After such an exhibition of Henry’s powers of coercion on the two chief nobles of the north, lesser men were not likely to venture upon defiance; the occupiers of crown lands passed from rage to terror and dismay, and began sullenly to make restitution.[1340] The grantees of Stephen, however, soon proved to be the least part of the difficulty. Several of the royal fortresses were held by partizans of the Empress, who had won them either while warring against Stephen in her behalf, or by a grant from their imperial mistress in her brief day of power; and they not unnaturally resented the king’s attempt to deprive them of what they looked upon as the well-earned rewards of their service to his mother and himself. Henry, however, had made up his mind that there must be no distinction of parties or of persons; all irregularities, no matter whence they proceeded, must be suppressed; every root of rebellion must be cut off, and every ground of suspicion removed.[1341] Early in March he called another council in London,[1342] confirmed the peace and renewed the old customs of the realm,[1343] and again summoned all holders of royal castles to give an account of their usurpations.[1344] The two mightiest barons of the west revolted at once; Roger of Hereford, the son of Matilda’s faithful Miles, hurried away from court to fortify his castles of Hereford and Gloucester against the king, and made common cause with Hugh of Mortemer, the lord of Cleobury and Wigmore, who held the royal fortress of Bridgenorth. Roger was brought to reason in little more than a week by the persuasions of his kinsman Bishop Gilbert of Hereford;[1345] Hugh was suffered to complete his preparations for defiance while Henry kept the Easter feast and held a great council at Wallingford to settle the succession to the throne, first upon his eldest child William, and, in case of William’s death, upon the infant Henry, who was scarcely six weeks old.[1346] That done, the king marched with all his forces against Hugh of Mortemer. He divided his host into three parts; one division laid siege to Cleobury, another to Wigmore,[1347] and the third, commanded by Henry himself, sat down before Bridgenorth.[1348] On the spot where the spirit of feudal insubordination, incarnate in Robert of Bellême, had fought its last fight against Henry I., the same spirit, represented by Hugh of Mortemer, now fought against Henry II. The fight had been useless fifty years ago; it was equally useless now. One after another the three castles were taken, and on July 7 a great council met beneath the walls of Bridgenorth to witness Hugh’s surrender.[1349]

At the opposite side of the kingdom two great barons still remained to be dealt with. One was Hugh Bigod, the veteran turncoat who had been seneschal to Henry I., and who had (as the Angevin party believed) perjured himself to oust Matilda from her rights, yet whose hereditary and territorial influence had, it seems, been great enough to win from the young king a confirmation of his earldom of Norfolk,[1350] as well as to procure him a long day of grace before he was called upon to give up his many unlawfully-acquired castles. The other was William of Blois, Stephen’s eldest surviving son, by marriage earl of Warren and Surrey, to whom the treaty of Wallingford had assigned two royal castles, Pevensey and Norwich. The danger of leaving these important fortresses in William’s hands was increased by the position of Norwich, in the very midst of Hugh Bigod’s earldom; and after a year’s delay Henry determined to put an end to this state of things in East Anglia. Contrary to all precedent, he summoned the Whitsuntide council of 1157 to meet at Bury S. Edmund’s.[1351] This peaceful invasion of their territories sufficed to bring both earls to submission. William contentedly gave up his castles in exchange for the private estates which his father had held before he became king; Hugh surrendered in like manner,[1352] and was likewise taken back into favour, to have another opportunity of proving his ingratitude sixteen years later. This settlement of East Anglia completed the pacification of the realm. Even before this, however, as early as the autumn of 1155, peace and order were so far secured that Henry could venture to think of leaving the country. At Michaelmas in that year he laid before his barons a scheme for conquering Ireland as a provision for his brother William.[1353] The Pope, who was traditionally held to be the natural owner of all islands which had no other sovereign, had granted a bull authorizing the expedition;[1354] but the Empress, whose counsel was always deferentially sought by her royal son, disapproved of his project;[1355] and when he went over sea in January 1156 it was not to win a kingdom for his youngest brother in Ireland, but to put down a rebellion of the second in Anjou.[1356]

