Henry II

paid in by the sheriff whose account was under examination. Twenty shillings of this was then melted down in a crucible and purified by fire; the resulting ingot was next weighed against the standard pound, and pence added from the selected money to bring it up to weight; the number of pence required for this purpose having been noted the sheriff was charged on all “blanch” sums due that number of pence in addition to each pound by tale.

When we pass to the consideration of the relative value and purchasing power of money in the middle of the twelfth century as compared with the present time we are met by many complications. The average price of an ox or cow during this reign was from three shillings to four shillings, occasionally rising as high as five shillings; farm horses fetched three shillings, but military chargers cost three pounds or more; sheep ranged from fourpence to sixpence and young pigs were about the same, but when full-grown they fetched as much as a shilling. A penny a day was the recognised wage for a sergeant or private soldier, and eightpence a day for a man-at-arms; the master of the royal yacht received a shilling, the clerk of the household two shillings, and the chancellor five shillings a day. Probably we may take the money of that date as roughly equivalent to twenty-five times the amount in modern currency.

So far as the expenditure of the Crown is concerned we labour under considerable difficulties, having no records of the nature of the Liberate and Issue Rolls of later reigns. The only items of expenditure which have come down to us are such as have been entered upon the Pipe Rolls as discharged by the sheriffs and other officers out of the issues of their offices. The heaviest of these expenses were incurred in connection with building, and especially in the repair and enlargement of the royal castles. The rebuilding of Scarborough has already been spoken of, and amongst the scores of entries of work done on castles may be mentioned the £1000 spent on Oxford in 1166 and 1167, a sum which is, however, insignificant beside the £4350 spent on Dover Castle between 1182 and 1187, as much as £1248 being spent in the one year 1185. Nottingham, which appears to have been one of the most habitable of the castles, accounted for £450 in 1172 and for over £300 in 1175; large sums were also spent on the king’s hunting seats such as Woodstock, Clipston, and especially Clarendon. For the adornment of Clarendon there were provided in 1177 “marble columns,” probably shafts of dark marble similar to those the introduction of which by St. Hugh in his new work at Lincoln so struck contemporary writers. But numerous as are the entries of building expenses, they can represent but part of the sums laid out by Henry on such operations, nor do we hear anything of the cost of the army or of the upkeep of the royal household, though we know from the existing list of salaries that this last item must have amounted to about £1500 a year. Whatever were his expenses Henry contrived to amass a great fortune, which his successor, Richard, found little difficulty in dissipating.

CHAPTER XI

THE ENGLISH NATION UNDER HENRY II

Society in England during Henry’s reign might be considered as arranged in three groups: (1) The Military Class, with the king at its head, ranging from the semi-independent earl to the humble tenant of some fraction of a knight’s fee. (2) The Merchants and Traders—dwellers in cities and seaports, from the wealthy councillor to the humble apprentice. (3) The Peasantry—the comfortable yeoman, the farm labourer, whose theoretical lack of freedom often sat but lightly upon him, and the hired servants. From this third class the two superior classes were completed. They formed the nameless ranks of archers and foot soldiers who bore the brunt of many a battle, and, unprotected by coat of mail or prospect of ransom, paid forfeit for defeat with their lives, and they were the hardy sailors, serving the merchants in time of peace, but ever ready to convert their ships into men-of-war. It might seem that the clergy should form a fourth class, but they really fall into the same three divisions as the laity. The prelates and dignitaries, holding their lands by military service and bound to provide so many knights for the king’s army, sometimes leading their troops in person; then, opposed to these sons of the Church Militant, the monks and canons of the religious orders, intent on the business of religion, not wholly averse to trading spiritual for material blessings, and displaying some skill in laying up treasure in this life as well as for the next; and finally the poor, but not always honest, parish priests and unattached clerks, the hardest workers and the worst paid, little above the secular peasantry from whose ranks they sprang, their many virtues unrecorded and the excesses of their unworthy members pilloried. If a fourth group did exist it consisted of the officials, blending the characteristics of clerks, soldiers, and merchants—men prepared at a moment’s notice to hear pleas, superintend the purchase and despatch of stores, or take command of a force of soldiers.

