen, taking Gilbert of Tillières’s castle
of Damville on the way,[719] and thence despatched his Brabantines to
check the plundering operations which Hugh of Chester and Ralf of
Fougères were carrying on unhindered throughout the border district which
lay between Fougères and Avranches. The interception of an important
convoy and the slaughter of its escort by the Brabantines drove the rebel
leaders to retire into the fortress of Dol. Here they were blockaded by the
Brabantines, backed by the populace of the district of Avranches,[720] who
clearly had no sympathy with the treason of their viscount. The siege began
on August 20; on the morrow Henry received tidings of it at Rouen; on the
23d he appeared in the midst of his soldiers; and on the 26th Dol and its
garrison, with Ralf of Fougères and Hugh of Chester at their head,
surrendered into his hands.[721] This blow crushed the Breton revolt; the rest
of the duchy submitted at once.[722] Louis of France was so impressed by
Henry’s success that he began to make overtures for negotiation, while
Henry was holding his court in triumph at Le Mans. Shortly before
Michaelmas a meeting took place near Gisors; Henry shewed the utmost
anxiety to be reconciled with his sons, offering them literally the half of his
realms in wealth and honours, and declaring his willingness virtually to
strip himself of everything except his regal powers of government and
justice.[723] That, however, was precisely the reservation against which the
French king and the disaffected barons were both alike determined to fight
as Henry himself had fought against S. Thomas’s reservation of the rights of
his order. The terms were therefore refused, and the earl of Leicester in his
baffled rage not only loaded his sovereign with abuse, but actually drew his
sword to strike him. This outrage of course broke up the meeting.[724]

Leicester hurried through Flanders, collecting troops as he went, to Wissant,
whence he sailed for England on Michaelmas day.[725] Landing at Walton in
Suffolk, he made his way to Hugh Bigod’s castle of Framlingham; here the
two earls joined their forces; and they presently took and burned the castle
of Haughley, which Ralf de Broc held against them for the king.[726]

[717] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 373. He alone gives the date, attributes the
wound to a shot “a quodam marchione,” and places the scene on the invaders’
march from Driencourt to Arques. The Gesta Hen. as above, p. 49, Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246, and Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 28 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 173) make
it occur during the siege of Driencourt (William calls it by its more modern
name, “Neufchâtel”), but as the former has told us that this siege began about
July 6 and was ended within a fortnight, this is irreconcileable with the date
given by R. Diceto. Gervase says Matthew was shot “a quodam arcubalistâ.”

[718] See the details of the story, and the disgraceful conduct of Louis, in
Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 51–54; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 50; R. Diceto
as above, p. 375; and another version in Will. Newb. as above (pp. 174, 175).

[719] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 56.

[720] Rob. Torigni, a. 1173. “Itaque obsessa est turris Doli a Brebenzonibus et
militibus regis et plebe Abrincatinâ.”

[721] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 378; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 57, 58;
Rob. Torigni, a. 1173; Will. Newb. l. ii. c. 29 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 176). The Gesta
Hen. gives the date, and a list of the captured. According to Rob. Torigni, Ralf of
Fougères escaped to the woods, and his two sons were taken as hostages. The
Chron. S. Albin. a. 1173 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 42), says he was taken, together
with Hugh (whom the Angevin monk transforms into “comitem Sceptrensem”)
and a hundred knights.

[722] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 52.

[723] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 59. Rog. Howden as above, p. 53.

[724] Rog. Howden as above, p. 54.

[725] R. Diceto as above, p. 377. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246, and
Gesta Hen. as above, p. 60, say he came over about S. Luke’s day; but this is
irreconcileable with R. Diceto’s careful and minute chronology of the subsequent
campaign. R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 175, says “in vigiliâ S. Mauricii,” i.e.
September 20.

[726] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 60, 61, with an impossible date; see ib.
p. 60, note 12. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
377, gives the correct date of the capture of Haughley, October 13.

Map IV.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

At the moment of Leicester’s arrival the representatives of the king were
far away on the Scottish border. At the close of the summer William of
Scotland had gathered his motley host of Lowland knights and wild
Galloway Highlanders, marched unhindered through the territories of the
see of Durham, and was just beginning to ravage Yorkshire after the manner
of his forefathers when Richard de Lucy and Humfrey de Bohun hastily
reassembled their forces and marched against him with such promptitude
and vigour that he was compelled to retreat not merely into Lothian but into
the safer shelter of the Celtic Scotland beyond it. The English host overran
Lothian,[727] and had just given Berwick to the flames when tidings reached
them of Earl Robert’s doings in Suffolk. The king of Scots was begging for
a truce; the English leaders readily consented, that they might hurry back to
their duties in the south.[728] Richard de Lucy returned to his post of
viceroy, and the supreme military command was left to the constable
Humfrey de Bohun, assisted by the earls of Cornwall and Gloucester and by
Earl William of Arundel,[729] who had now come to give the help of his
sword in England as he had already given it in Normandy. The constable
and the three earls, with three hundred paid soldiers of the king, posted
themselves at S. Edmund’s, ready to intercept Earl Robert on his way from
Framlingham to join the garrison of Leicester.[730] He made a circuit to the
northward to avoid them, but in vain. They marched forth from S.
Edmund’s beneath the banner of its patron saint, the famous East-Anglian
king and martyr, overtook the earl in a marsh near the church of S.
Geneviève at Fornham,[731] and in spite of overwhelming odds defeated him
completely. His Flemish mercenaries, who had gone forth in their insolent
pride singing “Hop, hop, Wilekin! England is mine and thine,”[732] were cut
to pieces not so much by the royal troops as by the peasantry of the district,
who flocked to the battle-field armed with forks and flails, with which they
either despatched them at once or drove them to suffocation in the ditches.
[733]
His French and Norman knights were all made prisoners;[734] he
himself took to flight, but was overtaken and captured;[735] and his wife,
who had accompanied him throughout his enterprise, was made captive
with him.[736] The victors followed up their success by posting bodies of
troops at S. Edmund’s, Ipswich and Colchester, hoping that Hugh Bigod,
thus confined within his own earldom, would be unable to provide for the
large force of Flemish mercenaries still quartered in his various castles, and

that these would be starved into surrender. The approach of winter however
disposed both parties for a compromise; a truce was arranged to last till the
octave of Pentecost, Hugh consenting to dismiss his Flemings, who were
furnished with a safe-conduct through Essex and Kent and with ships to
transport them from Dover back to their own land.[737]

[727] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376. Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 61.

[728] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 61. R. Diceto as above, p. 376. Jordan
Fantosme, vv. 478–838 (Michel, pp. 22–38), has a long account of this first
Scottish invasion, but it is far from clear, and some parts of it, e.g. the statement
that Warkworth was taken by the Scots, seem incompatible with after-events.

[729] Gesta Hen. as above.

[730] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 377. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 61. Rog.
Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 54.

[731] Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 55. The date,
according to R. Diceto (as above, p. 378) is October 17; the Gesta (as above, p.
62) make it October 16.

[732] Mat. Paris, Hist. Angl. (Madden), vol. i. p. 381. “Hoppe, hoppe, Wilekin,
hoppe, Wilekin, Engelond is min ant tin.”

[733] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1086–1091 (Michel, p. 50).

[734] R. Diceto as above, pp. 377, 378. Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 61, 62. Rog.
Howden as above, p. 55. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. Will. Newb., l. ii. c.
30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 179). The number of Robert’s Flemish troops is surely
exaggerated by all these writers; still, even at the lowest computation, the odds
seem to have been, as R. Diceto says, at least four to one.

[735] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[736] Will. Newb. as above. R. Diceto as above, p. 378. She had been with her
husband in France, and returned with him to England; ib. p. 377. According to
Jordan Fantosme, vv. 980–992 (Michel, p. 46), it was she who urged him to the
march which led to his ruin, in defiance of his own dread of the royal forces. See
also in Jordan, vv. 1070–1077 (Michel, p. 50) the story of her trying to drown
herself in a ditch to avoid being captured; and that in Mat. Paris, as above, of her
throwing away her ring. This latter seems to be only another version of Jordan’s;
cf. his v. 1072.

[737] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 378. He gives the number of these
Flemings as fourteen hundred.

