His
attitude
was natural, for it must have seemed
a noble thing to be head of the Church in England.
a noble thing to be head of the Church in England.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
549 (#595) ############################################
Death of Mandeville. Matilda leaves England
549
on a snowy night by climbing down a rope hung from the battlements, and
got away to Wallingford. By this time the Earl of Gloucester had returned
from Normandy bringing the Empress' little son Henry with him and
a force of 360 knights. But this reinforcement was inadequate to restore
his sister's fortunes and only enabled him in 1143 and 1144 to maintain
his hold on Dorset and Wiltshire. Meantime Stephen took heart, and
late in 1143 forced the Earl of Essex to surrender his castles. This
move gave Stephen undisputed control of London and Essex, but Man-
deville himself set up his standard in the fenlands, and having seized
Ramsey and the Isle of Ely, held out there, plundering the surrounding
country like a brigand until his death from a wound nine months later.
A terrible account of his cruelties, especially of his pitiless attacks on
villages and churches and of his extortions and use of torture, can be read
in the Peterborough Chronicle; for there can be little doubt that the
much-quoted picture of Stephen's reign, with which the Chronicle ends,
though it professes to be a picture of all England, was really inspired by
memories of the outrages which the monks had seen enacted in their
own neighbourhood in 1144. With the removal of Mandeville and the
return of Vere to his allegiance the Empress' chances of success finally
faded away. For three years more the Earl of Gloucester kept up a desul-
tory struggle; but he too died in 1147, and early the next year Matilda,
convinced that all hope of gaining her inheritance was gone, left England
for good, her little son Henry having departed some time previously.
Freed of his rival's presence, Stephen had a second chance of making
himself master of England. The Angevin party was at a very low ebb,
and had he made a determined effort to secure Wallingford, Gloucester,
and Bristol, he might have reduced it to submission. He was, however,
much too easy-going to seize the opportunity, and allowed five years
(1147-1152) to pass away, during which no active operations are recorded,
except a half-hearted attempt to take Worcester from the men of the
Count of Meulan, who had declared definitely for the Empress to escape
losing his Beaumont patrimony in Normandy. Even when the young
Henry reappeared in England in 1149 to rally his depressed friends,
Stephen made no attempt at all to interfere with his movements, but
allowed the youth to journey unmolested all the way to Carlisle to visit
his great-uncle King David. When he heard that the Earl of Chester,
who desired to secure Lancaster, had also gone to Carlisle, he was indeed
obliged to take some notice; but his action took the unwise form of
bribing the earl to remain loyal by extravagant grants of land in Notting-
hamshire and Leicestershire and by allowing him once more to take
possession of Lincoln Castle. This undignified move achieved its purpose
for the moment; and Henry, who was only sixteen, retired to Normandy
having effected nothing. That Henry's visit was so peaceful shews that
both sides were tired of fighting; and evidently Stephen, provided he was
left in peace, was quite content to let south-western England alone. It
CH. XVI.
## p. 550 (#596) ############################################
550 Stephen and Eugenius III. Geoffrey conquers Normandy
did not seem to matter to him that his writs did not run there. In the
bulk of England on the other hand, where the popular sentiment was on
his side, he still maintained his predecessor's forms of government,
appointing sheriffs and justices and holding the royal and communal
courts; but such scraps of evidence as we have shew that his revenues
were carelessly collected, and that the standard of order which he main-
tained was a very low one, each petty baron being allowed to build him-
self a stronghold and pursue his private feuds with his neighbours without
much hindrance. The simple explanation is that Stephen was fast ageing.
In 1147 he must have been nearly sixty, and it was only in ecclesiastical
matters, where fighting was not needful, that he seems still to have
desired to get his way. But even this display of will was unfortunate, as
it led him into a serious quarrel with Pope Eugenius III over filling the
archbishopric of York and into a rash attempt to prevent the Archbishop
of Canterbury from attending a council held by the Pope at Rheims in
1148. In both matters Stephen could plead that he was following in the
footsteps of Henry I; but the ecclesiastical world regarded his actions as
breaches of his promise that the Church should be free. The result was
that both the Papacy and Archbishop Theobald became his declared
enemies; and when in 1151 Stephen desired to have his son Eustace
crowned and formally recognised as his successor, they both refused to
permit any prelate to perform the ceremony, even though Stephen gave
way in the matter of the archbishopric of York. In spite of this rebuff,
as he had survived so many difficulties, and as the Count of Anjou and
his wife continued to leave him in peace, Stephen at this time probably
considered his son's succession reasonably certain. But the reality was
different. The real danger lay not in England but in Normandy, where
the Count of Anjou had been steadily gaining power year by year ever
since Stephen had turned his back on the duchy in 1138. As a prudent
man, Count Geoffrey had never shewn any desire to help his wife in
England; but in the duchy he had made the most of every opportunity
for establishing her claims, and by patience had not only conquered the
land but by his good government had almost brought the inhabitants
to forget their anti-Angevin bias and become supporters of his family
interests. He had first begun to make progress in 1141 when he got
possession of Falaise and Lisieux. In 1142 he acquired the Avranchin
and the Cotentin. By the end of 1143 the majority of the Norman pre-
lates and fief-holders joined him, led by the Count of Meulan; and in
1144 even the capital and the Archbishop of Rouen submitted, where-
upon Geoffrey publicly assumed the title of duke. A little later Louis VII
formally invested him with the duchy, and by 1145 only the castle of
Arques still held out for Stephen. Having conquered the duchy, Geoffrey
at once set to work to restore it to order, but he was wise enough to
make it clear that he held his prize for his son Henry and not for himself.
Wherever he could, he continued the institutions and policy of Henry I,
## p. 551 (#597) ############################################
Geoffrey succeeded by Henry of Anjou
551
and made no attempt to introduce Angevin customs. He suppressed the
justiciarship and made Rouen much more the capital than it had been
before, but he retained all the traditions of the Anglo-Norman chancery,
and when he wanted new officials drew his recruits from Normandy and
not from Anjou. He had his son instructed by the most famous Norman
scholar of the time, William of Conches, and in issuing charters, though
he ignored the Empress, frequently joined the young Henry's name with his
own, and declared that he was acting with his advice and consent. Finally,
as soon as his son, in 1150, reached the age of seventeen, he invested him
with the duchy and himself withdrew to Anjou. The very next year Count
Geoffrey in the prime of his manhood died suddenly of a fever, and the young
Henry unexpectedly found himself Count of Anjou and Maine as well as
Duke of Normandy, and secure at any rate on the continent in the position
which his grandfather Henry I had so ardently desired should be in store
for him. The sudden elevation of the young Henry to a position of power
and prestige was a threat to Stephen which he could not well have anti-
cipated; and the menace became even greater in May 1152, when the
young duke was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of
Louis VII, and in her right became Count of Poitou and overlord of all
the fiefs in south-western France from Limoges to the Pyrenees. At a
stroke Henry had become feudal head of territories as large as Stephen's,
and it was only to be expected that, as soon as he possibly could, he would
make a serious attempt to regain his mother's English inheritance.
The imminence of the danger woke up Stephen. As soon as he heard
of Henry's doings, he renewed his demand that Eustace should be crowned
and also ordered an attack on Wallingford, the unsubdued stronghold
whence Brian Fitz Count had defiantly upheld the cause of the Empress
in the Thames valley for nearly fourteen years. The resumption of active
measures, however, came too late. Rather than obey Stephen, Archbishop
Theobald fled across the Channel, and before the resistance of Wallingford
could be overcome Henry himself arrived in England with a small force
of knights and foot-soldiers. He landed in January 1153 and at once
received an offer of support from the Earl of Chester. A few weeks later
he captured Malmesbury and relieved Wallingford. But the desire for
peace was so general that a truce was agreed upon for negotiations. This
enabled Henry to visit Bristol, whence he set out on a march through
central England, visiting in turn Warwick, Leicester, Stamford, and
Nottingham. The reception he met with was a mixed one, but clearly
the midlands were wavering. Meantime Stephen was detained in East
Anglia, having to face the Earl of Norfolk who had seized Ipswich in
Henry's interest. So matters stood six months after Henry's landing, when
suddenly England was startled by the news that Stephen's heir Eustace
had died at Bury St Edmunds. Only a year before Stephen had lost his
devoted wife, and this second family catastrophe seems to have deprived
him of all desire to prolong the dynastic struggle, even though he had
CH. XVI.
## p. 552 (#598) ############################################
652 Stephen makes peace with Henry. Stephen's death
552
another son in whose interest he might have gone on fighting. He ac-
cordingly permitted his brother the Bishop of Winchester to join with
Archbishop Theobald in mediating a peace, by which it was arranged
that he should remain King of England for his life but that Henry should
be recognised as his successor and should in future be consulted in all the
business of the realm. This settlement, which was ratified in November
by Henry and his partisans doing homage to Stephen at Winchester be-
fore an assembly of magnates, was welcome to all parties; to Stephen
because he was old and broken, to Stephen's heir William because he was
unambitious and was guaranteed the earldom of Surrey in right of his
wife and also the succession to all his father's private fiefs, to the barons
because it freed them from the fear of the rule of the Empress and secured
them the restoration of their Norman estates, to the leaders of the Church
and the Papacy because it meant the humiliation of a prince who had
tried to thwart them, and to the mass of the people because it promised
the return of order after fifteen vears of license and the destruction of the
mushroom castles which had been dominating the country-side. To the
young Henry the slight concessions made to Stephen were unimportant.
He was still under twenty-one and could well afford to wait for an undis-
puted succession. Besides he had plenty of problems to occupy his attention
in his continental duchies and could not afford to remain indefinitely in
England. As it turned out, Henry had not to stand aside for long. Having
set the work of restoration on foot he withdrew about Easter 1154 to
Normandy, but six months later Stephen died and in December Henry
returned to London for his coronation at Westminster, determined to
re-establish his grandfather's system of government in every particular.
The years which witnessed the struggle for the throne between Stephen
and Matilda form a dismal and barren period when compared with the
thirty years of
progress enjoyed under the elder Henry. It is
doubtful, however, whether historians have not been inclined to paint them
in too sombre colours, indulging in generalisations which seem to assume
that all parts of England were plunged into anarchy for fifteen years. So
far as fighting is concerned, this clearly was not the case. At times and
in certain districts, chiefly in the valley of the upper Thames and in the
fens round Ely and Ramsey, there was no doubt serious havoc; but in
the greater part of England the fighting was never very serious or pro-
longed. What the people had to complain of was the failure to put down
ordinary crime and robbery and the ineffectiveness of the courts of justice.