The king’s supremacy in his court was indisputable; his greatest nobles were proud to serve him, and quick to resent any infringement of their rights of service. Thus the Earl of Arundel, hereditary chief butler, returning from a long journey just as the two kings, Henry and Louis, were sitting down to dinner, strode into the hall, flung off his cloak and seized the royal goblet from the acting butler, who resisting, the powerful earl knocked him down and presented the wine on bended knee to his royal master, explaining apologetically to the French king that it was his privilege and that the deputy butler ought to have withdrawn without protest. So also, at a later date, William de Tancarville, chamberlain of Normandy, forcibly possessed himself of the basin and ewer which another courtier was carrying to the king. Yet was Henry the most accessible of men; out of doors he suffered his subjects to crowd round him and speak to him freely, in his court he was almost always ready to give informal audience to all who sought him, and it was only at the very door of his bedchamber that a messenger would be challenged. Men of wit, such as Walter Map, the cynical canon of St. Paul’s, might break in on his conversation with a humorous or sarcastic comment unrebuked, and Henry could even take in good part the public reprimand addressed to him by an obscure monk of his neglected priory of Witham. The English court under Henry attracted scholars of European fame, and on the lighter side of literature we find the king encouraging Gerald de Barri, the proto-journalist, listening amusedly to his anecdotes and bantering him, giving money to “Maurice the story-teller” (fabulatori), and replying with mock seriousness to the heroics purporting to be addressed to him by King Arthur.

If his nobles did not share the king’s literary tastes they were at least in tune with him on the subject of sport. Hunting and hawking were the recreations of the English and Norman nobility, and in his devotion thereto Henry yielded to none of his subjects. The keepers of his hounds formed not the most insignificant part of his retinue; hawks were procured for him from Norway and from Ireland and passed as presents between himself and foreign princes; when he went out of England, whether for peaceful cause or war, his hawks and hounds and huntsmen followed him. His sons also, like all the magnates of their days, were devotees of the chase, but the two elder found greater pleasure in the sport of war, and the young King Henry in particular shone as the patron of the tournament. The gradual repression of private warfare, at least between the smaller lords, had deprived life of much of its excitement, and the more warlike spirits sought to counteract what they no doubt considered the softness and degeneracy of the age by the institution of tournaments, a species of private war cleansed of personal rancour and lacking the disastrous consequences to lands and tenants involved by the real thing. To picture the tournament of this date as resembling the formal and chivalrous jousting in the lists of later centuries would be completely misleading. For the most part the frequenters of these meetings were landless men, younger sons and needy adventurers, intent solely, or at least mainly, on making money by the capture of opponents, whose chargers and armour then became their own, and whose bodies might be held to ransom. It was no shame for ten to set on one, and William the Marshal, one of the most brilliant of these adventurers and the instructor of the young king, gained praise by the skill with which he let his adversaries exhaust themselves before he flung his forces upon them. This same Marshal, who went with another knight on a pot-hunting expedition during which they accounted for 103 knights, besides extra chargers, on one occasion saw one of the opposing knights thrown by his horse and lying on the ground, disabled with a broken thigh; rushing out of the tent where he was dining he picked up the injured man and bore him back into the tent, handing him over a prisoner to his companions “to pay their debts with.” In this particular instance there was no doubt an element of rough humour, but the whole spirit of the tournament was practical and unromantic, though fame and glory were sought at the same time as wealth, and the Marshal would have set a higher value upon his reputation for skill and courage than upon the fund of ready money for which he was remarkable at a time when steel and silver were rarely found together.

The spirit of the tournament pervaded the field of battle, and so far as the knightly combatants were concerned their chief aim was to capture and hold to ransom their adversaries rather than to kill them. Such lust of slaughter as they felt was satisfied at the expense of the unfortunate infantry, drawn from the ranks of the peasants and yeomen and not worth ransoming. After a desperate and decisive battle the chroniclers will recount a long list of knights captured, but it is rare indeed that any are recorded to have fallen in battle, and on such rare occasions it was usually by the hand of a common foot soldier or by a chance arrow. It was precisely this tradition of the respect due to gentle blood that made the Norman knights so useless against the Welsh or Irish, who ignored their gentility and fought to kill.

Henry’s genius for organisation found scope in military matters as elsewhere. During the reigns of the Saxon kings the fyrd or national militia, theoretically consisting of all the able-bodied male population, was always liable to be called out in time of war, and this liability had remained in force after the Conquest. Under William the Conqueror the country had been parcelled out into estates, great and small, the tenants of which held by the service of supplying a fixed quota of knights, in no way proportionate to the size or value of the estate, to serve in the royal army for forty days when required. It has been already pointed out that Henry II. encouraged the system of commuting personal service for a money payment, and in order to ascertain the exact amount of service due he caused a general return to be made by his military tenants in 1166. They were required to state how many knights they were bound to find, and as there were two ways of providing for these knights, either by granting them land in return for their services when required or by hiring them as occasion demanded, a distinction was to be drawn between the knights enfeoffed and those chargeable on the demesnes. A further distinction was to be made between those knights already enfeoffed at the time of the death of Henry I. and those of newer feoffment. In many cases the greater barons had enfeoffed more knights than they were bound to supply, probably for the most part during Stephen’s reign, with the intention of augmenting their own private forces, and Henry claimed that they should pay scutage on this larger number of knights instead of on their original quota, a claim which was strenuously resisted.