The earl and countess of Leicester were sent over to Normandy by the
king’s orders, there to be shut up in company with Hugh of Chester in
prison at Falaise.[738] Their capture filled the French king and the rebel
princes with dismay, and none of them dared to venture upon any
opposition against Henry when at Martinmas he led his Brabantines into
Touraine, forced some of its rebellious barons into submission,[739]
reinstated his ally Count John of Vendôme in his capital from which he had
been expelled by his own son,[740] and returned to keep the Christmas feast
at Caen.[741] An attack upon Séez, made at the opening of the new year by
the young king and the counts of Blois, Perche and Alençon, was repulsed
by the townsfolk,[742] and led only to a truce which lasted till the end of
March.[743] The truce made by Richard de Lucy with the king of Scots was
prolonged to the same date—the octave of Easter—by the diplomacy of
Bishop Hugh of Durham, who took upon himself to purchase this delay,
apparently without authority and for his own private ends, by a promise of
three hundred marks of silver to be paid to the Scot king out of the lands of
the Northumbrian barons.[744]

[738] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 62. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 55.
See also quotations from Pipe Roll a. 1173 on this matter, in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II.,
p. 177.

[739] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 62, 63. The chief rebels were Geoffrey of La
Haye—apparently that same La Haye which had formed part of the dower-lands
of the first countess of Anjou, and is known now as La Haye Descartes—and
Robert of “Ble” (see above, p. 136, note 6{661}) who held Preuilly and
Champigny. A list of the garrisons of these castles is given; two names are worth
noting—“Hugo le Danais” and “Rodbertus Anglicus.”

[740] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 63.

[741] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 246. According to Rob. Torigni,
however (a. 1174—i.e. 1173 in our reckoning) he kept it at Bures.

[742] R. Diceto as above, p. 379.

[743] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 63, 64.

[744] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 64. King and bishop met in person at
“Revedale”—or, as Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 56, 57, says, “in confinio
regnorum Angliæ et Scotiæ apud Revedene.”

The issue proved that Hugh’s real object was simply to gain time for the
organization of a general rising in the north; and in this object he succeeded.
The old isolation of Yorkshire was not yet a thing of the past; and its few
lines of communication with southern England were now all blocked, at
some point or other, by some stronghold of rebellion. Earl Hugh’s Chester,
Hamo de Massey’s Dunham[745] and Geoffrey of Coutances’ Stockport
commanded the waters of the Dee and the Mersey. South of the Peak, in the
upper valley of the Trent, the earl of Ferrers held Tutbury and Duffield;
further to south-east, on the opposite border of Charnwood Forest, lay the
earl of Leicester’s capital and his castles of Groby and Mount Sorrel.[746]
By the time that the truce expired Roger de Mowbray had renewed the
fortifications of Kinardferry in the Isle of Axholm,[747] thus linking this
southern chain of castles with those which he already possessed at Kirkby
Malzeard, or Malessart, and Thirsk;[748] and Bishop Hugh had done the like
at Northallerton.[749] Further north stood the great stronghold of Durham;
while all these again were backed, far to the north-westward, by a double
belt of fortresses stretching from the mouths of the Forth and the Tweed to
that of the Solway:—Lauder, held by Richard de Morville; Stirling,
Edinburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Roxburgh, Annan and Lochmaben, all in the
hands of the king of Scots.[750]

[745] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 48. Hamo de Massey had another castle
called Ullerwood; where was this?

[746] Ibid.

[747] Ib. p. 64. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 379.

[748] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 48.

[749] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 57.

[750] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 48. Annan and Lochmaben belonged to Robert
de Bruce; ibid. No doubt William had seized them when Bruce joined Henry.

Between this northern belt of rebel strongholds, however, and the
southern one which stretched from Chester to Axholm, there lay along the
river-valleys of Cumberland and Northumberland a cluster of royal castles.
Nicolas de Stuteville held Liddell, on the river of the same name. Burgh[751]

stood on the Solway Firth, nearly opposite Annan; the whole valley of the
Eden was guarded by Carlisle, whose castellan was Richard de Vaux,[752]
and Appleby, which like Burgh was held by Robert de Stuteville for the
king.[753] The course of the Tyne was commanded by Wark, under Roger de
Stuteville,[754] Prudhoe, under Odelin de Umfraville,[755] and by the great
royal fortress of Newcastle, in charge of Roger Fitz-Richard;[756] further
north, between the valleys of the Wansbeck and the Coquet, stood
Harbottle, also held by Odelin, with Roger Fitz-Richard’s Warkworth[757]
and William de Vesci’s Alnwick[758] at the mouths of the Coquet and the
Alne. This chain of defences William of Scotland, when at the expiration of
the truce he again marched into England, at once set himself to break.
While his brother David went to join the rebel garrison of Leicester,[759] he
himself began by laying siege to Wark. This fortress, held in the king’s
name by Roger de Stuteville—apparently a brother of the sheriff of
Yorkshire—occupied a strong position in the upper valley of the Tyne, on
the site of an earlier fortress which under the name of Carham had played a
considerable part in the Scottish wars of Stephen’s time, and had been
finally taken and razed by William’s grandfather King David in 1138.[760]
William himself had already in the preceding autumn besieged Wark
without success;[761] he prospered no better this time, and presently
removed his forces to Carlisle,[762] where he had also sustained a like
repulse six months before.[763] Carlisle, as well as Wark, was in truth almost
impregnable except by starvation; and William, while blockading it closely,
detached a part of his host for a series of expeditions against the lesser
fortresses, Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth, all of which
fell into his hands.[764] His brother’s arrival at Leicester, meanwhile,
seemed to have revived the energies of its garrison; under the command of
Earl Robert of Ferrers they sallied forth very early one morning, surprised
and burned the town of Nottingham, made a great slaughter of its citizens,
and went home laden with plunder and prisoners.[765]

[751] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 65.

[752] Ib. p. 64.

[753] Ib. p. 65. Jordan Fantosme, v. 1467 (Michel, p. 66), gives us the name—
a very interesting one—of the acting commandant—“Cospatric le fiz Horm, un

viel Engleis fluri.”

[754] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 478–483 (Michel, pp. 22–24).

[755] Ib. vv. 594–603 (p. 28), Gesta Hen. as above.

[756] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 566, 567 (Michel, p. 26).

[757] Ib. vv. 562–565 (p. 26). Gesta Hen. as above, p. 65. See above, p. 149,
note 3{728}.

[758] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 538, 539 (as above).

[759] Gesta Hen. as above. Cf. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1113–1136 (Michel, p.
52).

[760] See above, vol. i. pp. 287, 292.

[761] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 478–530 (Michel, pp. 22, 26).

[762] Ib. vv. 1191–1351 (pp. 54–62).

[763] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 610–760 (pp. 28–36).

[764] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 64, 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p.
60. Will. Newb., l. ii. cc. 30, 31 (Hewlett, vol. i. pp. 177, 180), seems to have
confused this campaign with that of the preceding autumn; and so has,
apparently, Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1145–1511 (Michel, pp. 52–68). “Banesburc”
in v. 1158 (p. 54), though it looks like Bamborough, surely ought to be Burgh.

[765] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 69. Nottingham was commanded by Reginald
de Lucy; what relation to the justiciar?

Meanwhile the king’s representatives in the south were not idle. Knowing
however that he was powerless to rescue the north, Richard de Lucy made
an attempt to draw off in another direction the forces both of the Scot king
and of his brother by laying siege to David’s castle of Huntingdon.[766]
Huntingdon had been held ever since 1136 either by the reigning king of
Scots or by one of his nearest kinsmen, in virtue of their descent from
Waltheof, the last Old-English earl of Huntingdon and Northampton,
through his daughter Matilda, the wife of King David. In each case,
however, the fief seems to have been held not as an hereditary possession
but by a special grant made to the individual holder for his life. The house
of Northampton, sprung from an earlier marriage of the same Matilda, were
thus enabled to maintain a claim upon it which had never been entirely
barred, and which Earl Simon of Northampton now seized his opportunity

to urge upon the king.[767] Henry answered that Simon might keep
Huntingdon if he could win it;[768] thus securing for Richard de Lucy his
support and co-operation in the siege, which began on May 8.[769] Three
days before this, however, a severe blow had been dealt at the northern
rebels. The king’s eldest son Geoffrey, who a year before had been
appointed to the bishopric of Lincoln, gathered up the forces of
Lincolnshire, led them into Axholm and laid siege to Kinardferry. Robert of
Mowbray, who was commanding there, seeing his garrison threatened with
the want of water, slipped out to seek aid of his friends at Leicester, but was
surrounded and made prisoner by the country-folk at Clay.[770] On May 5
Kinardferry surrendered; after razing it, Geoffrey marched northward to
York; here he was joined by the forces of the archbishop and of the shire;
with this united host he took Mowbray’s castle of Malessart,[771] closely
menaced that of Thirsk by erecting a rival fortification at Topcliff, and
having intrusted the former to Archbishop Roger and the latter to William
de Stuteville, marched back to Lincoln in triumph.[772] His victory was
scarcely won when a new peril arose in East-Anglia. Three days after
Pentecost some three hundred Flemish soldiers, forerunners of a great host
with which Count Philip of Flanders had sworn to invade England at
Midsummer on behalf of the young king, landed at the mouth of the Orwell.
[773]
Hugh Bigod, whose truce with the king’s officers, made when he
dismissed his other Flemish troops in the preceding autumn, expired four
days later, at once received them into his castles.[774] For a whole month,
however, no further movement was made save by the garrison of Leicester,
who after the close of Whitsun-week made a successful plundering raid
upon the town of Northampton.[775] On June 18 Hugh Bigod and his
Flemings marched upon Norwich, took it by assault, committed a vast
slaughter of men and women, and finally sacked and fired the city.[776] They
seem to have returned to Framlingham by way of Dunwich, which was still
a flourishing seaport, of sufficient wealth to tempt their greed; but its stout
fisher-folk met them with such a determined front that they were compelled
to retire.[777]

[766] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[767] See the story in the tract “De Judithâ uxore Waldevi comitis,” in M. F.
Michel’s Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, vol. ii. pp. 128, 129.