They could see the feudal lords constantly arrogating new powers to
themselves, and attempting new exactions. But it is impossible to suppose
that the feudal lords as a whole were guilty of the crimes and outrages
which undoubtedly were committed by some of the Empress' captains in
Wiltshire and by Geoffrey de Mandeville. The pictures painted in the
Peterborough Chronicle and by monastic writers generally are certainly
overdrawn. If some feudal lords were turbulent and cruel, it cannot be
peace and
## p. 553 (#599) ############################################
Character of Stephen's reign
553
overlooked that a considerable number of the magnates from Stephen
downwards were remarkable at this period for their works of piety. It
was in Stephen's reign that the only English monastic order was founded
by Gilbert of Sempringham, that the canons of Prémontré first came
to England, and that the Orders of Savigny and Cîteaux spread over the
country. In all more than fifty religious houses were founded and en-
dowed by the baronage at this time. Castle building and priory building
in fact go very much together. Another point to be remembered is that
for the most part the boroughs were free from exactions throughout the
reign. A few were the scenes of fighting, but none had to pay the heavy
aids which Henry had imposed. It was the same with the Danegeld. So
far as is known Stephen never attempted to levy it. The charge against
bim is, not that he was avaricious but that he failed to get in his revenues.
All accounts agree that he was genial and generous. He had no ambition
to play a part on the continent or to be an autocrat; and so he let the
powers of the Crown be curtailed, and lived on his own revenues. His
reign in fact was disastrous for the autocratic ideal of government set up
by the Conqueror and elaborated by Henry; it also witnessed a growth
in the pretensions of the clergy, and the practice of appealing to the Pope.
But to those who do not place order above everything and who realise
how oppressive Henry's government was becoming in spite of its legality,
it must always remain a moot question whether Stephen's reign was such
a total set-back for the mass of the people as the ecclesiastical writers of
the day would have us believe. At any rate, in the sphere of the arts, of
learning, and of manners there were movements which are hard to
reconcile with an age given over to anarchy. In architecture, for in-
stance, the activity, which under Henry's orderly rule had perhaps
culminated in Flambard's buildings at Durham, by no means ceased.
On the contrary, it was under Stephen that the great naves were erected
at Norwich and Bury St Edmunds by Bishop Eborard and Abbot
Anselm, that the minster arose at Romsey and the noble hospital of
St Cross at Winchester, that the pointed arch was introduced at
Fountains and Buildwas, that stone vaulting began to be used for large
spans in place of the Hat painted wooden ceilings, and that sculptured
doorways became numerous. In literature and learning it was the period
when Geoffrey of Monmouth published his epoch-making romances and
was rewarded by Stephen with the bishopric of St Asaph; when
Adelard, the pioneer student of Arabic science and philosophy, wrote
his treatise on the astrolabe at Bath and dedicated it to the young
Henry Plantagenet; when Robert of Cricklade abridged Pliny's Natural
History, and when John of Salisbury acquired his love of the classics.
It was the period when the ideas of chivalry began to take hold of the
baronage, and when tournaments first became popular. Finally, it was a
period when no attempt was made to debase the coinage, and when the
two races, French and English, began to be blended into one nation.
CH, XVI.
## p. 554 (#600) ############################################
554
CHAPTER XVII.
ENGLAND: HENRY II.
I.
The lands of which Henry II was in name the ruler stretched from the
Tweed to the Pyrenees. England was but one member of a dominion
that cannot be called an empire, for it was only held together by the
common allegiance that individual magnates owed to Henry. As with
the king, so with his barons: Robert, Earl of Leicester, was lord of
Breteuil; his elder brother was Count of Meulan. The great men of
Henry's day held land on both sides of the Channel and frequently passed
from their English to their continental possessions. Henry's own time
was fairly equally divided, though France claimed more of it than
England The defence of his continental boundary was a perpetual
problem, and prosecution of his frontier claims a constant occupation;
the lawyer in Henry made him unwilling to abandon any one of them.
England needed government and not defence; it gave Henry the greatest
of his many titles, but in no sense was it the centre of his dominions.
From either point of view, the “Angevin Empire” is a modern conception.
Already Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou, Henry
became king without opposition on Stephen’s death on 25 October 1154.
Stephen had recognised him as his heir and justiciar of the kingdom by the
treaty of Wallingford of the previous year. What was meant by this title
is uncertain, but Roger of Howden, writing at the end of the century, says
It may be convenient to insert a table shewing the time spent by the king him-
self in England and Normandy respectively.
England
Normandy
8 December 1154
January 1156
April 1157
April 1157
August 1158
January 1163
January 1163
March 1165
May 1165
May 1165
March 1166
March 1170
March 1170
June 1170
August 1171
August 1171
May 1172 *
July 1174+
July 1174
August 1174
May 1175
May 1175
August 1177
July 1178
July 1178
April 1180
July 1181
July 1181
March 1182
June 1184
June 1184
April 1185
April 1186
April 1186
February 1187
January 1188
January 1188
July 1188
6 July 1189
*[This time was spent mainly in Ireland, not England. ]
+ [The Pipe Roll of 1173 suggests that Henry spent four days at Northampton
in the course of the year. There is no other evidence of the visit. ]
1
## p. 555 (#601) ############################################
The kingdom secured
555
that thereafter all the business of the kingdom was done through him.
In any case, the work of demolishing the unlicensed castles of the anarchy
was begun before Stephen's death, although the slowness with which
the work was accomplished almost caused a rupture between Henry
and Stephen. As king, Henry carried on the work, and used in the
administration men who had served Stephen before him. Archbishop
Theobald of Canterbury, Robert, Earl of Leicester, Richard de Luci,
had all played their parts in Stephen's reign. They now became Henry's
chief advisers, together with Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, his uncle, and
Thomas Becket, one of Theobald's clerks, whom Henry made Chancellor
on the archbishop's advice. Nigel, Bishop of Ely, Henry I's treasurer,
was called in to re-organise the Exchequer.
The assertion of royal authority was made without difficulty. Ranulf,
Earl of Chester, who had nearly created for himself an independent
principality in central England, died in December 1153, leaving a child
as his heir. No one seems to have considered the possibility of making
Stephen's surviving son, William, king. The Church was on Henry's
side, and the baronage, tired of a weak king, accepted the situation.
After keeping his Christmas court at Bermondsey, Henry visited the
northern and eastern parts of his kingdom. On 23 January he was at
Lincoln with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Master of the
Templars in England'. In February he was at York, and William of
Aumâle, Earl of Yorkshire, surrendered the castle of Scarborough.
Thence Henry went to Nottingham, and William Peverel of Nottingham,
the greatest baron of Nottingham and Derby, suspected of poisoning the
Earl of Chester, took shelter under the cowl. The only serious opposi-
tion to the surrender of castles was in the west. Roger, Earl of Hereford,
fortified Hereford and Gloucester; Hugh Mortimer fortified Wigmore,
Cleobury Mortimer, and Bridgnorth. The Earl submitted on the per-
suasion of the Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, but the subjuga-
tion of Hugh Mortimer's castles occupied most of the summer of 1155.
At a great council held at Wallingford in April Henry tried to
secure the succession to the throne. He caused all the magnates to swear
fealty to himself and his heirs, William, who was not yet two, and, failing
William, Henry, born in the preceding February. At the Winchester
council in September he put forward his plan of conquering Ireland,
to make a principality for his younger brother William. It seems to be
this proposal, together with the Toulouse war of 1159, that has made
historians talk of Henry as of one who set order in his kingdom that he
might engage in wars of conquest. It is the prerogative of youth to
dream, but history suggests that Henry's dreams were short. There was
sound political reason for the Irish proposal of 1155: William's support
was necessary, for Henry's second brother, Geoffrey, was making trouble
by insisting on his claims to Anjou and Touraine. To suppress him,
1 Cott. Vespasian E. xviii f. 73d.
CH. XVII.
## p. 556 (#602) ############################################
556
Wales and Scotland
1
1
1
and to assure himself of the loyalty of Aquitaine and Normandy, Henry
left England in January 1156. The capture of Geoffrey's castles of Mira-
beau and Chinon ended his revolt. He was satisfied with compensation
in money and permission to accept the invitation of the men of the
eastern part of Brittany and make himself Count of Nantes. In his
attitude towards Brittany, both now and later in his reign, Henry was
but maintaining the policy of his ancestors who claimed overlordship of
that province. In his relations with continental powers the same feeling
can be traced, a desire to lose nothing that had come to him by inherit-
ance or marriage; no right must be given up, no claim allowed to lapse.
But Henry was only an aggressor in so far as he forced others to recognise
claims which they would rather see forgotten. The war of Toulouse
which occupied the July, August, and September of 1159 was undertaken
to recover Toulouse, to which Henry inherited a title through his wife.
When the King of France interfered, Henry gave up the war; to con-
tinue it against his overlord would have been going beyond his right.
The question of Henry's relations with Wales and Scotland had to be
faced early in the reign. Both countries had gained by the anarchy in
England. David of Scotland had been succeeded in 1153 by his grand-
son Malcolm IV, who visited Henry in England, and agreed to surrender
Northumberland and Cumberland, with the castles of Bamburgh, New-
castle, and Carlisle. Either at Peak Castle or at Chester he did homage
to Henry for his English lands, the honour of Huntingdon. A Welsh
expedition was not only essential from the standpoint of general policy;
it was a means of securing the gratitude of marcher lords who had lost
land in the time of Stephen. The object of Henry's attack was the
northern kingdom of Gwynedd, where Owen Gwynedd had built up a
principality which Ranulf, Earl of Chester, himself had feared. The suc-
cession of a child of six to the earldom exposed it to Owen's attacks.
Henry's Welsh expedition of 1158, though not a brilliant military success,
achieved for the moment its end; Owen was forced to give hostages, and
his activities were checked for a time. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the ruler of
Deheubarth, the southern kingdom, after some hesitation, acknowledged
the overlordship of Henry. The Clares and Cliffords were restored to the
lands that Rhys had conquered in the previous reign. Neither Rhys, how-
ever, nor Owen was prepared to acquiesce in any reduction of power, and
in 1162 Rhys took Llandovery Castle from Walter Clifford. In the next
year Henry led an expedition into Wales, passing through Carmarthen and
taking Rhys prisoner at Pencader. Rhys was allowed to do homage and
return to his principality, but he immediately re-opened war, ravaging
Cardigan until little more than the castle and the town remained to the
Normans. Henry's absorption in the Becket quarrel after 1163 en-
couraged Rhys and Owen to make a combined attack on the marcher
barons. The lesser princes of Wales were attracted into the alliance by
the prestige of the two leaders. The failure of Henry's great expedition
1
## p. 557 (#603) ############################################
Becket as Chancellor
557
of 1165 to suppress the coalition secured for the Welsh another hundred
years of freedom. Henry made no other great effort, and from that time
his attention was confined to strengthening the border castles. His con-
cern was not to restrain the Welsh princes or keep their lands for the
marcher lords, but merely to retain the overlordship of the two kingdoms
of Deheubarth and Gwynedd. In the troubles of the rebellion of 1173-4
the Welsh princes were faithful to Henry.