For the re-organisation of the national forces an Assize of Arms was issued in England in 1181. Every holder of a knight’s fee or of rents and property to the value of sixteen marks was to keep a coat of mail, a helmet, a shield, and a lance; the owner of property worth ten marks should have a hauberk, an iron headpiece, and a lance, and all burgesses and the whole body of freemen should have a quilted jacket (wambais), an iron headpiece, and a lance. These arms were never to be parted with, but to descend from father to son; but in order to render the supply more accessible it was ordered that no burgess should keep more arms than his statutory quota, and if he had others should give or sell them to those that required them; at the same time Jews were forbidden to retain coats of mail and hauberks, presumably the most expensive portions of the outfit. From the absence of any mention of horses it has been assumed by some writers that all these troops were expected to fight on foot, but this is undoubtedly an error; presumably the provision of a horse was left to the discretion of the soldier, and practically the whole of the first class and a large proportion of the second would have been mounted men. Another noteworthy omission is that of the bow; some thirty years later the holder of property worth twenty shillings was required to provide a bow and arrows, but at this time it would seem that the bow was regarded as unworthy of a freeman and its use confined to the villein soldiers.

The justices itinerant were to publish this assize in the different county courts and to make it known that any defaulter would pay for his fault with his body and by no means escape with fine or forfeiture. At the same time the justices were to hold inquiries by juries of freemen of good standing as to the persons in the several hundreds and boroughs who held property worth sixteen marks or ten marks, to draw up lists of such persons and to swear them to the observance of the assize.

The final article of the Assize of Arms directed that no one should buy or sell any ship to be taken away from England, or export timber. In this decree we have evidence of Henry’s comprehension of the value of a strong navy to the country. In speaking of a strong navy it must not be supposed that any royal force of fighting ships existed or was even contemplated at this time. Such naval organisation as existed was almost entirely confined to the federation of the Cinque Ports. The origin and early history of this federation is very obscure, but it seems clear that Hastings and Dover and probably the other three ports of Sandwich, Hythe, and Romney, were bound together by the possession of common privileges and common responsibilities in the reign of Edward the Confessor. Hastings was the undoubted head of this group of ports and the first to acquire privileges at the royal court and in connection with the herring fishery at Yarmouth which were afterwards extended to the other members. When the title of the Cinque Ports was assumed has not yet been discovered, but it was clearly established by the beginning of the reign of Henry II., as in 1161 we find a payment of £34, 17s. to the ships of “the five ports” which conveyed treasure across the channel. As one main division of the English fleet employed in the expedition against Lisbon in 1147 was referred to as the “Hastingenses,” almost certainly alluding to the ships of the allied ports, it would seem that the title was first officially recognised under Henry II. The bonds of union were still so loose that the separate ports and their affiliated members received separate charters. One of these, of quite uncertain date, issued by Henry at Westminster, confirmed to the “barons” of Hastings their privileges at court, exemption from customs and other dues, and the foreshore rights of “strand and den” at Yarmouth, in return for the provision of twenty ships for fifteen days when required. Henry also granted similar exemptions to the two “ancient towns” of Rye and Winchelsea, affiliating them to Hastings, to whose quota of twenty ships they were to send two; they were further exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and might be impleaded only in the same manner as the barons of Hastings and of the Cinque Ports. This privilege of a separate court was clearly of early date, as in another charter given during the first six years of Henry’s reign to the men of Hythe he ordered that they should not plead elsewhere than they were used to do, namely at the Shipway.