[768] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 71. The case seems to have been tried in
the Curia Regis; ibid., and Chron. Anglo-Norm., as above.

[769] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[770] “A rusticis del Clay.” Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 68. Rog. Howden
(Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 58, alters “rusticis” into “hominibus.” The place is perhaps
Clay Cross in Derbyshire.

[771] Kirkby or Kirby Malzeard, near Ripon.

[772] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 68, 69. Cf. R. Diceto as above, and Gir.
Cambr., Vita Galfr. Archiep., l. i. cc. 2, 3 (Dimock, vol. iv. pp. 364–367).

[773] “Apud Airewellam.” R. Diceto (as above), p. 381.

[774] Ibid. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 247.

[775] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 68.

[776] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 68. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381 (to
whom we owe the date). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 248.

[777] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 30 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 178). “Insignum vicum
maritimum, variis opibus refertum, qui dicitur Donewich,” he calls it. He gives
an account of the entire East-Anglian campaign, but he has mixed up the doings
of this summer of 1174 with those of the preceding autumn. Jordan Fantosme,
vv. 845–897 (Michel, pp. 40–42), has done the same. He explains, however, the
otherwise unaccountable facility with which Norwich was taken, by telling us
that “Uns traïtres Lohereng la trahi, pur ço si fud surprise.”

Richard de Lucy was all this while busy with the siege of Huntingdon.
Provoked apparently by a vigorous assault which he made upon it at
midsummer,[778] the garrison set fire to the town; Richard then built a tower
to block their egress from the castle, and left the completion of the siege to
the earl of Northampton.[779] For himself it was time once more to lay down
the knightly sword and resume that of justice. While the justiciar’s energies
were absorbed in warfare with the barons, the burgher-nobles of the capital
had caught from their feudal brethren the spirit of lawlessness and misrule,
and London had become a vast den of thieves and murderers. Young men,
sons and kinsmen of the noblest citizens, habitually went forth by night in
parties of a hundred or more, broke into rich men’s houses and robbed them
by force, and if they met any man walking in the streets alone, slew him at

once. Peaceable citizens were driven in self-defence to meet violence with
violence. One man, expecting an attack, gathered his armed servants around
him in a concealed corner, surprised his assailants in the act of breaking into
his house with crowbars, struck off with a blow of his sword the right hand
of their leader Andrew Bucquinte, and raised an alarm which put the rest to
flight. Bucquinte was captured and delivered next morning to the justiciar;
on a promise of safety for life and limb he gave up the names of his
accomplices; some fled, some were caught, and among the latter was one of
the noblest and richest citizens of London, John Oldman,[780] who vainly
offered five hundred marks of silver to the Crown to purchase his escape
from the gallows.[781] The revelation of such a state of things in the capital
apparently drove Richard de Lucy and his colleagues almost to desperation.
They had already sent messenger after messenger to intreat that the king
would return; getting however no certain answer, they now determined that
one of their number should go to Normandy in person to lay before him an
authentic account of the desperate condition of his realm.[782]

[778] “Appropinquante autem nativitate S. Johannis Baptistæ, Ricardus de
Luci magnum congregavit exercitum et obsedit castellum de Huntendoniâ.”
Gesta Hen. as above, p. 70. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60, substitutes for
the first words “in festo Nativitatis S. Johannis.” This is the first time that either
writer mentions the siege, but see R. Diceto as above, p. 376.

[779] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 71.

[780] “Johannes Senex.”

[781] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 155, 156. The story is there told in
connexion with that of the murder of a brother of the earl of Ferrers in 1177, and
said to have happened “three years before.” The wording of the latter part, where
it is said that John “obtulit quingentas marcas argenti domino regi . . . sed . . .
noluit denarios illos accipere, et præcepit ut judicium de eo fieret,” seems to
imply that the king himself came to England between the capture of Bucquinte
and the execution of John. In that case the date of the affair would be about June
or July 1174. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 131, mentions the hanging of
John Oldman, but puts it after the murder of De Ferrers in 1177 and omits the
whole story which in the Gesta intervenes, thereby also omitting to shew the true
sequence of events and chronology.

[782] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381.

Henry had spent the spring in a successful progress through Maine and
Anjou to Poitiers, where he kept the Whitsun feast. He had just rescued
Saintes from a band of rebels who had seized it in Richard’s name[783] when
he was called northward again by a rumour of the Flemish count’s scheme
for the invasion of England. By S. Barnabas’s day he was back again on the
borders of Britanny and Anjou; he took and fortified Ancenis, and then,
leaving Anjou to the charge of a faithful baron, Maurice of Craon,[784] went
to meet the castellans of the Norman border in a council at Bonneville on
Midsummer-day. Their deliberations were interrupted by the appearance of
Richard of Ilchester—now bishop-elect of Winchester—on his errand from
England to recall the king.[785] Richard’s pleadings however were scarcely
needed. Henry knew that his eldest son was at that very moment with the
count of Flanders at Gravelines, only awaiting a favourable wind to set sail
for the invasion of England,[786] and that, whatever might be the risk to his
continental realms, he must hasten to save the island.[787] He at once took
measures for the security of the Norman castles and for the transport of
those prisoners and suspected persons whom he dared not venture to leave
behind him—his queen,[788] the earl and countess of Leicester, the earl of
Chester,[789] the young queen Margaret,[790] and the affianced brides of his
three younger sons; besides the two children who were still with him, Jane
and John.[791] The wind which thwarted the designs of his foes was equally
unfavourable to him; it was not till July 7 that he himself embarked at
Barfleur, and even then the peril of crossing seemed so great that the sailors
were inclined to put back. Henry raised his eyes to heaven: “If I seek the
peace of my realm—if the heavenly King wills that my return should
restore its peace—He will bring me safe into port. If He has turned away
His Face from me and determined to scourge my realm, may I never reach
its shores!” By nightfall he was safe[792] at Southampton.[793]

[783] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 380. Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 71,
and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1174 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 43).

[784] R. Diceto and Gesta Hen. as above.

[785] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 381, 382. Cf. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1530–
1633 (Michel, pp. 70–74).

[786] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 61.

[787] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 248. Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 32 (Howlett,
vol. i. p. 181).

[788] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. Gesta Hen. as above.

[789] R. Diceto (as above) has “comitem Cestrensem, Legecestrensem
comitissam”; Mat. Paris, Chron. Maj. (Luard), vol. ii. p. 292, turns this into
“comitem Legecestrensem et comitissam.” We may surely combine the two
versions.

[790] R. Diceto and Gesta Hen. as above.

[791] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. “Uxores filiorum suorum” must mean Adela
of France, Constance of Britanny and Alice of Maurienne, all of whom are
known to have been in Henry’s custody.

[792] R. Diceto as above, pp. 382, 383.

[793] Ib. p. 383. Gesta Hen. as above. Cf. Pipe Roll a. 1173, quoted by Itin.
Hen. II., p. 180. R. Niger (Anstruther), p. 176, puts the voyage two days later.