The minister to whom Henry from the first gave his fullest confidence
was Thomas Becket, his Chancellor. The office of chancellor involved the
custody of the king's seal and constant attendance on his person: Becket
is almost always a witness, often the sole witness, to the charters and writs
of the early years of the reign. His power, however, depended not on his
office, but on his intimacy with the king. It was at Henry's gift that he
received the custody of vacant benefices, not by virtue of his office as
chancellor. Becket acquired wealth and became a leader of fashion. Too
busy to return to his archidiaconal duties, he earned but mild reproaches
from his archbishop and requests that he would forward certain business
with the king. Through him the king might be approached not only by
schemers like Arnulf, Bishop of Lisieux, but by such men as John of
Salisbury. The circumstances of Becket's death have secured the pre-
servation of masses of material, not only relating to his life as archbishop,
but also to his time as chancellor. His work can also be traced in the
official language of the Pipe Roll clerks. He was concerned in the restora-
tion of order, in the administration of justice, in diplomatic business at
the French court. His writ could authorise the payment of money out
of the treasury, a right that later in the reign belonged only to the
Justiciar. It was with reason, though in flattery, that Peter, Abbot
of La Celle at Troyes, wrote: “Who does not know you to be second
to the king in four kingdoms ? ”
Archbishop Theobald died in April 1161, and a year passed before
Henry decided that Becket should succeed him. The stories of Henry's
announcement of his decision to Thomas and Thomas' unwillingness to
become primate were probably invented to fit the history of the struggle.
The nolo episcopari of Thomas was probably no less common form than
that of most contemporary bishops; there is nothing in his career to
suggest an unwillingness to accept great office. He was a man of high
ambitions. Of undoubted ability, he was, however, not fitted to be Lan-
franc to Henry's William. He had neither the training nor the sanity
of that great archbishop and administrator, nor among the churchmen
of Henry's day would it have been easy to find a second Lanfranc.
Henry's hesitation may mean that he was not sure of Becket. There is
no evidence that he was obnoxious to the ecclesiastical party as a whole;
Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford and afterwards of London, was never
his friend, but Theobald seems to have desired him for a successor. Once
Becket was consecrated, he tried to be the perfect archbishop. He re-
CH. XVII.
## p. 558 (#604) ############################################
558
Becket as Archbishop; criminous clerks
signed the chancellorship, though he did not give up the archdeaconry of
Canterbury until the king forced him to do so. He played the ascetic as
perfectly as he had played the courtier. There was no insincerity in this
changed way of life.
He shewed from the first a determination to let go no right which the
Church could claim.
His attitude was natural, for it must have seemed
a noble thing to be head of the Church in England. He set about win-
ning back for his own Church of Canterbury the lands and rights which
it had lost. No claim was too shadowy for him. He demanded from the
king the custody of the castles of Rochester, Saltwood, and Hythe, from
the Earl of Hertford, Roger de Clare, his homage for Tonbridge Castle.
Forgetting his own past, he deprived clerks in the king's service of the
benefices in the see of Canterbury that they held as their reward. As
archbishop he claimed rights of patronage over all benefices on land held
by tenants of the see; he excommunicated William of Eynsford, a
tenant-in-chief for other lands, for resisting the application of this claim.
He came into conflict with the king over a matter of general administra-
tion. In July 1163 at the council of Woodstock, Henry proposed that
the sheriff's aid should be paid into the royal treasury. Becket's oppo-
sition was so vigorous that Henry dropped the plan. Flagrant cases of
the inadequacy of ecclesiastical punishment for crime, and of abuse in
ecclesiastical courts, came to complete the estrangement. On 1 October
1163 at the council at Westminster the question of criminous clerks was
discussed at length. The king and his advisers demanded that accused
clerks should answer the accusation in the lay court, that they should
be handed over to the ecclesiastical court for trial and judgment, and
that if the accused were found guilty he should be degraded and given
up to the secular power for punishment. Warrant for this procedure
could be found in Canon Law. Becket, with the support of the bishops,
answered, not that Henry's interpretation of Canon Law was unjustifiable,
but that “God will not judge a man twice for the same offence. ” Real-
ising that Becket would continue to evade the question of law, Henry
fell back on custom, and asked whether the bishops were prepared to
observe the ancient customs of the kingdom. After discussing the matter
among themselves, they said that they were prepared to observe them,
“saving their order. “ Hilary, Bishop of Chichester, alone promised to
observe them without this reservation. Henry broke up the council in
exasperated fury.
The king used every means in his power to overcome the clerical
opposition. He removed his heir from Becket's charge, and he took from
Becket the custody of the castles and honours of Eye and Berkhampstead.
He did his utmost to make a party against Becket among the bishops, and
the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London promised to observe
the customs. In the last three months of 1163, Arnulf, Bishop of Lisieux,
and Richard of Ilchester, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, are said to
## p. 559 (#605) ############################################
The Constitutions of Clarendon
559
have crossed the sea six times to gain the Pope's assent to the customs.
The Pope himself, exiled from Rome and travelling in northern France,
was unwilling to offend Henry. He obviously wished Becket to moderate
his opposition, although he did not immediately accede to Henry's re-
quests that Roger, Archbishop of York, should be appointed legate in
succession to Theobald, and that the bishops should be ordered to obey
the customs. Before the end of the year Becket gave way to the ex-
postulations of the bishops and the fears of the Pope and cardinals; he
promised his consent to the customs.
A council was therefore summoned to meet at Clarendon in January
1164 at which Becket might give his formal assent. He is said to have
come repenting his promise and prepared to withdraw it. The king in
the meantime must have caused the customs to be carefully drawn up
and engrossed. The writing of the Constitutions cannot have been left,
as some authorities would have us believe, until the council was in actual
progress; they were produced on the first day of the council. Becket
was only induced to agree to them by the persuasions of bishops, two
knights of the Temple, and the two senior earls, Cornwall and Leicester.
After giving his unqualified assent to the Constitutions and allowing the
bishops to do the same, Becket refused to take the irrevocable step of
sealing the document. The Constitutions had been engrossed modo ciro-
grafi, that is, they had been written out three times on one piece of
parchment. Before the parchment was severed into three, the two arch-
bishops and the king should each have affixed his seal to each copy of
the Constitutions. Since Becket refused his seal, the document apparently
unsealed, was cut into three parts. One part was given to the Arch-
bishop of York, one was thrust into Becket's hand, and the third was
laid up in the royal treasury.
There is no evidence that the general body of English clergy felt that
the Constitutions of Clarendon were any other than Henry claimed,
that is, an accurate representation of the customs of his grandfather's
time. The relations between Church and State had never exactly been
defined before. Such hesitation as the bishops may have felt in agreeing
to the Constitutions was probably due to a natural dislike of definition
and fear of precedent. The Church won little by Becket's death because
it wished to win little. It was not an aggressive body, and many of the
judges in its courts had been trained, some were still actually engaged,
in the king's service. To say that the king's policy at this time meant an
inevitable quarrel between Church and State is to go beyond the evidence.
What might have been expected was an assertion of the right of the
king's court to define the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and, there-
after, competition between the Church courts and the lay courts for
jurisdiction over individual cases. Henry did not begin the quarrel by
attempting a general revision of ecclesiastical justice. His ultimatum,
in the Constitutions, was as much directed against and caused by Becket's
CH. XVII.
## p. 560 (#606) ############################################
560
The fate of the Constitutions
general attitude of arrogant and aggressive rectitude as by the abuses of
ecclesiastical courts. A few years later, at the time of the Inquest of
Sheriffs, the barons submitted to a far more drastic supervision of feudal
justice than Henry ever proposed in the case of the courts of the Church.
Thomas was an exception among the churchmen of his day. He would
have found a congenial atmosphere in the Curia of Boniface VIII.
The fate of the Constitutions indicates the attitude of the English
Church to Henry's claims. Only in regard to criminous clerks and appeals
to the Pope was Henry forced to give way. Both sides laid particular
emphasis on the clause dealing with criminous clerks. Opinion among
canonists as to the validity of Henry's claims was divided. Passages in
Canon Law could be interpreted to mean that clerks found guilty and
degraded in the ecclesiastical court should be handed over to the lay
court for punishment. It does not seem to have been the opinion
canonists that this procedure was contrary to the dictum so constantly on
Becket's lips. The archbishop was no canonist, and there were those who
said that he was not even scholar enough to make a speech in Latin.
He concentrated on the question of punishment. His murder secured
for clerks immunity from lay punishment for their first crime. But it
should be remembered that, when Henry submitted on this point, and
indeed throughout the next century, the word clerk had not the wide
interpretation that it received in later times. In the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries a clerk had to prove his ordination, at least to the
sub-diaconate, before he was handed over to the official of the Church
to be tried in Court Christian. Moreover Henry succeeded in forcing
accused clerks to appear in the lay court to prove their clergy, although
Canon Law gives no justification for the practice. So much he gained.
His unfortunate surrender of the right to punish the guilty clerk left an
opening for private revenge. In 1202, in a trial for murder at Lincoln,
it was stated that the murdered man had been degraded from the
diaconate for killing a relative of the defendant.
The king retained without serious question much of what the Con-
stitutions gave him. Advowsons remained lay property; the king kept
control over the churches of his fee; elections to bishoprics were con-
ducted as before in the king's chapel. For the rest, the relations between
Church and State were left to be worked out in the practice of the courts.
By the Constitutions the king had agreed that jurisdiction over land
held in free alms belonged to the Church courts; but he had secured to
his own court the right of adjudging, in accordance with the verdict of a
jury, whether the land at issue were lay fee or free alms. Had the
Church courts been able to keep all the jurisdiction this clause would
have given them, much business would have been lost to the king's court;
for during the last half of the twelfth and throughout the thirteenth
century innumerable grants of lands were being made to religious houses
in free alıns. By John's day it was highly exceptional for this procedure
## p. 561 (#607) ############################################
The quarrel renewed
561
by the assize utrum, as it was called from the words of the writ which began
it, to be a prelude to a suit in the ecclesiastical court. The assize rolls
shew the religious houses using the layman's forms of action in the lay
courts. The assize utrum was already almost entirely confined to rectors
of parish churches, who without it would have found difficulty in proving
their right to the lands of their church appropriated by laymen. If the
jury's verdict in such a suit declared the land to be free alms the parson
recovered his land without further process of law. In this respect at
least the king had won far more than the customs of Henry I would
have given him. But the king's courts found it difficult to maintain
what Henry had asserted at Clarendon, jurisdiction over debts where the
bargain had included the formal pledging of faith. No one doubted
that it belonged to the Church courts to deal with questions of broken
faith. Henry declared in effect that the affidatio, or pledging of faith,
was not essential to the legal validity of a bargain, and that suits touch-
ing the bargain must be heard in his court. The lay court won in the
end, but it had to contend not only with ecclesiastical courts more
eager for jurisdiction than those of the twelfth century, but also against
the religious feeling of the English people.