As a result of grants and confirmations of privileges the king could rely at need upon a force of some sixty ships. The ships themselves were the ordinary fishing and trading vessels of the channel ports, small but seaworthy, easily converted into fighting ships by the erection of wooden fore and stern castles and manned by hardy and experienced sailors. But for all their experience the little ships with their single square sail were not very manageable in a storm and the tale of shipwrecks was large. When used for transport purposes it would seem that about a hundred soldiers could be carried by each vessel. The Cinque Port vessels were bound to carry a crew of twenty-one, but this was apparently an exceptional complement, as in the levy of ships for the Irish expedition of 1171 the average crew was twelve men and a master, such crews being carried by the thirty-six ships from Norfolk and Suffolk, the seven from Dorset and Somerset, six from Devon, two from London, and one from Herefordshire; on the other hand the twenty-eight ships supplied by Gloucestershire averaged only six men, but eight from Sussex nineteen, and two from Hampshire twenty-two apiece. During the troubles of 1173 most of the ships which were “sent to Sandwich to meet the ships of the Cinque Ports” carried crews of twenty or upwards, and the two vessels from Colchester carried sixty seamen between them. Probably the numbers were raised at this time in anticipation of attack, as we find that an extra force of from ten to twenty men was put on board the king’s yacht each time it crossed with treasure this year. This royal yacht was the only vessel permanently retained in the king’s service, naval forces being collected as required from the Cinque Ports and other coast towns, though there were at Southampton certain private ship-owners whose vessels were so often chartered for national service that they might almost be held to have constituted a miniature royal navy in embryo.

Southampton was at this time the chief mercantile port of England, pre-eminent for its valuable wine trade, thanks alike to the natural advantages of its situation relative to Normandy and the wine-exporting districts of the west, and to its proximity to the royal city of Winchester. Although London had already outdistanced Winchester in wealth the latter was still the home of the treasury, the rival of Westminster as the king’s official residence, and a leading centre of trade. The great fair of St. Giles drew merchants from all over England and from foreign lands to Winchester, to sell their fine worked stuffs to the king’s purveyors for his royal robes or to buy the coarse woollen cloth of local manufactures, for Winchester with its gilds of weavers and fullers was a great seat of the cloth industry, most of its products being the coarse “burrell” cloth of which two thousand ells were purchased and sent to Ireland in 1171 for the troops. A cheaper and coarser cloth seems to have been made in Cornwall, as on several occasions Cornish “burrells” in large quantities were bought for the king’s almoner. The output of English cloth was altogether more remarkable for quantity than quality; gilds of weavers existed in 1156 at Winchester, London, Lincoln, Oxford, Huntingdon, and Nottingham, all being of sufficient importance to pay yearly to the king from 40s. to £6, but their productions were for the most part poor and coarse, with the notable exception of the scarlet cloths of Lincoln, which are found fetching the prodigious price of 6s. 8d. the ell. So far as there were exceptions to the general lack of quality they were no doubt due to foreign, especially to Flemish, influence. At the time of the expulsion of the Flemings after the rebellion of 1173 there are numerous entries on the Pipe Rolls recording seizures of wool and woad belonging to Flemings; the dyers of Worcester are recorded as owing £12 to the king’s Flemish enemies, and there is other evidence to show the presence of these skilled clothworkers throughout the country.

For foreign trade, statistics, and even such details as would permit of broad generalisations, are lacking. There was no imposition of customs for revenue purposes by the central authorities; each town, whether seaport or inland market, had its own schedule of customs and octroi dues, but they were only under the control of the Crown in so far that the king could by charter exempt persons from the payment of such dues throughout the realm. Such exemptions were amongst the most valued franchises of the barons of the Cinque Ports, the men of a few privileged boroughs, and the tenants of certain great religious houses. A trading privilege of particular interest for its bearing upon the development of London under Norman influence was the right of the citizens of Rouen to a port or anchorage in the Thames close to the city walls, which was confirmed to them by Henry II. in 1174. A still more striking instance of the connection of two ports was Henry’s grant of Dublin to the burgesses of Bristol, assuring to them a virtual monopoly of the Irish trade, which they appear to have previously shared with Chester, the monopoly of the Irish trade with Normandy being in the same way assured to Rouen. As a whole Henry’s policy towards the towns and trading communities, especially in the earlier years of his reign, was liberal and encouraging; we find him granting the customs of York to the burgesses of Scarborough in 1155, the liberties of London and Winchester to the men of Gloucester, and the customs of Lincoln to the burgesses of Coventry at a later date; gilds merchant and trade gilds were confirmed in their privileges at Oxford, Nottingham, Lincoln, and elsewhere, and the formation of others licensed. With the growth of trade other unauthorised gilds sprang up, and in 1180 no fewer than nineteen such “adulterine” gilds were reported in London alone, five of them being connected with London Bridge, the famous stone bridge built in 1176. Of these London gilds the only four definitely identified with special trades were those of the goldsmiths, spicers, butchers, and clothworkers, the others being, no doubt, social and religious societies of a less specialised composition.