His first care was to bestow his prisoners and hostages in safe custody.
[794]
That done, he set off at once on a pilgrimage to the grave of his former
friend and victim at Canterbury. Travelling with the utmost speed, and
feeding only on bread and water, he reached Canterbury on July 12; before
the church of S. Dunstan, outside the west gate, he dismounted, exchanged
his kingly robes for the woollen gown of a pilgrim, and made his way with
bare and bleeding feet along the rough-paved streets to the cathedral
church. Here, surrounded by a group of bishops and abbots who seem to
have come with him, as well as by the monks of the cathedral chapter and a
crowd of wondering lay-folk, he threw himself in an agony of penitence and
prayer on the martyr’s tomb, which still stood in the crypt where his body
had been hastily buried by the terrified monks immediately after the
murder. The bishop of London now came forward and spoke in the king’s
name, solemnly protesting that he had never sought the primate’s death, and
beseeching absolution from the assembled prelates for the rash words which
had occasioned it. The absolution was given; the king then underwent a
public scourging at the hands of the bishops and monks; he spent the whole
night in prayer before the shrine; early on the morrow he heard mass and
departed, leaving rich gifts in money and endowments, and rode back still
fasting to London, which he reached on the following morning.[795] The
next few days were spent in collecting forces, in addition to a large troop of

Brabantines whom he had brought over with him,[796] and in despatching a
part of these into Suffolk against Hugh Bigod; Henry himself lingering
another day or two to recover from his excitement and fatigue.[797]

[794] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72. Eleanor was placed at Salisbury
(Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 67; Labbe, Nova Bibl., vol. ii. p. 319) in charge of Robert
Mauduit; the younger queen “and the hostages” were sent to Devizes under the
care of Eustace Fitz-Stephen. (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 180, from Pipe Roll a.
1173.)

[795] For accounts of the penance see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 383; Gerv.
Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 248, 249; Gesta Hen. as above; Rog. Howden (Stubbs),
vol. ii. pp. 61, 62; Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 18); E. Grim
(Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 445–447; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 545–
547.

[796] R. Diceto as above, p. 382. Gesta Hen. as above. Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

[797] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 189), says he stayed in
London in order to be bled.

In the middle of the night of July 17 a courier from the north came
knocking wildly for admittance at the palace-gate. The porters remonstrated
with him in vain; he bore, he said, good news which the king must hear that
very night. He hurried to the door of the king’s chamber, and, despite the
expostulations of the chamberlains, made his way to the bedside and woke
the king from his sleep. “Who art thou?” demanded Henry. “A servant of
your faithful Ralf de Glanville, and the bearer of good tidings from him to
you.” “Is he well?” “He is well; and lo! he holds your enemy the king of
Scots in chains at Richmond castle.” Not till he had seen Ralf’s own letters
could Henry believe the tidings; then he burst into thanksgivings for the
crowning triumph which had come to him, as he now learned, almost at the
moment when his voluntary humiliation at Canterbury was completed.[798]
The garrison of Carlisle had pledged themselves to surrender to the Scot
king at Michaelmas if not previously relieved. In the interval William laid
siege to Odelin de Umfraville’s castle of Prudhoe on the Tyne.[799] Here he
was rejoined by Roger de Mowbray, who came to intreat the Scot king’s aid
in the recovery of his lost castles.[800] Meanwhile, however, the king’s
return had apparently brought with it the return of the sheriff of Yorkshire,
Robert de Stuteville. Under his leadership and that of his son William the

whole military forces of the shire, with those of William de Vesci, Ralf de
Glanville, Bernard de Balliol and Odelin de Umfraville, and Archbishop
Roger’s men under his constable Ralf de Tilly, gathered and marched
northward to oppose the Scots.[801] They reached Newcastle on July 12[802]
—the day of Henry’s penitential entry into Canterbury—but only to find
that on the rumour of their approach William the Lion had retired from
Prudhoe, and was gone to besiege Alnwick with his own picked followers,
while the bulk of his host, under the earls of Fife and Angus and the English
traitor Richard de Morville, dispersed over all Northumberland to burn,
plunder and slay in the old barbarous Scottish fashion which seems hardly
to have softened since the days of Malcolm Canmore.[803] The English
leaders now held a council of war. Their forces consisted only of a few
hundred knights, all wearied and spent with their long and hurried march, in
which the foot had been unable to keep up with them at all. The more
cautious argued that enough had been done in driving back the Scots thus
far, and that it would be madness for a band of four hundred men to
advance against a host of eighty thousand. Bolder spirits, however, urged
that the justice of their cause must suffice to prevail against any odds; and it
was decided to continue the march to Alnwick. They set out next morning
before sunrise; the further they rode, the thicker grew the mist; some
proposed to turn back. “Turn back who will,” cried Bernard de Balliol, “if
no man will follow me, I will go on alone, rather than bear the stain of
cowardice for ever!” Every one of them followed him; and when at last the
mist cleared away, the first sight that met their eyes was the friendly castle
of Alnwick. Close beside it lay the king of Scots, carelessly playing with a
little band of some sixty knights. Never dreaming that the English host
would dare to pursue him thus far, he had sent out all the rest of his troops
on a plundering expedition, and at the first appearance of the enemy he took
them for his own followers returning with their spoils. When they unfurled
their banners he saw at once that his fate was sealed. The Scottish Lion,
however, proved worthy of his name, and his followers proved worthy of
their leader. Seizing his arms and shouting, “Now it shall be seen who are
true knights!” he rushed upon the English; his horse was killed, he himself
was surrounded and made prisoner, and so were all his men.[804] Roger de
Mowbray and Adam de Port, an English baron who had been outlawed two
years before for an attempt on King Henry’s life, alone fled away into
Scotland;[805] not one Scot tried to escape, and some even who were not on

the spot, when they heard the noise of the fray, rode hastily up and almost
forced themselves into the hands of their captors, deeming it a knightly duty
to share their sovereign’s fate.[806]

[798] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 35 (Howlett, vol. i. (pp. 189, 190). On the
coincidence of time see Mr. Howlett’s note 3, p. 188. Cf. the more detailed, but
far less vivid version of the story in Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1956–2029 (Michel,
pp. 88–92). In the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 72, Henry is said to have
received the news on July 18. Taken in conjunction with the story given above,
this must mean the night of July 17–18.

[799] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 65. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 60. Cf.
Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 32 (as above, p. 182); and Jordan Fantosme, vv., 1640–1650
(Michel, p. 74).

[800] Will. Newb. as above.

[801] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 65, 66. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol.
ii. p. 60.

[802] “Sexta Sabbati.” Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 183).

[803] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 66. Cf. Rog. Howden as above; Will. Newb., l.
ii. c. 32 (as above, pp. 182, 183), and Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1671–1729 (Michel,
pp. 76–78). On the Scottish misdoings see also R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 376;
Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 247; and Gesta Hen. as above, p. 64; this latter
writer can find no better way of describing them than by copying Henry of
Huntingdon’s account of the Scottish invaders of 1138 (Hen. Hunt., l. viii. c. 6,
Arnold, p. 261).

[804] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 183–185). Jordan Fantosme,
vv. 1731–1839 (Michel, pp. 78–84). Cf. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 67; Rog.
Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63; and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 249.

[805] Jordan Fantosme, vv. 1841–1849 (Michel, p. 84). Will. Newb. as above
(p. 185). On Adam de Port (whose presence on this occasion is mentioned by
Jordan only) see Gesta Hen. as above, p. 35 and note 2, and Stapleton, Magn.
Rot. Sacc. Norm. (Soc. Antiq.), vol. i., Observ., p. clxi.

[806] Will. Newb. as above.

The capture of William the Lion almost put an end to the rebellion. A
body of Flemings summoned by Bishop Hugh of Durham landed the same
day at Hartlepool; but at the tidings of the Scottish disaster, Hugh thought it
safest to pay them their forty days’ wages and send them home again at
once.[807] On the same day, too, the young king, weary of waiting for a

wind at Gravelines, left the count of Flanders there alone and proceeded to
Wissant with a body of troops whom he succeeded in despatching from
thence into England, under the command of Ralf of La Haye, to the
assistance of Hugh Bigod.[808] In London, meanwhile, the news brought by
Ralf de Glanville’s courier raised to the highest pitch the spirits both of
Henry and of his troops. On that very day he set out for Huntingdon,[809]
whose titular earl had already fled back to Scotland;[810] at Huntingdon
Geoffrey of Lincoln came to meet him with a force of seven hundred
knights;[811] and three days later the garrison surrendered at discretion.[812]
The king then marched to S. Edmund’s; here he divided his host, sending
half against Hugh Bigod’s castle of Bungay, while he himself led the other
half to Framlingham, where Hugh was entrenched with five hundred
knights and his Flemish men-at-arms. The number of these, however, had
dwindled greatly; when the royal host encamped on July 24 at Sileham,
close to Framlingham, Hugh felt himself unable to cope with it; and next
morning he surrendered.[813] By the end of the month the whole struggle
was over. One by one the king’s foes came to his feet as he held his court at
Northampton. The king of Scots was brought, with his feet tied together
under his horse’s body, from his prison[814] at Richmond.[815] On the last
day of July Bishop Hugh of Durham came to give up his castles of Durham,
Norham and Northallerton. On the same day the earl of Leicester’s three
fortresses were surrendered by his constables;[816] and Thirsk was given up
by Roger of Mowbray.[817] Earl Robert de Ferrers yielded up Tutbury and
Duffield;[818] the earl of Gloucester and his son-in-law Richard de Clare,
who were suspected of intriguing with the rebels, came to offer their
services and their obedience to the king;[819] and a like offer came from far-
off Galloway, whose native princes, Uhtred and Gilbert, long unwilling
vassals of the king of Scots, had seized their opportunity to call home their
men, drive out William’s bailiffs, destroy his castles and slaughter his
garrisons, and now besought his victorious English cousin to become their
protector and overlord.[820] In three weeks from Henry’s landing in England
all the royal fortresses were again in his hands, and the country was once
more at peace.[821]

[807] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 67.