Becket never intended to observe the Constitutions. He abstained
from the service of the altar as a penance for his weakness in ever promising
to observe them; and he even made an ineffectual attempt to leave the
country. The Pope took neither side, not daring to offend Henry nor
wishing to desert Becket. The next move came from the king. An officer
of the court, John the Marshal, father of the famous William Marshall,
Earl of Pembroke, complained to the king that the archbishop's court
had failed in justice in a plea which he had brought for the recovery of
land held of the see of Canterbury, and Becket was summoned to answer
for the failure of his court. Instead of sending an essoin, a formal excuse
for non-attendance, he sent four knights with letters from himself and the
sheriff of Kent to answer on his behalf. The case was adjourned, and
Becket was summoned to appear at a great council at Northampton in
October, to answer both for his previous contempt of the king's court
and for the failure of his own court to do right to John the Marshal.
Becket came to Northampton. He sought the king on 7 October, and
his case was heard the next day. On the original question, the case of
John the Marshal, the archbishop was successful, but the barons, both
lay and ecclesiastical, adjudged him guilty of contempt of the king's
court, and he therefore fell into the king's mercy. Although protesting
that no court had the right to try him, Becket was persuaded to offer to
make fine with the king for his amercement. The king, on the other
hand, seems to have come to Northampton with the intention of forcing
Becket's hand by attacking him in every possible way. He demanded an
account of the sums which Becket had received as custos of the honours
of Eye and Berkhampstead, of five hundred marks which he had received
C. LED. H. v0L, Y. CH. XVII.
36
## p. 562 (#608) ############################################
562
Becket's flight
1
i
1
from the king for the Toulouse campaign, of another five hundred marks
for which the king had been his pledge to a certain Jew, and finally of
the issues of the vacant sees which had passed through Becket's hands
while he was chancellor. Becket was forbidden to leave Northampton
until he had given the king security for the whole amount. The third
day of the council, Saturday 10 October, was passed by Becket in
discussing with the bishops and abbots the course that he should take.
However ungracious the king's demands, they did not alienate either the
bishops or the laity; some bishops even urged Becket to resign the
archbishopric and put himself in the king's mercy. On the following
Tuesday, Becket made up his mind to defiance. He forbade the bishops
to associate themselves in any judgment on him with regard to his con-
duct as chancellor, he appealed to the Pope, and he ordered the bishops
to excommunicate all who dared to give effect to the judgment of any
lay court upon him, thus directly contravening the Constitutions of
Clarendon. His action placed the bishops in a difficult position. They
must either endure the king's anger for breaking the eleventh clause of the
Constitutions of Clarendon or the censures of the Church for disobedience
to their archbishop. They evaded the dilemma by abstaining from judgment
upon the archbishop, but appealing to the Pope for his deposition on the
ground of his perjury in withdrawing the assent which he had originally
given to the Constitutions. The king's court never delivered its judg-
ment upon Becket. The barons, headed by Robert, Earl of Leicester,
qui dux erat verbi, went to pronounce it, but Becket did not stay to hear
it. He left the castle; next day he left Northampton; by 2 November
he had crossed the Channel as a fugitive.
The quarrel begun unnecessarily by Becket was pursued unmercifully
by the king. He exiled all the archbishop's kinsfolk, of whom there seem
to have been many. They had become rich with drippings from Becket's
abundance, and their departure impressed contemporaries so much that
private documents may occasionally be found dated “in the year in which
the king caused the kinsfolk of the archbishop to cross over. "? Becket's
exile lasted for six years. To a man of his temper it must have been hard
to bear, and its intluence upon his character was lamentable-he became
fanatic. The Pope was still unwilling to commit himself. Henry tried
to intimidate him by negotiations with the Emperor, but it was obvious
that opinion in England, although almost wholly on Henry's side in his
struggle with the archbishop, was not favourable to dealings with the
anti Pope. Alexander forbade Becket to take any irrevocable step until
Easter 1166. By the time the truce expired, the Pope was back at Rome,
and ready to support the archbishop. Becket was authorised to excom-
municate all who had occupied the lands of Canterbury since his flight,
and was given a legatine commission over all England except the see
of York. At Vézelay on Whitsunday Becket excommunicated John of
1 Cott. Nero C. i f. 200.
1
1
## p. 563 (#609) ############################################
The reconciliation
563
Oxford, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, and Richard of Ilchester, after-
wards Bishop of Winchester, for communicating with the supporters of
the anti-Pope. They had been Henry's ambassadors to the Emperor in
1165. Richard de Luci, the Justiciar, and Joscelin de Balliol were ex-
communicated as the authors and fabricators of the Constitutions, and
Ranulf de Broc, Hugh de St Clare, and Thomas fitz Bernard for having
occupied Canterbury lands.
The sentences brought Becket little good. The armies of Frederick
Barbarossa were coming south, and the Pope himself dared not attack
Henry openly. He received Henry's embassy sent to prosecute a renewed
appeal on behalf of the English bishops against Becket. One of the
ambassadors was John of Oxford, whom the Pope allowed to clear himself
by oath of the imputations which had been the ground of his excommunica-
tion. Legates were appointed to bring about peace, but both antagonists
had
gone beyond reason. At Clairvaux in April 1169 Becket excommuni-
cated Bishops Gilbert Foliot of London and Joscelin of Salisbury. Foliot
had opposed Becket from the first, and had brought to his opposition a
bitter wit and a gift of sarcasm which Becket could not match.
As time went on, new matters of dispute made hopeless the original
quarrel over the Constitutions of Clarendon. Becket demanded all the
revenues of the see of Canterbury which had accrued during his exile.
In the meantime, the king had been providing for the apportionment of
his possessions among his sons, and wished his heir, his eldest surviving
son, Henry, to be crowned King of England. In Becket's absence, the
ceremony was performed on 14 June 1170 by Roger, Archbishop of York.
It is easy to understand Becket's anger at this infringement of an undoubted
prerogative of his see. The bitterness had never gone out of the struggle
for primacy between successive Archbishops of York and Canterbury, and
Roger had never made a profession of canonical obedience to Thomas.
Becket had a further, though unacknowledged, reason for resentment.
Roger de Pont l'Évêque had been a senior clerk in Archbishop Theobald's
household when Thomas of London had entered it from a merchant's
office? . It is hard to understand Becket's willingness to agree to a
reconciliation with Henry at Fréteval on 22 July 1170 which left every
matter at issue unsettled.
The king's attitude was plain. The Pope had commissioned the Arch-
bishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Nevers to make peace. Becket was
not to insist on the arrears of the revenues of his see, and the question
of the Constitutions was not to be raised until peace had been secured;
in that event, the king was to be persuaded to moderate them. If Henry
refused to be reconciled to the archbishop within forty days of the receipt
of the Pope's letters, his continental lands were to be laid under an interdict.
1 Thomas of London is the last, and Roger de Ponte episcopi the first, in a group
of Archbishop Theobald's clerks who attest an archiepiscopal writ in favour of
Southwark Priory. Cott. Nero C. in f. 188.
CH. XVII.
36-2
## p. 564 (#610) ############################################
1
564
The murder
1
The reconciliation of Fréteval was a mere form. Nothing was said of the
Constitutions, for Henry meant to maintain them, and Becket knew it.
The question of the arrears was not raised, for Becket meant to have them,
and Henry knew it. The king promised amends for the injury done to the
archbishop by the coronation, but refused to give him the kiss of peace.
Becket demanded it, though he meant war. At Becket's request, the Pope
had given him letters suspending the prelates who had taken part in the
coronation. These letters he sent to England before he himself landed
on 1 December. On Christmas Day in Canterbury cathedral, he violently
denounced his enemies, especially those who had entered upon the posses-
sions of his see. The end of his story, which came four days later, is well-
known, but Becket's secret thoughts and hopes, which undoubtedly
precipitated the tragedy of 29 December, remain mysterious. There is
much in his conduct at the end to suggest that he desired the martyr's
crown. In Becket's heart there had always burned a fierce desire to excel.
He had enjoyed the highest secular power he could hope to win; the
highest ecclesiastical position in England had been his. Neither Church
nor State had suffered from his exile, and even the Pope had not unre-
servedly supported him. He hoped to be a second and a greater Alphege;
by his death he won what to him was sweeter than life.
The news of the murder reached Henry at Argentan on 1 January 1171.
He is said to have spent three days in solitude. The Pope had previously
instructed the Archbishops of Sens and Rouen to lay an interdict on
Henry's continental lands if the archbishop were arrested. On 25 January
the Archbishop of Sens published the interdict, but the Archbishop of
Rouen and the Norman clergy refused to recognise the sentence. They
appealed against it, and the archbishop with three bishops and three
clerks set out to prosecute the appeal at the papal court. In considerable
anxiety as to Alexander's attitude, Henry sent an embassy, and the ex-
communicated bishops sent messengers. Alexander waited until April;
then he confirmed the interdict and the excommunication of the bishops.
Against the king personally he took no other action than to forbid him
to enter a church; legates were to be sent later to announce the terms
on which absolution would be granted. After a few days the Pope was
persuaded to send permission for a conditional absolution on behalf of
the Bishops of London and Salisbury because of their age and infirmity.
In the meantime Henry had spent the months of March and April in
Brittany. England must have been simmering with excitement, for the
miracles of Thomas began almost as soon as he was dead. The first
miracle occurred in Sussex on the third day after the martyrdom, and the
second miracle at Gloucester two days later. By Easter time “miracles
came in crowds. ". But at first it was the humble who believed. Brother
Elias of Reading dared not tell his abbot of his visit to the shrine of
Thomas to win a cure for his leprosy; he had asked leave to visit the
1 Abbott, St Thomas of Canterbury, 1, p. 249.
## p. 565 (#611) ############################################
Ireland
565
health-resort at Bath. Though the better-informed may have been sceptical
of the miracles, the unforgiven king must have been glad to leave England
for Ireland, to pass the time there until the legates should come to absolve
him.
Recent events in Ireland combined with the murder to suggest that
the invasion proposed in 1155 should at last be carried out. Ireland in
the twelfth century resembled Britain in the days of Gildas. The position
of high-king was a dignity to be fought for continually, but it gave to the
winner only a nominal supremacy, a cattle tribute, and jurisdictional rights
so vague as to be indefinable. In theory, each of the five divisions of
Ireland—Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Meath-had its king.
In fact, the boundaries of the provinces shifted with the varying power
of the kings, whose very existence depended on success in war and the
reputation which it brought. The chief preoccupation of each king was
to keep his family in power against other families, and himself as against
other members of his own family; no thought of establishing order in
their kingdoms troubled them. Indeed, if it had, their period of power
would have been short.