Side by side with the growth of manufactures developed the exploitation of the mineral wealth of England. The lead mines of Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Shropshire were being worked, and the valuable silver-bearing lead mines of Carlisle, which were farmed in 1158 for 100 marks, were bringing in 150 marks at the end of the reign, having fluctuated between 500 marks in 1166 and no yield at all after the border wars of 1173-4. At the other end of the kingdom were the rich tin mines of Cornwall and Devon. Iron was worked in the northern counties and to some extent in Northamptonshire, but the industry had not yet attained any degree of importance in the Weald of Sussex and Kent, and the Forest of Dean enjoyed a practical monopoly of the southern iron trade. Tin was undoubtedly exported to the Continent, lead we read of as sent by King Henry for the use of the monks of Clairvaux; but it is doubtful whether it was to any extent an article of commerce, and iron was almost certainly not exported.

By a curious inversion of later practice the chief exports from England in early times were the raw materials of wool and hides and a certain amount of food stuffs. Amongst the latter were no doubt cheeses, which had already found a market in Flanders in the eleventh century, and possibly ale, for which England, and especially Kent, was celebrated. In 1168 we find fifty-three hogsheads of ale sent to the king in Normandy, and that this drink was appreciated by foreigners we may conclude from its having occupied so prominent a part amongst the gifts which Becket carried with him on his famous embassy to the French court. While ale was the national drink, no small quantity of wine was grown in England, vineyards existing in the southern counties from Kent to Hereford, and at least as far north as Cambridgeshire, and references to cider are also numerous.

The preference given to cider over Kentish ale was one of the charges of luxury brought by Gerald de Barri against his monastic entertainers at the cathedral priory of Christchurch, Canterbury. How far the accusations of excess, in food and in other matters, brought by Gerald and by Walter Map against the monks, and in particular against those of the Cistercian order, could be sustained is a question difficult to answer. Both men bore personal grudges against the Cistercians, both preferred a scandalous story or a witty jest to strict accuracy, and Gerald especially was utterly unscrupulous in the abuse of his enemies. At the same time some of the little details in the stories told seem to support their accuracy, and there is evidence that in many cases abuses had crept in and ascetic ideals been relaxed with a rapidity which is astonishing when it is remembered that Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the order, had died only the year before Henry ascended the throne. One of Gerald’s tales relates how an abbot of one of the English Cistercian houses hospitably regaled the king, not knowing him, with a drinking bout, initiating him into the mysteries of “Pril” and “Vril,” the private toasts, or drinking cries, used in the monastery in place of the secular “Washeil” and “Drinkheil,” and how Henry, when the abbot subsequently came to court, welcomed him with “Pril” and made him repeat the performance, to his utter confusion and the intense amusement of the nobles. The possibility of this being a true story is increased when we read in the Cistercian annals a generation later that in 1215 the Abbot of Beaulieu was deposed because he behaved outrageously at table, drinking hilariously, in the presence of three earls and forty knights, and that, two years later, the Abbot of Tintern drank ceremoniously (solemniter) with bishops and monks. Of the purely English order of Gilbertines, whose founder, Gilbert of Sempringham, died in 1181, Gerald speaks favourably, though deprecating their system of double convents for nuns and canons, but it is only of the austere Carthusians and Grammontanes that he writes with whole-hearted commendation. That his praise was justified is confirmed by the exceptional favour shown to these two orders by Henry, who troubled little about other religious, save the nuns of Fontevrault and the military order of the Templars.