In England the year of his absence was a year without a history. Not a single event of any consequence is recorded by the chroniclers save the death of Henry’s eldest son, shortly before Christmas;[1357] and even this was a matter of no political moment; for, as we have seen, there was another infant to take his place as heir-apparent. The blank in the chronicles has to be filled up from the Pipe Roll which once again makes its appearance at Michaelmas 1156, and which has a special value and interest as being the most authoritative witness to the character of the young king’s efforts for the reorganization of the government, and to the results which they had already produced. The record itself is a mere skeleton, and a very imperfect one; the carefulness of arrangement, the fulness of detail, the innumerable touches of local and personal colour which make the one surviving Pipe Roll of Henry I. so precious and so interesting, are sadly wanting in this roll of the second year of Henry II.; yet between its meagre lines may be read a suggestive, almost a pathetic story. Its very imperfections, its lack of order and symmetry, its scantiness of information, its brief, irregular, confused entries, help us to realize as perhaps nothing else could how disastrous had been the break-down of the administrative machinery which we saw working so methodically five-and-twenty years ago, and how laborious must have been the task of restoration. Three whole shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, send in no account at all, for they were still in the hands of the king of Scots; in almost every shire there are significant notices of “waste,” and a scarcely less significant charge for repair of the royal manors. The old items reappear—the Danegeld, the aids from the towns, the proceeds of justice, the feudal incidents; but the total product amounts to little more than a third part of the sum raised in 1130; and even this diminished revenue was only made up with the help of sundry “aids” and “gifts” (as they were technically called), and of a new impost specially levied upon some of the ecclesiastical estates under the name of scutage.

The origin of this tax is implied in its title; it was derived from the “service of the shield” (scutum)—one of the distinguishing marks of feudal tenure—whereby the holder of a certain quantity of land was bound to furnish to his lord the services of a fully-armed horseman for forty days in the year. The portion of land charged with this service constituted a “knight’s fee,” and was usually reckoned at the extent of five hides, or the value of twenty pounds annually. The gradual establishment of this military tenure throughout the kingdom was a process which had been going on ever since the Norman conquest; the use of the word “scutage,” implying an assessment of taxation based on the knight’s fee instead of the old rating division of the hide, indicates that it was now very generally completed. The scutage of 1156 was levied, as we learn from another source,[1358] specially to meet the expenses of a war which Henry was carrying on with his rebel brother in Anjou. For such a purpose the feudal host itself was obviously not a desirable instrument. Ralf Flambard’s famous device of 1093, when he took a money compensation from the English levies and sent it over sea to pay the wages of the Red King’s foreign mercenaries, suggested a precedent which might be applied to the feudal knighthood as well as to the national host. Its universal application might be hindered at present by a clause in the charter of Henry I., which exempted the tenants by knight-service from all pecuniary charges on their demesne lands. It was, however, possible to make a beginning with the Church lands. These habitually claimed, with more or less success, immunity from military service except in the actual defence of the country; on the other hand, now that the bishops and abbots had been made to accept their temporalities on the same tenure as the lay baronies, there was a fair shew of reason for compelling them to compromise their claim by a money contribution assessed on the same basis as the personal service for which it was a substitute.[1359]

Such, it seems, was the origin of the great institution of scutage. Its full developement, which it only attained three years later, was avowedly the work of Thomas the chancellor; whether or not its first suggestion came from him is not so clear. At the moment no resentment seems to have been provoked by the measure; its ultimate tendency was not foreseen, the sum actually demanded was not great, and the innovation was condoned on the ground of the king’s lawful need and in the belief that it was only an isolated demand.[1360] A greater matter might well have been condoned in consideration of Henry’s loyal redemption of his coronation-pledges, to which the Pipe Roll bears testimony. If the king had been prompt in resuming his kingly rights, he had been no less prompt in striving to fulfil his kingly duties. The work of necessary destruction was no sooner accomplished than the work of reconstruction began in all departments of state administration. The machinery of justice was set in motion once again; the provincial visitations of the judges of the king’s court were revived; thirteen shires were visited by some one or more of them between Michaelmas 1155 and Michaelmas 1156. The person most extensively employed in this capacity was the constable, Henry of Essex:[1361] the chancellor also appears in the like character, twice in Henry’s company[1362] and once in that of the earl of Leicester.[1363] Nay, the supreme “fount of justice” itself was always open to any suitor who could be at the trouble and expense of tracking its ever-shifting whereabouts; not only was the chancellor, as the king’s special representative, constantly employed in hearing causes, but Henry himself was always ready to fulfil the duty in person; at the most inconvenient moments—in the middle of the siege of Bridgenorth, at the crisis of his struggle with the Angevin rebels—he found time and patience to give attentive hearing to a wearisome suit which had been going on at intervals for nearly six years between Bishop Hilary of Chichester and Walter de Lucy the abbot of Battle.[1364] Hand in hand with the revival of order and law went the revival of material prosperity. In the dry, laconic prose of the financial record we can find enough to bear out, almost to the letter, the historians’ poetical version of the work of Henry’s first two years. The wolves had fled or become changed into peaceable sheep; the swords had been beaten into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks;[1365] and the merchants again went forth to pursue their business, the Jews to seek their creditors, in peace and safety as of old.[1366]