Death of Mandeville. Matilda leaves England
549
on a snowy night by climbing down a rope hung from the battlements, and
got away to Wallingford. By this time the Earl of Gloucester had returned
from Normandy bringing the Empress' little son Henry with him and
a force of 360 knights. But this reinforcement was inadequate to restore
his sister's fortunes and only enabled him in 1143 and 1144 to maintain
his hold on Dorset and Wiltshire. Meantime Stephen took heart, and
late in 1143 forced the Earl of Essex to surrender his castles. This
move gave Stephen undisputed control of London and Essex, but Man-
deville himself set up his standard in the fenlands, and having seized
Ramsey and the Isle of Ely, held out there, plundering the surrounding
country like a brigand until his death from a wound nine months later.
A terrible account of his cruelties, especially of his pitiless attacks on
villages and churches and of his extortions and use of torture, can be read
in the Peterborough Chronicle; for there can be little doubt that the
much-quoted picture of Stephen's reign, with which the Chronicle ends,
though it professes to be a picture of all England, was really inspired by
memories of the outrages which the monks had seen enacted in their
own neighbourhood in 1144. With the removal of Mandeville and the
return of Vere to his allegiance the Empress' chances of success finally
faded away. For three years more the Earl of Gloucester kept up a desul-
tory struggle; but he too died in 1147, and early the next year Matilda,
convinced that all hope of gaining her inheritance was gone, left England
for good, her little son Henry having departed some time previously.
Freed of his rival's presence, Stephen had a second chance of making
himself master of England. The Angevin party was at a very low ebb,
and had he made a determined effort to secure Wallingford, Gloucester,
and Bristol, he might have reduced it to submission. He was, however,
much too easy-going to seize the opportunity, and allowed five years
(1147-1152) to pass away, during which no active operations are recorded,
except a half-hearted attempt to take Worcester from the men of the
Count of Meulan, who had declared definitely for the Empress to escape
losing his Beaumont patrimony in Normandy. Even when the young
Henry reappeared in England in 1149 to rally his depressed friends,
Stephen made no attempt at all to interfere with his movements, but
allowed the youth to journey unmolested all the way to Carlisle to visit
his great-uncle King David. When he heard that the Earl of Chester,
who desired to secure Lancaster, had also gone to Carlisle, he was indeed
obliged to take some notice; but his action took the unwise form of
bribing the earl to remain loyal by extravagant grants of land in Notting-
hamshire and Leicestershire and by allowing him once more to take
possession of Lincoln Castle. This undignified move achieved its purpose
for the moment; and Henry, who was only sixteen, retired to Normandy
having effected nothing. That Henry's visit was so peaceful shews that
both sides were tired of fighting; and evidently Stephen, provided he was
left in peace, was quite content to let south-western England alone. It
CH. XVI.
## p. 550 (#596) ############################################
550 Stephen and Eugenius III. Geoffrey conquers Normandy
did not seem to matter to him that his writs did not run there. In the
bulk of England on the other hand, where the popular sentiment was on
his side, he still maintained his predecessor's forms of government,
appointing sheriffs and justices and holding the royal and communal
courts; but such scraps of evidence as we have shew that his revenues
were carelessly collected, and that the standard of order which he main-
tained was a very low one, each petty baron being allowed to build him-
self a stronghold and pursue his private feuds with his neighbours without
much hindrance. The simple explanation is that Stephen was fast ageing.
In 1147 he must have been nearly sixty, and it was only in ecclesiastical
matters, where fighting was not needful, that he seems still to have
desired to get his way. But even this display of will was unfortunate, as
it led him into a serious quarrel with Pope Eugenius III over filling the
archbishopric of York and into a rash attempt to prevent the Archbishop
of Canterbury from attending a council held by the Pope at Rheims in
1148. In both matters Stephen could plead that he was following in the
footsteps of Henry I; but the ecclesiastical world regarded his actions as
breaches of his promise that the Church should be free. The result was
that both the Papacy and Archbishop Theobald became his declared
enemies; and when in 1151 Stephen desired to have his son Eustace
crowned and formally recognised as his successor, they both refused to
permit any prelate to perform the ceremony, even though Stephen gave
way in the matter of the archbishopric of York. In spite of this rebuff,
as he had survived so many difficulties, and as the Count of Anjou and
his wife continued to leave him in peace, Stephen at this time probably
considered his son's succession reasonably certain. But the reality was
different. The real danger lay not in England but in Normandy, where
the Count of Anjou had been steadily gaining power year by year ever
since Stephen had turned his back on the duchy in 1138. As a prudent
man, Count Geoffrey had never shewn any desire to help his wife in
England; but in the duchy he had made the most of every opportunity
for establishing her claims, and by patience had not only conquered the
land but by his good government had almost brought the inhabitants
to forget their anti-Angevin bias and become supporters of his family
interests. He had first begun to make progress in 1141 when he got
possession of Falaise and Lisieux. In 1142 he acquired the Avranchin
and the Cotentin. By the end of 1143 the majority of the Norman pre-
lates and fief-holders joined him, led by the Count of Meulan; and in
1144 even the capital and the Archbishop of Rouen submitted, where-
upon Geoffrey publicly assumed the title of duke. A little later Louis VII
formally invested him with the duchy, and by 1145 only the castle of
Arques still held out for Stephen. Having conquered the duchy, Geoffrey
at once set to work to restore it to order, but he was wise enough to
make it clear that he held his prize for his son Henry and not for himself.
Wherever he could, he continued the institutions and policy of Henry I,
## p. 551 (#597) ############################################
Geoffrey succeeded by Henry of Anjou
551
and made no attempt to introduce Angevin customs. He suppressed the
justiciarship and made Rouen much more the capital than it had been
before, but he retained all the traditions of the Anglo-Norman chancery,
and when he wanted new officials drew his recruits from Normandy and
not from Anjou. He had his son instructed by the most famous Norman
scholar of the time, William of Conches, and in issuing charters, though
he ignored the Empress, frequently joined the young Henry's name with his
own, and declared that he was acting with his advice and consent. Finally,
as soon as his son, in 1150, reached the age of seventeen, he invested him
with the duchy and himself withdrew to Anjou. The very next year Count
Geoffrey in the prime of his manhood died suddenly of a fever, and the young
Henry unexpectedly found himself Count of Anjou and Maine as well as
Duke of Normandy, and secure at any rate on the continent in the position
which his grandfather Henry I had so ardently desired should be in store
for him. The sudden elevation of the young Henry to a position of power
and prestige was a threat to Stephen which he could not well have anti-
cipated; and the menace became even greater in May 1152, when the
young duke was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of
Louis VII, and in her right became Count of Poitou and overlord of all
the fiefs in south-western France from Limoges to the Pyrenees. At a
stroke Henry had become feudal head of territories as large as Stephen's,
and it was only to be expected that, as soon as he possibly could, he would
make a serious attempt to regain his mother's English inheritance.
The imminence of the danger woke up Stephen. As soon as he heard
of Henry's doings, he renewed his demand that Eustace should be crowned
and also ordered an attack on Wallingford, the unsubdued stronghold
whence Brian Fitz Count had defiantly upheld the cause of the Empress
in the Thames valley for nearly fourteen years. The resumption of active
measures, however, came too late. Rather than obey Stephen, Archbishop
Theobald fled across the Channel, and before the resistance of Wallingford
could be overcome Henry himself arrived in England with a small force
of knights and foot-soldiers. He landed in January 1153 and at once
received an offer of support from the Earl of Chester. A few weeks later
he captured Malmesbury and relieved Wallingford. But the desire for
peace was so general that a truce was agreed upon for negotiations. This
enabled Henry to visit Bristol, whence he set out on a march through
central England, visiting in turn Warwick, Leicester, Stamford, and
Nottingham. The reception he met with was a mixed one, but clearly
the midlands were wavering. Meantime Stephen was detained in East
Anglia, having to face the Earl of Norfolk who had seized Ipswich in
Henry's interest. So matters stood six months after Henry's landing, when
suddenly England was startled by the news that Stephen's heir Eustace
had died at Bury St Edmunds. Only a year before Stephen had lost his
devoted wife, and this second family catastrophe seems to have deprived
him of all desire to prolong the dynastic struggle, even though he had
CH. XVI.
## p. 552 (#598) ############################################
652 Stephen makes peace with Henry. Stephen's death
552
another son in whose interest he might have gone on fighting. He ac-
cordingly permitted his brother the Bishop of Winchester to join with
Archbishop Theobald in mediating a peace, by which it was arranged
that he should remain King of England for his life but that Henry should
be recognised as his successor and should in future be consulted in all the
business of the realm. This settlement, which was ratified in November
by Henry and his partisans doing homage to Stephen at Winchester be-
fore an assembly of magnates, was welcome to all parties; to Stephen
because he was old and broken, to Stephen's heir William because he was
unambitious and was guaranteed the earldom of Surrey in right of his
wife and also the succession to all his father's private fiefs, to the barons
because it freed them from the fear of the rule of the Empress and secured
them the restoration of their Norman estates, to the leaders of the Church
and the Papacy because it meant the humiliation of a prince who had
tried to thwart them, and to the mass of the people because it promised
the return of order after fifteen vears of license and the destruction of the
mushroom castles which had been dominating the country-side. To the
young Henry the slight concessions made to Stephen were unimportant.
He was still under twenty-one and could well afford to wait for an undis-
puted succession. Besides he had plenty of problems to occupy his attention
in his continental duchies and could not afford to remain indefinitely in
England. As it turned out, Henry had not to stand aside for long. Having
set the work of restoration on foot he withdrew about Easter 1154 to
Normandy, but six months later Stephen died and in December Henry
returned to London for his coronation at Westminster, determined to
re-establish his grandfather's system of government in every particular.
The years which witnessed the struggle for the throne between Stephen
and Matilda form a dismal and barren period when compared with the
thirty years of
progress enjoyed under the elder Henry. It is
doubtful, however, whether historians have not been inclined to paint them
in too sombre colours, indulging in generalisations which seem to assume
that all parts of England were plunged into anarchy for fifteen years. So
far as fighting is concerned, this clearly was not the case. At times and
in certain districts, chiefly in the valley of the upper Thames and in the
fens round Ely and Ramsey, there was no doubt serious havoc; but in
the greater part of England the fighting was never very serious or pro-
longed. What the people had to complain of was the failure to put down
ordinary crime and robbery and the ineffectiveness of the courts of justice.