Gluttony and drunkenness were indeed vices in their addiction to which the English, both clergy and laity, compared unfavourably with their Welsh and Irish contemporaries. William Fitz-Stephen, in his famous description of London, gives “the immoderate drinking of fools” as one of the two “plagues” of the city. The degree of luxury then prevalent at table is indicated by his account of the public cook-shop on the river bank near the wine wharves, where every variety of fish, flesh, and fowl, roast meat, baked meat, stew and pasty was ever preparing. Hither ran the servants of those upon whose empty larders unexpected guests had descended; here was store sufficient to satisfy an army of knights or a band of pilgrims; here an epicure might call for sturgeon, woodcock, or ortolan. It was a gay, busy, prosperous city, ships of all nations loading and unloading, crowds chaffering with the merchants and tradesmen, whose stalls were congregated according to kind; here the booths of the goldsmiths, and here a street of cloth merchants; here the grocers, and here a row of cutlers, while through the narrow, irregular streets, scattering purchasers and loafers, would pass the retinue of some prelate or baron on the way to his town house. Then there was the weekly excitement of the horse fair held outside the city walls on the flat fields of Smithfield; every one was there, come to buy, to sell, or to look on, and there were horses to suit every conceivable want, at least if you accepted the word of their owners; here were ambling nags, unbroken colts, of whose heels you had better be careful, stately chargers, sturdy pack horses, mares with their foals, cart horses, driving horses, horses innumerable. But the fun really began when, with a sudden shouting, the crowd parted hastily and left a clear course down which thundered the chargers in mad race, scarcely needing the shouts and spurring of their boy jockeys to urge them to their utmost effort. And then there were the holidays, when the fields outside the city were thronged with students, chaffing each other and lampooning their teachers with apt Latinity, young nobles from the court at Westminister, and apprentices from the city, while their elders looked on and grew younger with excitement as they watched them cock-fighting, ball-playing, or tilting; and as the day wore on the girls would come to the fore and there would be song and dancing until the moon rose. Or the scene would shift to the river, where the boys, standing in the bows of a boat, would tilt at a shield suspended above the water and win either the applause or more often the laughter of the watchers on the bridge and in the riverside houses by their efforts to maintain their balance and avoid a ducking. And then in the winter, when the marshes were covered with ice, bone skates were in demand, and tilting on skates warmed the blood even if it was responsible for rather a large number of broken heads and limbs. For those who were too old, too timid, or too dignified for such boisterous sports there were the pleasures of hunting and hawking over the great preserves belonging to the city in Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and Kent. A gay city, but one whose gaiety was only too often suddenly checked by an outbreak of fire, the second of Fitz-Stephen’s “plagues.” With their wooden hovels, wooden booths, and primitive open hearths the English towns were constant sufferers from fire. Becket’s parents had been impoverished by a succession of fires, and in one year, 1161, London, Canterbury, Winchester, and Exeter were devastated; next year the booths of St. Giles’ fair at Winchester were burnt with all the merchandise in them, and in 1180 a fire beginning at the mint destroyed the greater part of the unfortunate town of Winchester; Glastonbury was burnt in 1184 and Chichester in 1187; and these are only instances recorded for the magnitude of destruction wrought; smaller outbreaks must have been of continual occurrence.

The description of London, mutatis mutandis, would apply sufficiently well to other towns of the period, though in many of the smaller boroughs the mercantile element must be almost eliminated and a large agricultural element introduced to render the picture even tolerably faithful. But when we get outside the walls of the towns we meet with quite a different state of affairs. Here and there a castle or the chief seat of some powerful landowner would present us with a building of some architectural importance, but in far the greater number of cases the chief house, the manor, would be a barn-like structure of one storey, the main feature of which would be the hall, or living room, with the massive beams of its open roof blackened by the smoke from the fire burning on an open hearth in the centre of the hall. The chamber, or sleeping apartment, a similar but smaller room connected with the first by a lobby or vestibule, would possibly be partitioned into cubicles either by lath and plaster walls or by cloth hangings. The kitchen, with brew-house, wash-house, dairy and other offices, where such existed, might form part of the main buildings or be in a block by themselves, and there would be one or two barns, with cart-houses, stables, cow-sheds, hen-houses, pig-styes and the miscellaneous appurtenances of a farm. The roofs of the various buildings would be thatched and the windows unglazed, closed with wooden shutters; on the floor would be a layer of rushes, not too frequently renewed, and one or two trestle tables, some benches and stools; a cupboard and possibly a couple of massive chests would pretty nearly exhaust the catalogue of the furniture, save for the wooden platters and bowls, buckets and barrels in the kitchen. Near the manor house as a rule would stand the church, massive and dark, its walls adorned with crudely realistic paintings and its stonework enriched with the strong, barbaric mouldings of the period, and hard by, overshadowed by the tithe barn, would be the house of the parish priest, little superior to the clusters of mud huts in which the peasantry contrived to exist.