[808] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 381. Cf. ib. p. 385.

[809] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 72.

[810] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 37 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 195).

[811] See Henry’s remark at their meeting in Gir. Cambr. Vita Galfr., l. i. c. 3
(Dimock, vol. iv. p. 368).

[812] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 73. Cf. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 384.

[813] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto as above, pp. 384, 385.

[814] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 64.

[815] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 33 (as above, p. 185).

[816] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto as above, p. 384, dates the surrender of
these three castles July 22—i.e. just as Henry was leaving Huntingdon for
Suffolk. The chronology of the Gesta seems much more probable. See in Will.
Newb., l. ii. c. 37 (as above, pp. 194, 195), how Henry frightened the constables
into submission. Jordan Fantosme, vv. 2039–2046 (Michel, p. 92), has a different
story about Leicester. He makes David of Huntingdon its commandant, and says
that as soon as Henry received the news of the Scot king’s capture, he forwarded
it to David with a summons to surrender; whereupon David gave up Leicester
castle and himself both at once.

[817] Gesta Hen. as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 385.

[818] Gesta Hen. as above. Tutbury was being besieged by a host of
Welshmen under Rees Ap-Griffith; R. Diceto (as above), p. 384.

[819] R. Diceto as above, p. 385.

[820] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 63.

[821] Ib. p. 65. Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

When England was secured, it was comparatively a light matter to secure
the rest. Louis of France was so dismayed at the sudden collapse of the
rebellion in England—a collapse which necessarily entailed a like fate upon
the rebellion in Normandy, since the leaders were the same men in both
cases—that he at once recalled the young king and the count of Flanders
from their project of invasion. As a last resource, all three concentrated their
forces upon the siege of Rouen.[822] Its garrison held out gallantly until
Henry had time to recross the sea with his Brabantines and a thousand
Welshmen[823] who had already done good service under Rees Ap-Griffith

at the siege of Tutbury.[824] On August 11, three days after landing, he
entered Rouen;[825] a successful raid of his Welshmen upon some French
convoys, followed by an equally successful sally of Henry himself against
the besieging forces, sufficed to make Louis ask for a truce, under cover of
which he fled with his whole host back into his own dominions.[826] Some
three weeks later[827] he and Henry met in conference at Gisors and
arranged a suspension of hostilities until Michaelmas on all sides, except
between Henry and his son Richard, who was fighting independently
against his father’s loyal subjects in Poitou.[828] Henry marched southward
at once; Richard fled before him from place to place, leaving his conquests
to fall back one by one into the hands of their rightful owner; at last he
suddenly returned to throw himself at his father’s feet, and a few days
before Michaelmas Henry concluded his war in Poitou[829] by entering
Poitiers in triumph with Richard, penitent and forgiven, at his side.[830]

[822] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 73. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 64.
Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 36 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 190). Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
249. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 386.

[823] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

[824] See R. Diceto as above, p. 384. It seems most likely that these were the
same. The Pipe Roll of 1174 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 183) has a charge of £4: 18:
11 “in corredio Reis et aliorum Walensium qui venerunt ad regem in
expedicionem.”

[825] R. Diceto as above, p. 385. Gesta Hen. as above. Rog. Howden as
above, p. 65.

[826] See the details of Louis’s disgraceful conduct in Gesta Hen. as above,
pp. 74–76, Rog. Howden as above, pp. 65, 66, R. Diceto as above, pp. 386, 387,
Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 250, and Will. Newb., l. ii. cc. 36 and 37 (as above, pp.
192–196).

[827] On September 8. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 76.

[828] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 76. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 66.
Rob. Torigni, a. 1174.

[829] “Et sic finivit rex gwerram suam in Pictaviâ,” comments the writer of
the Gesta Hen. (as above) on the reconciliation.

[830] Rog. Howden as above, p. 67.

On the last day of September the two kings and all the princes met in
conference between Tours and Amboise.[831] Henry’s three elder sons
accepted the endowments which he offered them; in return, the young king
gave his assent to a provision for John. A general amnesty was agreed upon;
all prisoners on both sides, except the king of Scots, the earls of Leicester
and Chester and Ralf of Fougères, were released at once; all the rebels
returned to their allegiance, and were fully forgiven; Henry claimed nothing
from any of them save the restoration of their castles to the condition in
which they had been before the war, and the right of taking such hostages
and other security as he might choose.[832] These terms of course did not
apply to England; while, on the other hand, the king of Scots and his
fellow-captives, whom Henry had brought back with him to Normandy and
replaced in confinement at Falaise,[833] were excluded from them as
prisoners of war. It was at Falaise, on October 11, that Henry and his sons
embodied their agreement in a written document.[834] A few weeks later
William of Scotland, with the formal assent of the bishops and barons of his
realm, who had been allowed free access to him during his captivity,
submitted to pay the price which Henry demanded for his ransom. The legal
relations between the crowns of England and Scotland had been doubtful
ever since the days of William the Conqueror and Malcolm Canmore, if not
since the days of Eadward the Elder and Constantine; henceforth they were
to be doubtful no longer. William the Lion became the liegeman of the
English king and of his son for Scotland and for all his other lands, and
agreed that their heirs should be entitled to a like homage and fealty from
all future kings of Scots. The castles of Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Berwick,
Edinburgh and Stirling were required by Henry as security; and as soon as
the treaty had been ratified at Valognes[835] William was sent over sea in a
sort of honourable custody to enforce their surrender and thereby complete
his own release.[836]

[831] Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 67. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 76.
Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 250. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 394. On the date
given by this last see below, note 7{834}.

[832] Treaty given at length in Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 77–79, and Rog.
Howden as above, pp. 67–69; abridged in R. Diceto as above, pp. 394, 395.

[833] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

[834] The treaty, as given in Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden (see above, note
5 {832} ), is printed also in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i. p. 30, with the addition of a
date—Falaise—and the signatures of twenty-eight witnesses. Among the latter is
Geoffrey, bishop elect of Lincoln. Now we know from R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i.
p. 393, that Geoffrey came over from England to Normandy on October 8. R.
Diceto (ib. p. 394) gives the date of the meeting at which the treaty was made as
October 11. Is it not probable that he has substituted for the date of the making of
the treaty that of its formal ratification at Falaise?

[835] This treaty, as given in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 96–99, and Rog.
Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 80–82 (and from them in Rymer’s Fœdera, vol. i.
pp. 30, 31), is dated at Falaise. R. Diceto, however (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 396), who
gives an abridgement of it, says it was made at Valognes, on December 8. Now
there is in Hearne’s Liber Niger, vol. i. pp. 36–40, a copy of the treaty, differing
from the former ones in having eighteen more witnesses (one cannot help noting
the name of the last—“Roger Bacun”) and in its date, which is “Valognes.” No
doubt the Falaise copy was made first, and this is the ratification of it.

[836] R. Diceto as above, p. 398.

By the terms of Henry’s treaty with France, all the English barons who
held lands on both sides of the sea were to be at once re-instated in their
continental possessions, except the castles over which the king resumed his
ancient rights of garrison or of demolition. Their English estates however
were wholly at his mercy; but he made a very gentle use of his power over
them. He took in fact no personal vengeance at all; he exacted simply what
was necessary for securing his own authority and the peace of the realm—
the instant departure of the Flemish mercenaries[837] and the demolition of
unlicensed fortifications—and for defraying the expenses of the war. This
was done by a tax levied partly on the royal demesnes, partly on the estates
of the rebels throughout the country, on the basis of an assessment made for
that purpose during the past summer by the sheriffs of the several counties,
assisted by some officers of the Exchequer.[838] No ruinous sums were
demanded; even Hugh Bigod escaped with a fine of a thousand marks, and
lost none of the revenues of his earldom save for the time that he was
actually in open rebellion; the third penny of Norfolk was reckoned as due
to him again from the third day after his surrender, and its amount for two
months was paid to him accordingly at Michaelmas.[839] Even the earls of
Leicester and Chester seem to have been at once set free;[840] and in little
more than two years they were restored to all their lands and honours,

except their castles, which were either razed or retained in the king’s hands.
[841]

[837] Hugh Bigod’s Flemings and the knights sent over by the young king
were all sent out of the country immediately after Hugh’s surrender, and the
former were made to swear that they would never set a hostile foot in England
again. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 385.