They could see the feudal lords constantly arrogating new powers to
themselves, and attempting new exactions. But it is impossible to suppose
that the feudal lords as a whole were guilty of the crimes and outrages
which undoubtedly were committed by some of the Empress' captains in
Wiltshire and by Geoffrey de Mandeville. The pictures painted in the
Peterborough Chronicle and by monastic writers generally are certainly
overdrawn. If some feudal lords were turbulent and cruel, it cannot be
peace and
## p. 553 (#599) ############################################
Character of Stephen's reign
553
overlooked that a considerable number of the magnates from Stephen
downwards were remarkable at this period for their works of piety. It
was in Stephen's reign that the only English monastic order was founded
by Gilbert of Sempringham, that the canons of Prémontré first came
to England, and that the Orders of Savigny and Cîteaux spread over the
country. In all more than fifty religious houses were founded and en-
dowed by the baronage at this time. Castle building and priory building
in fact go very much together. Another point to be remembered is that
for the most part the boroughs were free from exactions throughout the
reign. A few were the scenes of fighting, but none had to pay the heavy
aids which Henry had imposed. It was the same with the Danegeld. So
far as is known Stephen never attempted to levy it. The charge against
bim is, not that he was avaricious but that he failed to get in his revenues.
All accounts agree that he was genial and generous. He had no ambition
to play a part on the continent or to be an autocrat; and so he let the
powers of the Crown be curtailed, and lived on his own revenues. His
reign in fact was disastrous for the autocratic ideal of government set up
by the Conqueror and elaborated by Henry; it also witnessed a growth
in the pretensions of the clergy, and the practice of appealing to the Pope.
But to those who do not place order above everything and who realise
how oppressive Henry's government was becoming in spite of its legality,
it must always remain a moot question whether Stephen's reign was such
a total set-back for the mass of the people as the ecclesiastical writers of
the day would have us believe. At any rate, in the sphere of the arts, of
learning, and of manners there were movements which are hard to
reconcile with an age given over to anarchy. In architecture, for in-
stance, the activity, which under Henry's orderly rule had perhaps
culminated in Flambard's buildings at Durham, by no means ceased.
On the contrary, it was under Stephen that the great naves were erected
at Norwich and Bury St Edmunds by Bishop Eborard and Abbot
Anselm, that the minster arose at Romsey and the noble hospital of
St Cross at Winchester, that the pointed arch was introduced at
Fountains and Buildwas, that stone vaulting began to be used for large
spans in place of the Hat painted wooden ceilings, and that sculptured
doorways became numerous. In literature and learning it was the period
when Geoffrey of Monmouth published his epoch-making romances and
was rewarded by Stephen with the bishopric of St Asaph; when
Adelard, the pioneer student of Arabic science and philosophy, wrote
his treatise on the astrolabe at Bath and dedicated it to the young
Henry Plantagenet; when Robert of Cricklade abridged Pliny's Natural
History, and when John of Salisbury acquired his love of the classics.
It was the period when the ideas of chivalry began to take hold of the
baronage, and when tournaments first became popular. Finally, it was a
period when no attempt was made to debase the coinage, and when the
two races, French and English, began to be blended into one nation.
CH, XVI.
## p. 554 (#600) ############################################
554
CHAPTER XVII.
ENGLAND: HENRY II.
I.
The lands of which Henry II was in name the ruler stretched from the
Tweed to the Pyrenees. England was but one member of a dominion
that cannot be called an empire, for it was only held together by the
common allegiance that individual magnates owed to Henry. As with
the king, so with his barons: Robert, Earl of Leicester, was lord of
Breteuil; his elder brother was Count of Meulan. The great men of
Henry's day held land on both sides of the Channel and frequently passed
from their English to their continental possessions. Henry's own time
was fairly equally divided, though France claimed more of it than
England The defence of his continental boundary was a perpetual
problem, and prosecution of his frontier claims a constant occupation;
the lawyer in Henry made him unwilling to abandon any one of them.
England needed government and not defence; it gave Henry the greatest
of his many titles, but in no sense was it the centre of his dominions.
From either point of view, the “Angevin Empire” is a modern conception.
Already Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou, Henry
became king without opposition on Stephen’s death on 25 October 1154.
Stephen had recognised him as his heir and justiciar of the kingdom by the
treaty of Wallingford of the previous year. What was meant by this title
is uncertain, but Roger of Howden, writing at the end of the century, says
It may be convenient to insert a table shewing the time spent by the king him-
self in England and Normandy respectively.
England
Normandy
8 December 1154
January 1156
April 1157
April 1157
August 1158
January 1163
January 1163
March 1165
May 1165
May 1165
March 1166
March 1170
March 1170
June 1170
August 1171
August 1171
May 1172 *
July 1174+
July 1174
August 1174
May 1175
May 1175
August 1177
July 1178
July 1178
April 1180
July 1181
July 1181
March 1182
June 1184
June 1184
April 1185
April 1186
April 1186
February 1187
January 1188
January 1188
July 1188
6 July 1189
*[This time was spent mainly in Ireland, not England. ]
+ [The Pipe Roll of 1173 suggests that Henry spent four days at Northampton
in the course of the year. There is no other evidence of the visit. ]
1
## p. 555 (#601) ############################################
The kingdom secured
555
that thereafter all the business of the kingdom was done through him.
In any case, the work of demolishing the unlicensed castles of the anarchy
was begun before Stephen's death, although the slowness with which
the work was accomplished almost caused a rupture between Henry
and Stephen. As king, Henry carried on the work, and used in the
administration men who had served Stephen before him. Archbishop
Theobald of Canterbury, Robert, Earl of Leicester, Richard de Luci,
had all played their parts in Stephen's reign. They now became Henry's
chief advisers, together with Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, his uncle, and
Thomas Becket, one of Theobald's clerks, whom Henry made Chancellor
on the archbishop's advice. Nigel, Bishop of Ely, Henry I's treasurer,
was called in to re-organise the Exchequer.
The assertion of royal authority was made without difficulty. Ranulf,
Earl of Chester, who had nearly created for himself an independent
principality in central England, died in December 1153, leaving a child
as his heir. No one seems to have considered the possibility of making
Stephen's surviving son, William, king. The Church was on Henry's
side, and the baronage, tired of a weak king, accepted the situation.
After keeping his Christmas court at Bermondsey, Henry visited the
northern and eastern parts of his kingdom. On 23 January he was at
Lincoln with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Master of the
Templars in England'. In February he was at York, and William of
Aumâle, Earl of Yorkshire, surrendered the castle of Scarborough.
Thence Henry went to Nottingham, and William Peverel of Nottingham,
the greatest baron of Nottingham and Derby, suspected of poisoning the
Earl of Chester, took shelter under the cowl. The only serious opposi-
tion to the surrender of castles was in the west. Roger, Earl of Hereford,
fortified Hereford and Gloucester; Hugh Mortimer fortified Wigmore,
Cleobury Mortimer, and Bridgnorth. The Earl submitted on the per-
suasion of the Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, but the subjuga-
tion of Hugh Mortimer's castles occupied most of the summer of 1155.
At a great council held at Wallingford in April Henry tried to
secure the succession to the throne. He caused all the magnates to swear
fealty to himself and his heirs, William, who was not yet two, and, failing
William, Henry, born in the preceding February. At the Winchester
council in September he put forward his plan of conquering Ireland,
to make a principality for his younger brother William. It seems to be
this proposal, together with the Toulouse war of 1159, that has made
historians talk of Henry as of one who set order in his kingdom that he
might engage in wars of conquest. It is the prerogative of youth to
dream, but history suggests that Henry's dreams were short. There was
sound political reason for the Irish proposal of 1155: William's support
was necessary, for Henry's second brother, Geoffrey, was making trouble
by insisting on his claims to Anjou and Touraine. To suppress him,
1 Cott. Vespasian E. xviii f. 73d.
CH. XVII.
## p. 556 (#602) ############################################
556
Wales and Scotland
1
1
1
and to assure himself of the loyalty of Aquitaine and Normandy, Henry
left England in January 1156. The capture of Geoffrey's castles of Mira-
beau and Chinon ended his revolt. He was satisfied with compensation
in money and permission to accept the invitation of the men of the
eastern part of Brittany and make himself Count of Nantes. In his
attitude towards Brittany, both now and later in his reign, Henry was
but maintaining the policy of his ancestors who claimed overlordship of
that province. In his relations with continental powers the same feeling
can be traced, a desire to lose nothing that had come to him by inherit-
ance or marriage; no right must be given up, no claim allowed to lapse.
But Henry was only an aggressor in so far as he forced others to recognise
claims which they would rather see forgotten. The war of Toulouse
which occupied the July, August, and September of 1159 was undertaken
to recover Toulouse, to which Henry inherited a title through his wife.
When the King of France interfered, Henry gave up the war; to con-
tinue it against his overlord would have been going beyond his right.
The question of Henry's relations with Wales and Scotland had to be
faced early in the reign. Both countries had gained by the anarchy in
England. David of Scotland had been succeeded in 1153 by his grand-
son Malcolm IV, who visited Henry in England, and agreed to surrender
Northumberland and Cumberland, with the castles of Bamburgh, New-
castle, and Carlisle. Either at Peak Castle or at Chester he did homage
to Henry for his English lands, the honour of Huntingdon. A Welsh
expedition was not only essential from the standpoint of general policy;
it was a means of securing the gratitude of marcher lords who had lost
land in the time of Stephen. The object of Henry's attack was the
northern kingdom of Gwynedd, where Owen Gwynedd had built up a
principality which Ranulf, Earl of Chester, himself had feared. The suc-
cession of a child of six to the earldom exposed it to Owen's attacks.
Henry's Welsh expedition of 1158, though not a brilliant military success,
achieved for the moment its end; Owen was forced to give hostages, and
his activities were checked for a time. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the ruler of
Deheubarth, the southern kingdom, after some hesitation, acknowledged
the overlordship of Henry. The Clares and Cliffords were restored to the
lands that Rhys had conquered in the previous reign. Neither Rhys, how-
ever, nor Owen was prepared to acquiesce in any reduction of power, and
in 1162 Rhys took Llandovery Castle from Walter Clifford. In the next
year Henry led an expedition into Wales, passing through Carmarthen and
taking Rhys prisoner at Pencader. Rhys was allowed to do homage and
return to his principality, but he immediately re-opened war, ravaging
Cardigan until little more than the castle and the town remained to the
Normans. Henry's absorption in the Becket quarrel after 1163 en-
couraged Rhys and Owen to make a combined attack on the marcher
barons. The lesser princes of Wales were attracted into the alliance by
the prestige of the two leaders. The failure of Henry's great expedition
1
## p. 557 (#603) ############################################
Becket as Chancellor
557
of 1165 to suppress the coalition secured for the Welsh another hundred
years of freedom. Henry made no other great effort, and from that time
his attention was confined to strengthening the border castles. His con-
cern was not to restrain the Welsh princes or keep their lands for the
marcher lords, but merely to retain the overlordship of the two kingdoms
of Deheubarth and Gwynedd. In the troubles of the rebellion of 1173-4
the Welsh princes were faithful to Henry.