To obtain a true estimate of the position of the peasantry at this time it is essential to grasp the entirely different standard of life then prevalent. Comfort and happiness are mainly matters of comparison, and at a time when the country gentleman was content with a simplicity which a modern artisan would scorn the labourer might well see no discomfort in conditions against which an Irish peasant would protest. A condition of servitude was no great burden in itself to those upon whose imaginations the theoretical beauty of liberty had not dawned. The gradations between free and bond were so fine that it required a skilled lawyer to draw the line that separated them, and in practice many freemen were worse off than the average villein. If villeinage legally bound the tenant to perform irksome service for his lord it morally bound the lord to provide for his tenant. At the same time the services exacted from the villein were arduous; in theory they were unlimited, but in practice custom had already fixed their nature in most manors. Striking a rough average, we may say that a villein as a rule had to work for his lord one day in each week for every five or ten acres that he held, and in addition to put in a number of extra days during the busy and critical weeks of harvest and further occasional days for ploughing, harrowing, and sowing. Then there were occasions when he might be called upon to help in thatching the farm buildings, carting manure, repairing hedges, carrying farm produce to market or fetching salt, or such local requirements as the drying and salting of herrings. For many of these extra services he had some return in the shape of a meal at the lord’s cost, but the demands upon his time were heavy and would have left him little opportunity to cultivate his own small holding if he had no sons or others to assist him.

The lot of the people, villein, landowner, and burgess had improved under the wise rule of Henry, and even the great lords, if shorn of their power, were safe from the attacks of rivals and secure of their possessions so long as they remained loyal. The seeds of the English Constitution had been sown. The English nation, which had been nursed, in part unwittingly, by Henry, was to discover its own existence under his successors when his foreign policy failed and the connection between Normandy and England was severed. The relations between Church and State were settled upon a firm basis, and if the supremacy of the State, for which Henry had fought, had to be abandoned, the Catholic Church in England developed a consciousness of nationality and remained independent of Rome in a degree quite exceptional when compared with the Church on the Continent. As the effects of Henry’s policy were either evanescent and negligible or enduring, and in the latter case easy to trace, it is not hard to estimate the significance of his reign, but to obtain a just estimate of the man himself is more difficult. For the more intimate details we are largely dependent upon men who either bore him ill-will or, more rarely, were writing in a spirit of flattery, but putting the evidence together we see a strong, clear-headed man, controlling his emotions but occasionally clearing off accumulations of irritation and annoyance by tremendous outbursts of mad rage; a methodical man with a keen sense of justice, but arbitrary and unscrupulous; a skilled general who never engaged in warfare if it could be avoided; a keen and restless sportsman with a sense of humour and a passion for literature; a free-thinking adulterer with a genuine appreciation of purity and true religion; a king who could manage the affairs of half-a-dozen principalities but could not rule his own house; an acute judge of men, who lavished affection and benefits upon ungrateful and unworthy sons; a mass of contradictions; in other words, an entirely human man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Records

For the whole period covered by the reign of Henry II. the English national archives are fortunate in the possession of the unique series of Pipe Rolls. On these annual account rolls were entered in detail the issues of all the counties, escheats, vacant sees and other lands farmed for the Crown. The details of these payments, including “relief” paid by the heirs of deceased tenants in chief, amercements for innumerable offences and other miscellaneous information, are most valuable to the genealogist, topographer, and constitutional historian, but of greater value to the general historian are the balancing items of money expended by the sheriffs upon building operations, hiring ships, provisioning troops, entertaining members of the royal family or ambassadors from foreign courts, and in a hundred other different ways. From these it is possible in many cases to follow the king’s movements, while often the details given throw a cold, impartial light, corroborative or corrective, upon the prejudiced or distorted statements of the chroniclers. Of the corresponding Pipe Rolls for Normandy only that for 1180 and a fragment for 1185 have survived.

A large number of royal Charters of this period have survived and are of great value to the antiquary, though, for the most part, they yield little to the general historian. The Calendars of Charter Rolls, Mr. Round’s Calendar of Documents preserved in France, and the Monasticon Anglicanum contain the most important collections of these charters. With practically no exceptions the charters of Henry II. are undated and can only be assigned to their years by a careful examination of the attesting signatures, but M. Leopold Delisle in a series of articles in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (1906-1908) claims that the charters prior to 1173 can be at once distinguished from those of later date by the absence from the king’s title of the formula Dei gratia, which is invariably found from 1173 onwards. This theory has been disputed, but the weight of evidence is in favour of M. Delisle.

Surveys of the manors and churches belonging to the canons of St. Paul’s, made in 1181 (printed in the Domesday of St. Paul’s by the Camden Society), and of the possessions of the Knights Templars in 1185 (Exch. K. R., Misc. Books, vol. 16) are of interest for the light thrown upon land tenure and agricultural life in general, and further particulars can be gleaned from the many monastic cartularies, printed and manuscript, which exist. Most important, perhaps, of all this class of records is the “Boldon Book,” an elaborate survey of the possessions of the see of Durham in 1183, which has been fully treated by Dr. Lapsley in the Victoria History of the County of Durham.