[838] This is the “Assiza super dominica regis et super terras eorum qui
recesserunt.” Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 184, 185.

[839] See extract from Pipe Roll 20 Hen. II. [a. 1174], and Mr. Eyton’s
comment upon it, Itin. Hen. II., p. 181, note 2.

[840] Hugh of Chester was probably released at the same time with the king of
Scots, for he signs among the witnesses to the treaty of Falaise. Gesta Hen.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 99. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 82.

[841] Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 134, 135. Rog. Howden as above, p. 118.

This very clemency was in itself at once the strongest proof of the
completeness of Henry’s victory and the surest means of retaining the hold
which he had now gained over the barons. The struggle whose course we
have been trying to follow has a special significance: it was the last struggle
in English history in which the barons were arrayed against the united
interests of the Crown and the people. That feudal pride which had revolted
so often and so fiercely against the determination of William the Conqueror
and Henry I. to enforce justice and order throughout their realm stooped at
last to acknowledge its master in Henry II. In the unbroken tranquillity, the
uninterrupted developement of reform in law and administration, the
unchecked growth of the material and social prosperity of England during
the remaining fifteen years of his reign, Henry and his people reaped the
first-fruits of the anti-feudal policy which he and his predecessors had so
long and so steadily maintained. Its full harvest was to be reaped after he
was gone, not by the sovereign, but by the barons themselves, to whom his
strong hand had at last taught their true mission as leaders and champions of
the English people against a king who had fallen away from the traditions
alike of the Norman and of the Angevin Henry.

CHAPTER V.
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE.
1175–1183.

In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt
Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies
had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly
than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the
four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before
him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning
year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church,
alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism
was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and
serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like
position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The
great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the
hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external
foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the
Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the
friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in
Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of
them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the
full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his
whole dominions were thus completely removed.
In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity
and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional.
Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had
ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was
there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and
stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till

March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards
the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as
he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never
been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on
May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their
reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which
met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of
Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles
and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill
S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his
pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was
returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the
council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to
the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court
at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a great
council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years
before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been
accumulating during Thomas’s exile was completed in another council at
Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of
order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king;
all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors,
to come to the court without special summons, and, under any
circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of
arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the
Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they
were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by
Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-
visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not
completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which
scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest,
was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people
as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to
throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during
the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for
a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in
accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The

license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had
intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such
outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry
I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike
stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the
transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and
their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851]

[842] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 83, 84. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 399.

[843] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 84. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 250. R.
Diceto as above, pp. 399–401.

[844] On the Canterbury troubles and Richard’s election see Gerv. Cant. as
above, pp. 239–242, 243–245, 247.

[845] Ib. p. 249. R. Diceto as above, p. 391. Gesta Hen. as above, p. 74.

[846] Gesta Hen. as above, p. 91. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 256. R. Diceto as
above, p. 399.

[847] Gesta Hen. as above.

[848] Ib. p. 92.

[849] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 93. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 78,
79.

[850] Gesta Hen. as above. “Sed hæc præcepta parvo tempore custodita sunt.”

[851] On the “misericordia regis pro forestâ,” as it is called in the Pipe Rolls,
see Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 92, 94; Rog. Howden as above, p. 79; R. Diceto
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 402; Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 483; and the extracts from
the Pipe Rolls 22 and 23 Hen. II. (i.e. 1176 and 1177) in Madox, Hist. Exch., vol.
i. pp. 541, 542.

In the beginning of that year the king assembled a great council at
Northampton,[852] and thence issued an Assize which forms another link in
the series of legal enactments begun at Clarendon just ten years before. The
first three clauses and the twelfth clause of the Assize of Northampton are
substantially a re-issue of those articles of the Assize of Clarendon which
regulated the presentment, detention and punishment of criminals and the
treatment of strangers and vagabonds.[853] The experience of the past ten

years had however led to some modifications in the details of the procedure.
The recognition by twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every
township, to be followed by ordeal of water, was re-enacted; but the
presentment was now to be made not to the sheriff, but direct to the king’s
justices. The punishments, too, were more severe than before; the forger,
robber, murderer or incendiary who under the former system would have
suffered the loss of a foot was now to lose a hand as well, and to quit the
realm within forty days.[854] The remaining articles dealt with quite other
matters. The fourth declared the legal order of proceeding with regard to the
estate of a deceased freeholder, in such a manner as to secure the rights of
his heir and of his widow before the usual relief could be exacted by the
lord; and it referred all disputes between the lord and the heir touching the
latter’s right of inheritance to the decision of the king’s justices, on the
recognition of twelve lawful men[855]—a process which, under the name of
the assize of mort d’ancester, soon became a regular part of the business
transacted before the justices-in-eyre. Some of the other clauses had a more
political significance. They directed the justices to take an oath of homage
and fealty to the king from every man in the realm, earl, baron, knight,
freeholder or villein, before the octave of Whit-Sunday at latest, and to
arrest as traitors all who refused it:[856]—to investigate and strictly enforce
the demolition of the condemned castles;[857] to ascertain and report by
whom, how and where the duty of castle-guard was owed to the king;[858] to
inquire what persons had fled from justice and incurred the penalty of
outlawry by failing to give themselves up at the appointed time, and to send
in a list of all such persons to the Exchequer at Easter and Michaelmas for
transmission to the king.[859] The tenth article was aimed at the bailiffs of
the royal demesnes, requiring them to give an account of their stewardship
before the Exchequer;[860] and two others defined the justices’ authority, as
extending, in judicial matters, over all pleas of the Crown, both in criminal
causes and in civil actions concerning half a knight’s fee or less; and in
fiscal matters, over escheats, wardships, and lands and churches in royal
demesne.[861]

[852] On January 26. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 404. Cf. Gesta Hen.
(Stubbs), vol. i. p. 107, and Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 87. The Gesta date
it merely “circa festum Conversionis S. Pauli”; Roger turns this into “in festo,”
etc., and adopts the reading “Nottingham” instead of “Northampton.” Gerv. Cant.

(Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 257, 258, confounds the Assize of Clarendon with the
Constitutions.

[853] Cf. articles 1–3, 12 of Ass. Northampton (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp.
150, 151, 152), with Ass. Clarendon, cc. 1–4, 13, 15, 16 (ib. pp. 143, 144, 145).
The Assize of Northampton is given in the Gesta Hen. as above, pp. 108–110,
and by Rog. Howden as above, pp. 89–91.

[854] Ass. North., c. 1 (Stubbs, as above, p. 151).

[855] Ib. c. 4 (pp. 151, 152).

[856] Ass. North., c. 6 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 152).

[857] Ib. c. 8 (as above).

[858] Ib. c. 11 (ibid.)

[859] Ib. c. 13 (pp. 152, 153).

[860] Ib. c. 10 (p. 152).

[861] Ib. cc. 7 and 9 (ibid.).

The visitations of the justices by whom this assize was carried into effect
were arranged upon a new plan, or rather upon a modified form of the plan
which had been adopted two years before for the assessment of a tallage
upon the royal demesnes, to meet the cost of the expected war. It was at that
terrible crisis, when most men in Henry’s place would have had no thought
to spare for anything save the military necessities and perils of the moment,
that he had first devised and carried into effect the principle of judicial
circuits which with some slight changes in detail has remained in force until
our own day. This tallage was levied by nineteen barons of the Exchequer,
distributed into six companies, each company undertaking the assessment
throughout a certain district or group of shires.[862] The abandonment of this
scheme in the assizes of the two following years was probably necessitated
by the disturbed state of the country. But at the council of Northampton the
kingdom was again definitely mapped out into six divisions, to each of
which three justices were sent.[863] In the report of their proceedings in the
Pipe Roll of the year they are for the first time since the Assize of
Clarendon[864] officially described by the title which they had long borne in
common speech, “justitiæ itinerantes” (or “errantes”), justices-in-eyre; and

it is from this time that the regular institution of itinerant judges is dated by
modern legal historians.[865]

[862] See the lists in Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxv, note 5, and
Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 176; from the Pipe Roll 19 Hen. II. (a. 1173).

[863] See lists in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 107, 108.

[864] Ass. Clar., c. 19 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 145).

[865] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. pp. lxix, lxx and notes.