The minister to whom Henry from the first gave his fullest confidence
was Thomas Becket, his Chancellor. The office of chancellor involved the
custody of the king's seal and constant attendance on his person: Becket
is almost always a witness, often the sole witness, to the charters and writs
of the early years of the reign. His power, however, depended not on his
office, but on his intimacy with the king. It was at Henry's gift that he
received the custody of vacant benefices, not by virtue of his office as
chancellor. Becket acquired wealth and became a leader of fashion. Too
busy to return to his archidiaconal duties, he earned but mild reproaches
from his archbishop and requests that he would forward certain business
with the king. Through him the king might be approached not only by
schemers like Arnulf, Bishop of Lisieux, but by such men as John of
Salisbury. The circumstances of Becket's death have secured the pre-
servation of masses of material, not only relating to his life as archbishop,
but also to his time as chancellor. His work can also be traced in the
official language of the Pipe Roll clerks. He was concerned in the restora-
tion of order, in the administration of justice, in diplomatic business at
the French court. His writ could authorise the payment of money out
of the treasury, a right that later in the reign belonged only to the
Justiciar. It was with reason, though in flattery, that Peter, Abbot
of La Celle at Troyes, wrote: “Who does not know you to be second
to the king in four kingdoms ? ”
Archbishop Theobald died in April 1161, and a year passed before
Henry decided that Becket should succeed him. The stories of Henry's
announcement of his decision to Thomas and Thomas' unwillingness to
become primate were probably invented to fit the history of the struggle.
The nolo episcopari of Thomas was probably no less common form than
that of most contemporary bishops; there is nothing in his career to
suggest an unwillingness to accept great office. He was a man of high
ambitions. Of undoubted ability, he was, however, not fitted to be Lan-
franc to Henry's William. He had neither the training nor the sanity
of that great archbishop and administrator, nor among the churchmen
of Henry's day would it have been easy to find a second Lanfranc.
Henry's hesitation may mean that he was not sure of Becket. There is
no evidence that he was obnoxious to the ecclesiastical party as a whole;
Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford and afterwards of London, was never
his friend, but Theobald seems to have desired him for a successor. Once
Becket was consecrated, he tried to be the perfect archbishop. He re-
CH. XVII.
## p. 558 (#604) ############################################
558
Becket as Archbishop; criminous clerks
signed the chancellorship, though he did not give up the archdeaconry of
Canterbury until the king forced him to do so. He played the ascetic as
perfectly as he had played the courtier. There was no insincerity in this
changed way of life.
He shewed from the first a determination to let go no right which the
Church could claim.
His attitude was natural, for it must have seemed
a noble thing to be head of the Church in England. He set about win-
ning back for his own Church of Canterbury the lands and rights which
it had lost. No claim was too shadowy for him. He demanded from the
king the custody of the castles of Rochester, Saltwood, and Hythe, from
the Earl of Hertford, Roger de Clare, his homage for Tonbridge Castle.
Forgetting his own past, he deprived clerks in the king's service of the
benefices in the see of Canterbury that they held as their reward. As
archbishop he claimed rights of patronage over all benefices on land held
by tenants of the see; he excommunicated William of Eynsford, a
tenant-in-chief for other lands, for resisting the application of this claim.
He came into conflict with the king over a matter of general administra-
tion. In July 1163 at the council of Woodstock, Henry proposed that
the sheriff's aid should be paid into the royal treasury. Becket's oppo-
sition was so vigorous that Henry dropped the plan. Flagrant cases of
the inadequacy of ecclesiastical punishment for crime, and of abuse in
ecclesiastical courts, came to complete the estrangement. On 1 October
1163 at the council at Westminster the question of criminous clerks was
discussed at length. The king and his advisers demanded that accused
clerks should answer the accusation in the lay court, that they should
be handed over to the ecclesiastical court for trial and judgment, and
that if the accused were found guilty he should be degraded and given
up to the secular power for punishment. Warrant for this procedure
could be found in Canon Law. Becket, with the support of the bishops,
answered, not that Henry's interpretation of Canon Law was unjustifiable,
but that “God will not judge a man twice for the same offence. ” Real-
ising that Becket would continue to evade the question of law, Henry
fell back on custom, and asked whether the bishops were prepared to
observe the ancient customs of the kingdom. After discussing the matter
among themselves, they said that they were prepared to observe them,
“saving their order. “ Hilary, Bishop of Chichester, alone promised to
observe them without this reservation. Henry broke up the council in
exasperated fury.
The king used every means in his power to overcome the clerical
opposition. He removed his heir from Becket's charge, and he took from
Becket the custody of the castles and honours of Eye and Berkhampstead.
He did his utmost to make a party against Becket among the bishops, and
the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London promised to observe
the customs. In the last three months of 1163, Arnulf, Bishop of Lisieux,
and Richard of Ilchester, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, are said to
## p. 559 (#605) ############################################
The Constitutions of Clarendon
559
have crossed the sea six times to gain the Pope's assent to the customs.
The Pope himself, exiled from Rome and travelling in northern France,
was unwilling to offend Henry. He obviously wished Becket to moderate
his opposition, although he did not immediately accede to Henry's re-
quests that Roger, Archbishop of York, should be appointed legate in
succession to Theobald, and that the bishops should be ordered to obey
the customs. Before the end of the year Becket gave way to the ex-
postulations of the bishops and the fears of the Pope and cardinals; he
promised his consent to the customs.
A council was therefore summoned to meet at Clarendon in January
1164 at which Becket might give his formal assent. He is said to have
come repenting his promise and prepared to withdraw it. The king in
the meantime must have caused the customs to be carefully drawn up
and engrossed. The writing of the Constitutions cannot have been left,
as some authorities would have us believe, until the council was in actual
progress; they were produced on the first day of the council. Becket
was only induced to agree to them by the persuasions of bishops, two
knights of the Temple, and the two senior earls, Cornwall and Leicester.
After giving his unqualified assent to the Constitutions and allowing the
bishops to do the same, Becket refused to take the irrevocable step of
sealing the document. The Constitutions had been engrossed modo ciro-
grafi, that is, they had been written out three times on one piece of
parchment. Before the parchment was severed into three, the two arch-
bishops and the king should each have affixed his seal to each copy of
the Constitutions. Since Becket refused his seal, the document apparently
unsealed, was cut into three parts. One part was given to the Arch-
bishop of York, one was thrust into Becket's hand, and the third was
laid up in the royal treasury.
There is no evidence that the general body of English clergy felt that
the Constitutions of Clarendon were any other than Henry claimed,
that is, an accurate representation of the customs of his grandfather's
time. The relations between Church and State had never exactly been
defined before. Such hesitation as the bishops may have felt in agreeing
to the Constitutions was probably due to a natural dislike of definition
and fear of precedent. The Church won little by Becket's death because
it wished to win little. It was not an aggressive body, and many of the
judges in its courts had been trained, some were still actually engaged,
in the king's service. To say that the king's policy at this time meant an
inevitable quarrel between Church and State is to go beyond the evidence.
What might have been expected was an assertion of the right of the
king's court to define the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and, there-
after, competition between the Church courts and the lay courts for
jurisdiction over individual cases. Henry did not begin the quarrel by
attempting a general revision of ecclesiastical justice. His ultimatum,
in the Constitutions, was as much directed against and caused by Becket's
CH. XVII.
## p. 560 (#606) ############################################
560
The fate of the Constitutions
general attitude of arrogant and aggressive rectitude as by the abuses of
ecclesiastical courts. A few years later, at the time of the Inquest of
Sheriffs, the barons submitted to a far more drastic supervision of feudal
justice than Henry ever proposed in the case of the courts of the Church.
Thomas was an exception among the churchmen of his day. He would
have found a congenial atmosphere in the Curia of Boniface VIII.
The fate of the Constitutions indicates the attitude of the English
Church to Henry's claims. Only in regard to criminous clerks and appeals
to the Pope was Henry forced to give way. Both sides laid particular
emphasis on the clause dealing with criminous clerks. Opinion among
canonists as to the validity of Henry's claims was divided. Passages in
Canon Law could be interpreted to mean that clerks found guilty and
degraded in the ecclesiastical court should be handed over to the lay
court for punishment. It does not seem to have been the opinion
canonists that this procedure was contrary to the dictum so constantly on
Becket's lips. The archbishop was no canonist, and there were those who
said that he was not even scholar enough to make a speech in Latin.
He concentrated on the question of punishment. His murder secured
for clerks immunity from lay punishment for their first crime. But it
should be remembered that, when Henry submitted on this point, and
indeed throughout the next century, the word clerk had not the wide
interpretation that it received in later times. In the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries a clerk had to prove his ordination, at least to the
sub-diaconate, before he was handed over to the official of the Church
to be tried in Court Christian. Moreover Henry succeeded in forcing
accused clerks to appear in the lay court to prove their clergy, although
Canon Law gives no justification for the practice. So much he gained.
His unfortunate surrender of the right to punish the guilty clerk left an
opening for private revenge. In 1202, in a trial for murder at Lincoln,
it was stated that the murdered man had been degraded from the
diaconate for killing a relative of the defendant.
The king retained without serious question much of what the Con-
stitutions gave him. Advowsons remained lay property; the king kept
control over the churches of his fee; elections to bishoprics were con-
ducted as before in the king's chapel. For the rest, the relations between
Church and State were left to be worked out in the practice of the courts.
By the Constitutions the king had agreed that jurisdiction over land
held in free alms belonged to the Church courts; but he had secured to
his own court the right of adjudging, in accordance with the verdict of a
jury, whether the land at issue were lay fee or free alms. Had the
Church courts been able to keep all the jurisdiction this clause would
have given them, much business would have been lost to the king's court;
for during the last half of the twelfth and throughout the thirteenth
century innumerable grants of lands were being made to religious houses
in free alıns. By John's day it was highly exceptional for this procedure
## p. 561 (#607) ############################################
The quarrel renewed
561
by the assize utrum, as it was called from the words of the writ which began
it, to be a prelude to a suit in the ecclesiastical court. The assize rolls
shew the religious houses using the layman's forms of action in the lay
courts. The assize utrum was already almost entirely confined to rectors
of parish churches, who without it would have found difficulty in proving
their right to the lands of their church appropriated by laymen. If the
jury's verdict in such a suit declared the land to be free alms the parson
recovered his land without further process of law. In this respect at
least the king had won far more than the customs of Henry I would
have given him. But the king's courts found it difficult to maintain
what Henry had asserted at Clarendon, jurisdiction over debts where the
bargain had included the formal pledging of faith. No one doubted
that it belonged to the Church courts to deal with questions of broken
faith. Henry declared in effect that the affidatio, or pledging of faith,
was not essential to the legal validity of a bargain, and that suits touch-
ing the bargain must be heard in his court. The lay court won in the
end, but it had to contend not only with ecclesiastical courts more
eager for jurisdiction than those of the twelfth century, but also against
the religious feeling of the English people.