The Red Book of the Exchequer, which has been printed in the Rolls Series, contains the important returns of knights’ fees made in 1166 and the “Constitutio Domus Regis,” an account of persons composing the king’s household, their wages and perquisites, originally compiled in the reign of Henry I., but equally applicable to the court of Henry II.

Chronicles

For the acts of Henry prior to his accession we are mainly dependent upon the concise records of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Henry of Huntingdon, with the valuable addition of the more detailed Gesta Stephani.

For the general history of the reign the Chronicles of Robert of Torigny, Abbot of Mont St. Michel, down to 1186, in which year he died, and the History of William of Newburgh are two of the most reliable sources. From 1170 onwards we have the valuable aid of the Gesta Henrici, known by the name of Abbot Benedict of Peterborough, which is incorporated in the Chronicles of Roger of Hoveden. The works of Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul’s, and of Gervase of Canterbury are for the most part compilations based upon other writers, but each contain a few facts not found elsewhere. The Annales Monastici and other monastic chronicles printed in the Rolls Series and the Annales Angevines (Collection de Textes) supply a few occasional details of local events and serve to corroborate the more important works.

The bulk of the literature concerned with the Becket controversy has been collected in the seven volumes of Canon J. C. Robertson’s Materials for the History of Thomas Becket in the Rolls Series. These contain the Lives by William of Canterbury, including a long list of Miracles, Benedict of Peterborough, John of Salisbury, continued by Alan of Tewkesbury, William Fitz-Stephen, Herbert of Bosham, Edward Grim and two anonymous biographers, and also over eight hundred Letters connected with the controversy. Some light is thrown on the contemporary estimate of Becket by the Latin metrical chronicle, Draco Normannicus, attributed to Etienne of Rouen and written before Becket’s martyrdom had conferred upon him exemption from criticism.

Welsh affairs are recorded in the Annales Cambriæ and the more detailed Brut y Tywysogion, and much light is thrown upon them by the Descriptio Cambriæ and the Itinerarium Cambriæ of Gerald de Barri (“Giraldus Cambrensis”). The same writer’s Topographia Hibernica gives an interesting but inaccurate account of Ireland, and his Expugnatio Hiberniæ recounts the conquest of Ireland by Richard “Strongbow,” Earl of Pembroke, and his companions. Another and more reliable account of the conquest is given in the Norman poem, The Song of Dermot and the Earl (ed. G. H. Orpen, 1891); it appears to have been based upon materials supplied by Morice Regan, secretary to King Dermot. In addition to these sources we have, for Irish history, the Annals of the Four Masters and the Annals of Loch Cé.

Jordan Fantosme has left us a spirited Norman poem on the war between England and Scotland in 1173-4, including the capture of the Scottish king, at which he was present. Another poem, Guillaume le Maréchal (ed. P. Meyer, Société de l’Histoire de France), throws considerable light upon Henry’s later years, as does the De Principis Instructione of Gerald de Barri and the Vita Hugonis, or Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln.

On the legal and constitutional side we have Glanville De Legibus, a formulary compiled by the justiciar about the end of Henry’s reign, and the Dialogus de Scaccario of Richard Fitz-Neal, an elaborate account, historical and technical, of the exchequer.

In the matter of illustrating the life of the times first place must be accorded to Gerald de Barri, who exhibits in a unique degree the qualifications of a journalist; clever, humorous, plucky, possessing immense self-confidence, a fund of quotations, a love of “purple patches” and an eloquence of abuse worthy of his Welsh extraction, he continually enlivens his pages with personal anecdotes, usually scandalous. With him may be classed Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, witty and sarcastic. The Maréchal poem, already mentioned, throws some light on the life of the nobles, more especially of the younger landless men, whose chief delight was in the tournament. The inner life of a monastery is shown with singular fidelity in the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, monk of Bury St. Edmunds, and a few details of the general life of the people may be gleaned from the writings of Alexander Neckam.

Modern Writers

The reign of Henry II. has been treated by Lord Lyttleton, and more recently by Miss Norgate and by Mrs. J. R. Green. The period is also covered by the third volume of Sir J. Ramsay’s solid and scholarly History of England. Mr. Eyton in his Household and Itinerary of Henry II. endeavoured to trace the movements of the restless king from day to day and to assign to definite occasions his undated charters. Complete success in such a task is not to be expected, but although there are a number of mistakes, especially in the dating of charters, the work is monumental and most valuable to the student. Finally, mention may be made of Mr. Round’s various papers in Geoffrey de Mandeville, Feudal England, and The Commune of London.

APPENDIX

ITINERARY OF HENRY II