This first distribution of circuits however was soon altered. In the very
next year the same eighteen officers made, in addition to their judicial
circuits, a general visitation of the realm for fiscal purposes, in four
companies instead of six;[866] and on Henry’s return to England in the
summer of 1178 he made what at first glance looks like a sweeping change
in the organization of the Curia Regis. “The king,” we are told, “made
inquiry concerning his justices whom he had appointed in England, whether
they treated the men of the realm with righteousness and moderation; and
when he learned that the country and the people were sore oppressed by the
great multitude of justices—for they were eighteen in number—by the
counsel of the wise men of the realm he chose out five, two clerks and three
laymen, who were all of his private household; and he decreed that those
five should hear all the complaints of the realm, and do right, and that they
should not depart from the king’s court, but abide there to hear the
complaints of his men; so that if any question came up among them which
they could not bring to an end, it should be presented to the king’s hearing
and determined as might please him and the wise men of the realm.”[867]
From the mention of the number eighteen it appears that the persons against
whom were primarily directed both the complaint of the people and the
action of the king were the justices-in-eyre of the last two years; and this is
confirmed by the fact that of all these eighteen, only six were among the
judges who went on circuit in 1178 and 1179, while from 1180 onwards
only one of them reappears in that capacity, though many of them retained
their functions in the Exchequer. In 1178 and 1179 moreover the circuits
were reduced from six to two, each being served by four judges.[868] The
enactment of 1178, however, evidently touched the central as well as the

provincial judicature, and with more important results. It took the exercise
of the highest judicial functions out of the hands of the large body of
officers who made up the Curia Regis as constituted until that time, and
restricted it to a small chosen committee. This was apparently the origin of
a limited tribunal which, springing up thus within the Curia Regis, soon
afterwards appropriated its name, and in later days grew into the Court of
King’s Bench. At the same time the reservation of difficult cases for the
hearing of the king in council points to the creation, or rather to the revival,
of a yet higher court of justice, that of the king himself in council with his
“wise men”—a phrase which, while on the one hand it carries us back to the
very earliest form of the Curia Regis, on the other points onward to its later
developements in the modern tribunals of equity or of appeal, the courts of
Chancery and of the Privy Council in its judicial capacity.[869]

[866] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii. pref. p. lxx and note 3.

[867] Ib. vol. i. pp. 207, 208.

[868] Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii., pref. p. lxxi and note 2.

[869] Stubbs, Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 486, 487, 601–603; Gesta Hen., vol. ii.
pref. pp. lxxi, lxxiv–lxxvii.

All these changes in the circuits and in the Curia Regis had however
another motive. The chief obstacle to Henry’s judicial and legal reforms
was the difficulty of getting them administered according to the intention of
their author. It was to meet this difficulty that Henry, as a contemporary
writer says, “while never changing his mind, was ever changing his
ministers.”[870] He had employed men chosen from every available class of
society in turn, and none of his experiments had altogether brought him
satisfaction. Feudal nobles, court officials, confidential servants and friends,
had all alike been tried and, sooner or later, found wanting.[871] There was
only one who had never yet failed him in a service of twenty-five years’
duration—Richard de Lucy “the loyal”; but in the summer of 1179 Richard
de Lucy, to his master’s great regret, resigned his office of justiciar and
retired to end his days a few months later as a brother of an Augustinian
house which he had founded at Lesnes in Kent to the honour of S. Thomas
of Canterbury.[872] Henry in this extremity fell back once more upon a

precedent of his grandfather’s time and determined to place the chief
administration, for the moment at least, again in clerical hands. Instead of a
single justiciar-bishop, however, he appointed three—the bishops of
Winchester, Ely and Norwich;[873] all of whom, under their earlier
appellations of Richard of Ilchester, Geoffrey Ridel and John of Oxford,
had long ago acquired ample experience and shewn ample capacity for the
work of secular administration.[874]

[870] “Sic animum a proposito non immutans, circa personas mutabiles
immutabilem semper sæpe mutavit sententiam.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p.
434—part of a long passage which sets forth very fully the motives and the
general aims and results of Henry’s administrative changes.

[871] R. Diceto as above, pp. 434–435.

[872] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 238. Cf. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p.
190.

[873] R. Diceto as above, p. 435.

[874] Richard of Ilchester is well known as an active official of the
Exchequer; see below, pp. 193, 194. Geoffrey Ridel seems to have acted as vice-
chancellor throughout S. Thomas’s primacy and exile; see Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p.
174, note 1. As for John of Oxford, his diplomatic talents are only too notorious.

This arrangement was however only provisional. The number of judicial
circuits was again raised to four, and to each of the three southern circuits
was despatched one of the justiciar-bishops, with a royal clerk and three
laymen to act as his subordinate assistants. The fourth circuit, which took in
the whole district between the Trent and the Scottish border, was intrusted
to six justices, of whom only two were clerks; one of these, Godfrey de
Lucy the archdeacon of Richmond, a brother of the late chief justiciar, stood
nominally at the head of the commission; but there can be little doubt that
its real head was one of his lay colleagues—Ralf de Glanville,[875] the
faithful sheriff of Lancashire and castellan of Richmond to whom William
the Lion had given up his sword at Alnwick in 1174;[876] and these six were
appointed to form the committee for hearing the complaints of the people,
apparently in succession to the five who had been selected in the previous
year.[877] All four bodies of judges brought up a report of their proceedings
to the king at Westminster on August 27,[878] and it seems to have been the

most satisfactory which he had yet received. When he went over sea in the
following April, he left Ralf de Glanville to represent him in England as
chief justiciar.[879] Ralf’s business capacities proved to be at least as great,
and his honesty as stainless, as those of his predecessor; and from that time
forth the management of the entire legal and judicial administration was left
in his hands. Circuits, variously distributed, continued to be made from year
to year and for divers purposes by companies of judges, ranging in total
numbers from three to twenty-two;[880] while the King’s Court and the
Exchequer pursued their work on the lines already laid down, without
further interruption, till the end of Henry’s reign.

[875] See the lists in Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 238, 239; Rog. Howden
(Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 190, 191.

[876] Jordan Fantosme, v. 1811 (Michel, p. 82).

[877] “Isti sex sunt justitiæ in curiâ regis constituti ad audiendum clamores
populi.” Gesta Hen. as above, p. 239. See on this Stubbs, Gesta Hen., vol. ii.
pref. p. lxxiii, and Constit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 601, 602.

[878] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 436.

[879] Rog. Howden as above, p. 215.

[880] See notices of the circuits and of the sessions of the Curia Regis and
Exchequer in Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 236, 237, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251,
253, 258, 259, 265, 272, 273, 281, 291.

The last of Henry’s great legal measures, with the exception of a Forest
Assize issued in 1184, was an ordinance published in the autumn of 1181
and known as the Assize of Arms. Its object was to define more fully and
exactly the military obligations of the people at large in the service of the
king and the defence of the country;—in a word, to put once again upon a
more definite footing the old institution of the “fyrd,” which was the only
effective counterpoise to the military power of the barons, and whose
services in 1173 and 1174 had proved it to be well worthy of the royal
consideration and encouragement. The Assize of 1181 declared the
obligation of bearing arms at the king’s command to be binding upon every
free layman in the realm. The character of the arms with which men of
various ranks were required to provide themselves was defined according to

a graduated scale, from the full equipment of the knight down to the mail-
coat, steel-cap and spear of the burgher and the simple freeman.[881] The
justices were directed to ascertain, through the “lawful men” of the
hundreds and towns, what persons fell under each category, to enroll their
names, read out the Assize in their presence, and make them swear to
provide themselves with the proper accoutrements before S. Hilary’s day.
[882]
Every man’s arms were to be carefully kept and used solely for the
royal service; they were not to be taken out of the country, or alienated in
any way;[883] at their owner’s death they were to pass to his heir;[884] if any
man possessed other arms than those required of him by the Assize, he was
to dispose of them in such a manner that they might be used in the king’s
service;[885] and all this was enforced by a stern threat of corporal
punishment upon defaulters.[886]

[881] Ass. Arms, cc. 1–3 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 154; from Gesta Hen.,
vol. i. pp. 278–280. The Assize is also given by Rog. Howden, vol. ii. pp. 261,
262).

[882] Ib. cc. 9 and 4 (Stubbs as above, pp. 155, 156, 154).

[883] Ib. cc. 4, 8 (pp. 154, 155).

[884] Ib. c. 5 (p. 155).

[885] Ib. cc. 6, 7 (as above).

[886] Ib. c. 10 (p. 156).