Henry returned to England soon after Easter 1157.[1367] His first step, as we have seen, was to secure the obedience of East-Anglia. Having thus fully established his authority throughout his immediate realm, his next aim was to assert the rights of his crown over its Scottish and Welsh dependencies. The princes of Wales, who had long been acknowledged vassals of England, must be made to do homage to its new sovereign; the king of Scots owed homage no less, if not for his crown, at any rate for his English fiefs; moreover, his title to these was in itself a disputed question. Three English shires, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, had been conquered by David, nominally in behalf of his niece the Empress Matilda, in the early years of Stephen’s reign; Stephen, making a virtue of necessity, had formally granted their investiture to David’s son Henry;[1368] and they were now in the hands of Henry’s son, the young king Malcolm IV. The story went that old King David, before he knighted his grand-nephew Henry Fitz-Empress in 1149, had made him swear that if ever he came to the English throne he would suffer the king of Scots to keep these shires in peace for ever.[1369] Henry does not seem to have denied his oath; he simply refused to keep it, on the ground that it ran counter to his duty as king. Acting on what his enemies declared to be his habitual principle, of choosing to do penance for a word rather than for a deed,[1370] he declared that the crown of England must not suffer such mutilation, and summoned his Scottish cousin to give back to him the territory which had been acquired in his name.[1371]

Meanwhile, without waiting for Malcolm’s answer, Henry prepared for his first Welsh war. The domestic quarrels of the Welsh princes furnished him with an excellent pretext. Owen, prince of North-Wales, had confiscated the estates of his brother Cadwallader and banished him from the country; Cadwallader appealed to King Henry, and of course found a gracious reception.[1372] A council was held at Northampton on July 17,[1373] and thence orders were issued for an expedition into North-Wales. The force employed was the feudal levy, but in a new form; instead of calling out the whole body of knights to serve their legal term of forty days, Henry required every two knights throughout England to join in equipping a third[1374]—no doubt for a threefold term of service. By this expedient he obtained a force quite sufficient for his purpose, guarded against the risk of its breaking up before its task was accomplished—a frequent drawback in medieval warfare—and made the first innovation upon the strict rule of feudal custom in such a manner as to avoid all offence.

The invasion was to be twofold, by land and sea.[1375] The host assembled near Chester,[1376] on Saltney marsh,[1377] and was joined by Madoc Ap Meredith, prince of Powys. Owen of North-Wales, with his three sons and all his forces, entrenched himself at Basingwerk.[1378] The king, with his youthful daring,[1379] set off at once by way of the sea-coast, hoping to fall upon the Welsh at unawares; Owen’s sons however were on the watch,[1380] and in the narrow pass of Consilt[1381] the English suddenly found themselves face to face with the foe. Entangled in the woody, marshy ground, they were easily routed by the nimble light-armed Welsh;[1382] and a cry that the king himself had fallen caused the constable, Henry of Essex, to drop the royal standard and fly in despair. Henry of Anjou soon shewed himself alive, rallied his troops, and almost, like his ancestor Fulk at Conquereux, turned the defeat into a victory;[1383] for he cut his way through the Welsh ambushes with such vigour that Owen judged it prudent to withdraw from Basingwerk and seek a more inaccessible retreat.[1384] Cutting down the woods and clearing the roads before him, Henry pushed on to Rhuddlan, and there fortified the castle.[1385] Meanwhile the fleet had sailed[1386] under the command of Madoc Ap Meredith.[1387] It touched at Anglesey and there landed a few troops whose sacrilegious behaviour brought upon them such vengeance from the outraged islanders[1388] that their terrified comrades sailed back at once to Chester, where they learned that the war was ended.[1389] Owen, in terror of being hemmed in between the royal army and the fleet, sent proposals for peace, reinstated his banished brother,[1390] performed his own homage to King Henry,[1391] and gave hostages for his loyalty in the future.[1392] As the South-Welsh princes were all vassals of North-Wales, Owen’s submission was equivalent to a formal acknowledgement of Henry’s rights as lord paramount over the whole country, and the young king was technically justified in boasting that he had subdued all the Welsh to his will.[1393]

It was doubtless on his triumphant return that the king of Scots came to meet him at Chester.[1394] Whichever of the royal kinsmen might have the better cause, Malcolm now clearly perceived that the power to maintain it was all on Henry’s side. He therefore surrendered the three disputed shires,[1395] with the fortresses of Newcastle, Bamborough and Carlisle,[1396] and acknowledged himself the vassal of the English king “in the same manner as his grandfather had been the man of King Henry the Elder.”[1397] The precise import of this formula is uncertain, and was probably not much less so at the time; the exact nature and grounds of the Scottish homage to England formed a question which both parties usually found it convenient to leave undetermined.[1398] For Henry’s present purpose it sufficed that, on some ground or other, the homage was done.