Becket never intended to observe the Constitutions. He abstained
from the service of the altar as a penance for his weakness in ever promising
to observe them; and he even made an ineffectual attempt to leave the
country. The Pope took neither side, not daring to offend Henry nor
wishing to desert Becket. The next move came from the king. An officer
of the court, John the Marshal, father of the famous William Marshall,
Earl of Pembroke, complained to the king that the archbishop's court
had failed in justice in a plea which he had brought for the recovery of
land held of the see of Canterbury, and Becket was summoned to answer
for the failure of his court. Instead of sending an essoin, a formal excuse
for non-attendance, he sent four knights with letters from himself and the
sheriff of Kent to answer on his behalf. The case was adjourned, and
Becket was summoned to appear at a great council at Northampton in
October, to answer both for his previous contempt of the king's court
and for the failure of his own court to do right to John the Marshal.
Becket came to Northampton. He sought the king on 7 October, and
his case was heard the next day. On the original question, the case of
John the Marshal, the archbishop was successful, but the barons, both
lay and ecclesiastical, adjudged him guilty of contempt of the king's
court, and he therefore fell into the king's mercy. Although protesting
that no court had the right to try him, Becket was persuaded to offer to
make fine with the king for his amercement. The king, on the other
hand, seems to have come to Northampton with the intention of forcing
Becket's hand by attacking him in every possible way. He demanded an
account of the sums which Becket had received as custos of the honours
of Eye and Berkhampstead, of five hundred marks which he had received
C. LED. H. v0L, Y. CH. XVII.
36
## p. 562 (#608) ############################################
562
Becket's flight
1
i
1
from the king for the Toulouse campaign, of another five hundred marks
for which the king had been his pledge to a certain Jew, and finally of
the issues of the vacant sees which had passed through Becket's hands
while he was chancellor. Becket was forbidden to leave Northampton
until he had given the king security for the whole amount. The third
day of the council, Saturday 10 October, was passed by Becket in
discussing with the bishops and abbots the course that he should take.
However ungracious the king's demands, they did not alienate either the
bishops or the laity; some bishops even urged Becket to resign the
archbishopric and put himself in the king's mercy. On the following
Tuesday, Becket made up his mind to defiance. He forbade the bishops
to associate themselves in any judgment on him with regard to his con-
duct as chancellor, he appealed to the Pope, and he ordered the bishops
to excommunicate all who dared to give effect to the judgment of any
lay court upon him, thus directly contravening the Constitutions of
Clarendon. His action placed the bishops in a difficult position. They
must either endure the king's anger for breaking the eleventh clause of the
Constitutions of Clarendon or the censures of the Church for disobedience
to their archbishop. They evaded the dilemma by abstaining from judgment
upon the archbishop, but appealing to the Pope for his deposition on the
ground of his perjury in withdrawing the assent which he had originally
given to the Constitutions. The king's court never delivered its judg-
ment upon Becket. The barons, headed by Robert, Earl of Leicester,
qui dux erat verbi, went to pronounce it, but Becket did not stay to hear
it. He left the castle; next day he left Northampton; by 2 November
he had crossed the Channel as a fugitive.
The quarrel begun unnecessarily by Becket was pursued unmercifully
by the king. He exiled all the archbishop's kinsfolk, of whom there seem
to have been many. They had become rich with drippings from Becket's
abundance, and their departure impressed contemporaries so much that
private documents may occasionally be found dated “in the year in which
the king caused the kinsfolk of the archbishop to cross over. "? Becket's
exile lasted for six years. To a man of his temper it must have been hard
to bear, and its intluence upon his character was lamentable-he became
fanatic. The Pope was still unwilling to commit himself. Henry tried
to intimidate him by negotiations with the Emperor, but it was obvious
that opinion in England, although almost wholly on Henry's side in his
struggle with the archbishop, was not favourable to dealings with the
anti Pope. Alexander forbade Becket to take any irrevocable step until
Easter 1166. By the time the truce expired, the Pope was back at Rome,
and ready to support the archbishop. Becket was authorised to excom-
municate all who had occupied the lands of Canterbury since his flight,
and was given a legatine commission over all England except the see
of York. At Vézelay on Whitsunday Becket excommunicated John of
1 Cott. Nero C. i f. 200.
1
1
## p. 563 (#609) ############################################
The reconciliation
563
Oxford, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, and Richard of Ilchester, after-
wards Bishop of Winchester, for communicating with the supporters of
the anti-Pope. They had been Henry's ambassadors to the Emperor in
1165. Richard de Luci, the Justiciar, and Joscelin de Balliol were ex-
communicated as the authors and fabricators of the Constitutions, and
Ranulf de Broc, Hugh de St Clare, and Thomas fitz Bernard for having
occupied Canterbury lands.
The sentences brought Becket little good. The armies of Frederick
Barbarossa were coming south, and the Pope himself dared not attack
Henry openly. He received Henry's embassy sent to prosecute a renewed
appeal on behalf of the English bishops against Becket. One of the
ambassadors was John of Oxford, whom the Pope allowed to clear himself
by oath of the imputations which had been the ground of his excommunica-
tion. Legates were appointed to bring about peace, but both antagonists
had
gone beyond reason. At Clairvaux in April 1169 Becket excommuni-
cated Bishops Gilbert Foliot of London and Joscelin of Salisbury. Foliot
had opposed Becket from the first, and had brought to his opposition a
bitter wit and a gift of sarcasm which Becket could not match.
As time went on, new matters of dispute made hopeless the original
quarrel over the Constitutions of Clarendon. Becket demanded all the
revenues of the see of Canterbury which had accrued during his exile.
In the meantime, the king had been providing for the apportionment of
his possessions among his sons, and wished his heir, his eldest surviving
son, Henry, to be crowned King of England. In Becket's absence, the
ceremony was performed on 14 June 1170 by Roger, Archbishop of York.
It is easy to understand Becket's anger at this infringement of an undoubted
prerogative of his see. The bitterness had never gone out of the struggle
for primacy between successive Archbishops of York and Canterbury, and
Roger had never made a profession of canonical obedience to Thomas.
Becket had a further, though unacknowledged, reason for resentment.
Roger de Pont l'Évêque had been a senior clerk in Archbishop Theobald's
household when Thomas of London had entered it from a merchant's
office? . It is hard to understand Becket's willingness to agree to a
reconciliation with Henry at Fréteval on 22 July 1170 which left every
matter at issue unsettled.
The king's attitude was plain. The Pope had commissioned the Arch-
bishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Nevers to make peace. Becket was
not to insist on the arrears of the revenues of his see, and the question
of the Constitutions was not to be raised until peace had been secured;
in that event, the king was to be persuaded to moderate them. If Henry
refused to be reconciled to the archbishop within forty days of the receipt
of the Pope's letters, his continental lands were to be laid under an interdict.
1 Thomas of London is the last, and Roger de Ponte episcopi the first, in a group
of Archbishop Theobald's clerks who attest an archiepiscopal writ in favour of
Southwark Priory. Cott. Nero C. in f. 188.
CH. XVII.
36-2
## p. 564 (#610) ############################################
1
564
The murder
1
The reconciliation of Fréteval was a mere form. Nothing was said of the
Constitutions, for Henry meant to maintain them, and Becket knew it.
The question of the arrears was not raised, for Becket meant to have them,
and Henry knew it. The king promised amends for the injury done to the
archbishop by the coronation, but refused to give him the kiss of peace.
Becket demanded it, though he meant war. At Becket's request, the Pope
had given him letters suspending the prelates who had taken part in the
coronation. These letters he sent to England before he himself landed
on 1 December. On Christmas Day in Canterbury cathedral, he violently
denounced his enemies, especially those who had entered upon the posses-
sions of his see. The end of his story, which came four days later, is well-
known, but Becket's secret thoughts and hopes, which undoubtedly
precipitated the tragedy of 29 December, remain mysterious. There is
much in his conduct at the end to suggest that he desired the martyr's
crown. In Becket's heart there had always burned a fierce desire to excel.
He had enjoyed the highest secular power he could hope to win; the
highest ecclesiastical position in England had been his. Neither Church
nor State had suffered from his exile, and even the Pope had not unre-
servedly supported him. He hoped to be a second and a greater Alphege;
by his death he won what to him was sweeter than life.
The news of the murder reached Henry at Argentan on 1 January 1171.
He is said to have spent three days in solitude. The Pope had previously
instructed the Archbishops of Sens and Rouen to lay an interdict on
Henry's continental lands if the archbishop were arrested. On 25 January
the Archbishop of Sens published the interdict, but the Archbishop of
Rouen and the Norman clergy refused to recognise the sentence. They
appealed against it, and the archbishop with three bishops and three
clerks set out to prosecute the appeal at the papal court. In considerable
anxiety as to Alexander's attitude, Henry sent an embassy, and the ex-
communicated bishops sent messengers. Alexander waited until April;
then he confirmed the interdict and the excommunication of the bishops.
Against the king personally he took no other action than to forbid him
to enter a church; legates were to be sent later to announce the terms
on which absolution would be granted. After a few days the Pope was
persuaded to send permission for a conditional absolution on behalf of
the Bishops of London and Salisbury because of their age and infirmity.
In the meantime Henry had spent the months of March and April in
Brittany. England must have been simmering with excitement, for the
miracles of Thomas began almost as soon as he was dead. The first
miracle occurred in Sussex on the third day after the martyrdom, and the
second miracle at Gloucester two days later. By Easter time “miracles
came in crowds. ". But at first it was the humble who believed. Brother
Elias of Reading dared not tell his abbot of his visit to the shrine of
Thomas to win a cure for his leprosy; he had asked leave to visit the
1 Abbott, St Thomas of Canterbury, 1, p. 249.
## p. 565 (#611) ############################################
Ireland
565
health-resort at Bath. Though the better-informed may have been sceptical
of the miracles, the unforgiven king must have been glad to leave England
for Ireland, to pass the time there until the legates should come to absolve
him.
Recent events in Ireland combined with the murder to suggest that
the invasion proposed in 1155 should at last be carried out. Ireland in
the twelfth century resembled Britain in the days of Gildas. The position
of high-king was a dignity to be fought for continually, but it gave to the
winner only a nominal supremacy, a cattle tribute, and jurisdictional rights
so vague as to be indefinable. In theory, each of the five divisions of
Ireland—Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Meath-had its king.
In fact, the boundaries of the provinces shifted with the varying power
of the kings, whose very existence depended on success in war and the
reputation which it brought. The chief preoccupation of each king was
to keep his family in power against other families, and himself as against
other members of his own family; no thought of establishing order in
their kingdoms troubled them. Indeed, if it had, their period of power
would have been short.