The freemen who were armed under this Assize had little occasion to use
their weapons so long as King Henry lived. Within the four seas of Britain
there was almost unbroken peace till the end of his reign. The treaty with
Scotland was ratified by the public homage of William the Lion to Henry
and his son at York on August 10, 1175;[887] and thenceforth Henry’s sole
trouble from that quarter was the necessity of arbitrating between William
and his unruly vassals in Galloway,[888] and of advising him in his
ecclesiastical difficulties with the Roman see. The western border of
England was less secure than the northern; yet even in Wales the authority
of the English Crown had made a considerable advance since Henry’s
accession. His first Welsh war, directed against the princes of North Wales

in 1157, had little practical result. A second expedition marched in 1163
against Rees Ap-Griffith, prince of South Wales, and a lucky incident at the
outset insured its success. Directly in the king’s line of march from
Shrewsbury into South Wales, between Wenlock and Newport, there ran a
streamlet called Pencarn—a mountain-torrent passable only at certain
points. One of these was an ancient ford concerning which a prophecy
attributed to the enchanter Merlin declared: “When ye shall see a strong
man with a freckled face rush in upon the Britons, if he cross the ford of
Pencarn, then know ye that the might of Cambria shall perish.” The Welsh
guarded this ford with the utmost care to prevent Henry from crossing it;
he, ignorant of the prophecy, sent his troops over by another passage, and
was about to follow them himself, when a loud blast from their trumpets on
the opposite bank caused his horse to rear so violently that he was obliged
to turn away and seek a means of crossing elsewhere. He found it at the
fatal spot, and as the Welsh saw him dash through the stream their hearts
sank in despair.[889] He marched unopposed from one end of South Wales to
the other, through Glamorgan and Carmarthen as far as Pencader;[890] here
Rees made his submission;[891] and Rees himself, Owen of North Wales,
and several other Welsh princes appeared and swore allegiance to King
Henry and his heir in that famous council of Woodstock where the first
quarrel arose between Henry and Thomas of Canterbury.[892]

[887] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 94–96. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 79.
Cf. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 38 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 198).

[888] On the Galloway affair see Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 67, 68, 79,
80, 99, 126, 313, 336, 339, 348, 349; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. pp. 63, 69,
105, 299, 309.

[889] Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr. l. i. c. 6 (Dimock, vol. vi. pp. 62, 63).

[890] Ib. l. ii. c. 10 (p. 138).

[891] Ann. Cambr. a. 1164 (Williams, p. 49). Brut y Tywys., a. 1162 (Williams,
p. 199). Both dates are self-evidently wrong; the only possible one is the
intermediate year.

[892] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

Next year Rees, provoked as he alleged by Henry’s non-fulfilment of his
promises and also by the shelter given to the slayer of his nephew by Earl
Roger of Clare, harried the whole border and roused all Wales to fling off
the yoke of the “Frenchmen,” as the Welsh still called their Norman
conquerors.[893] Henry was obliged to delay his vengeance till the following
summer, when it furnished him with an excellent pretext for escaping from
his ecclesiastical and political entanglements on the continent.[894] He set
out from Oswestry[895] at the head of a vast army drawn from all parts of his
dominions, both insular and continental, and reinforced by Flemish and
Scottish allies.[896] All the princes of Wales were arrayed against him, and
both parties intended the campaign to be decisive. But the wet climate of
the Welsh hills proved a more dangerous foe than the mountaineers
themselves; and after remaining for some time encamped at Berwen, Henry
was compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, completely defeated by the
ceaseless rain,[897] and venting his baffled wrath against the Welsh in a
savage mutilation of their hostages.[898] For six years after this, as we have
seen, he never had time to visit his island realm at all, and the daring
“French” settlers in Wales or on its borders, such as the Geraldines or the
De Clares, were free to fight their own battles and make their own alliances
with the Welsh just as they chose; it was not till Henry in 1171 followed
them to their more distant settlement in Ireland that he again entered South
Wales. Then he used his opportunity for a series of personal interviews with
Rees,[899] which ended in a lasting agreement. Rees was left, in the phrase
of his native chronicler, as the king’s “justice” over all South Wales.[900]
How far he maintained, along the border or within his own territories, the
peace and order whose preservation formed the main part of an English
justiciar’s duty, may be doubted; but in the rebellion of 1174 he shewed his
personal loyalty to the king by marching all the way into Staffordshire to
besiege Tutbury for him, and some of his followers did equally good service
in the suppression of the Norman revolt.[901] David of North Wales, too, if
he did nothing to help the king, at least resisted the temptation of joining his
enemies; and the war was no sooner fairly over than, anxious that some
reflection of the glories of English royalty should be cast over his own
house, he became an eager suitor for the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma
—a suit which Henry found it politic to grant.[902] A few months later, in
June 1175, the king made an attempt to secure the tranquillity of the border

by binding all the barons of the district in a sworn mutual alliance for its
defence.[903] The attempt was not very successful; the border-warfare went
on in much the same way as of old; but it was not till the summer of 1184
that it grew serious enough to call for Henry’s personal intervention, and
then a march to Worcester sufficed to bring Rees of South Wales once more
to his feet.[904]

[893] Ann. Cambr. a. 1165 (Williams, pp. 49, 50). Brut y Tywys., a. 1163
(Williams, p. 199).

[894] See above, p. 56, note 3{223}.

[895] Ann. Cambr. a. 1166 (i.e. 1165; Williams, p. 50). Brut y Tywys., a. 1164
(Williams, p. 201). Gir. Cambr. Itin. Kambr., l. ii. c. 10 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 138).
According to the Brut (as above) Henry first “moved an army with extreme
haste, and came to Rhuddlan, and purposed to erect a castle there, and stayed
there three nights. After that he returned into England, and collected a vast
army,” etc. Following this, Mr. Bridgeman (Princes of S. Wales, p. 48) and Mr.
Eyton (Itin. Hen. II., pp. 79, 82) divide the Welsh campaign of 1165 into two,
one in May and the other in July. Neither the Ann. Cambr. nor Gerald, however,
make any mention of the Rhuddlan expedition.

[896] Ann. Cambr. and Brut y Tywys. as above.

[897] Brut y Tywys., a. 1164 (Williams, pp. 201, 203).

[898] Ibid. (p. 203). Chron. Mailros a. 1165.

[899] See Brut y Tywys., a. 1171, 1172 (Williams, pp. 213–219).

[900] Ib. a. 1172 (p. 219).

[901] See above, p. 164.

[902] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 397, 398.

[903] At the council held at Gloucester on June 29. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol.
i. p. 92.

[904] Ib. p. 314.

It was the latest-won dependency of the English crown which during
these years gave the most trouble to its wearer. If Henry found it hard to
secure fit instruments for the work of government and administration in
England, he found it harder still to secure them for the same work in

Ireland. At the outbreak of the barons’ revolt he had at once guarded against
all danger of the rebels finding support in Ireland by recalling the garrisons
which he had left in the Irish coast-towns and summoning the chief men of
the new vassal state, particularly Richard of Striguil and Hugh de Lacy, to
join him personally in Normandy.[905] Richard served him well in the war as
commandant of the important border-fortress of Gisors;[906] and it may have
been as a reward for these services that he was sent back to Ireland as
governor in Hugh’s stead[907] at the close of the year. For the next two
years, while the king had his hands full in Normandy and England, matters
in Ireland went much as they had gone before his visit there; the Norman-
English settlers pursued their strifes and their alliances with their Irish
neighbours or with each other, and granted out to their followers the lands
which they won, entirely at their own pleasure.[908] But the lesson which
Henry was meanwhile teaching their brethren in England was not thrown
away upon them; and at the close of 1175 it was brought home to them in
another way. Roderic O’Conor, moved as it seems by the fame of Henry’s
successes, and also perhaps by two papal bulls—Adrian’s famous
“Laudabiliter,” and another from the reigning Pope Alexander—which
Henry had lately caused to be published at Waterford,[909] at last bent his
stubborn independence to send three envoys to the English king with
overtures for a treaty of peace. The treaty was signed at Windsor on October
6. Roderic submitted to become Henry’s liegeman, and to pay him a yearly
tribute of one hide “pleasing to the merchants” for every ten head of cattle
throughout Ireland; on these conditions he was confirmed in the
government and administration of justice over the whole island, except
Leinster, Meath and Waterford, and authorized to reckon upon the help of
the royal constables in compelling the obedience of his vassals and
collecting from them their share of the tribute.[910]

[905] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 136–141. Cf. above, p. 145.

[906] Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), p. 137.

[907] Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 44 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 298).

[908] For the history of these years in Ireland see Four Masters, a. 1173–1175
(O’Donovan, vol. iii. pp. 9–23); Gir. Cambr. Expugn. Hibern., l. ii. cc. 1–4
(Dimock, vol. v. pp. 308–314); Anglo-Norm. Poem (Michel), pp. 142 to end.