For the last eight years Henry had been literally, throughout his English realm, over all persons and all causes supreme. From the hour of Thomas’s flight, not a hand, not a voice was lifted to oppose or to question his will; England lay passive before him; the time seemed to have come when he might work out at leisure and without fear of check his long-cherished plans of legal, judicial and administrative reform. In the execution of those plans, however, he was seriously hampered by the indirect consequences of the ecclesiastical quarrel. One of these was his own prolonged absence from England, which was made necessary by the hostility of France, and which compelled him to be content with setting his reforms in operation and then leave their working to other hands and other heads, without the power of superintending it and watching its effects with his own eyes, during nearly six years. He had now to learn that the enemy with whom he had been striving throughout those years was after all not the most serious obstacle in his way;—that the most threatening danger to his scheme of government still lay, as it had lain at his accession, in that temper of the baronage which it had been his first kingly task to bring under subjection. The victory which he had gained over Hugh Bigod in 1156 was real, but it was not final. The spirit of feudal insubordination was checked, not crushed; it was only waiting an opportunity to lift its head once more; and with the strife that raged around S. Thomas of Canterbury the opportunity came.
Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side of the ecclesiastical movement—its introduction of a separate system of law and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform regal administration—which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of Henry II.[583]
As yet, however, there was no token of the strife to come. In February 1166, two years after the publication of the Constitutions of Clarendon, Henry assembled another council at the same place and thence issued an ordinance[584] for carrying out a reform in the method of bringing to justice criminals in general, similar to that which he had in the Constitutions sought to apply to criminals of one particular class. By the Assize of Clarendon it was enacted that the king’s justices and the sheriffs should in every shire throughout the kingdom make inquiry concerning all crimes therein committed “since our lord the king was king.”[585] The method of their investigations was that of inquest by sworn recognitors chosen from among the “lawful men” of each hundred and township, and bound by oath to speak the truth according to their knowledge of the fact in question. This mode of legal inquiry had been introduced into England by William the Conqueror for fiscal purposes, such as the taking of the Domesday survey, and its employment for similar objects was continued by his successors. Henry II. had in the early years of his reign applied the same principle to the uses of civil litigation by an ordinance known as the “Great Assize,” whereby disputes concerning the possession of land might, if the litigants chose, be settled before the justices of the king’s court by the unanimous oath of twelve lawful knights chosen according to a prescribed form from among those dwelling in the district where the land lay, and therefore competent to swear to the truth or falsehood of the claim.[586] This proceeding seems to be assumed as already in use by the ninth Constitution of Clarendon, which ordains its application to disputes concerning Church lands.[587] The Assize of Clarendon aimed at bringing criminals to justice by the help of the same machinery. It decreed that in every hundred of every shire inquest should be made by means of twelve lawful men of the hundred and four from each township, who should be sworn to denounce every man known in their district as a robber, thief or murderer, or a harbourer of such; on their presentment the accused persons were to be arrested by the sheriff, and kept by him in safe custody till they could be brought before the itinerant justices, to undergo the ordeal of water and receive legal punishment according to its results.[588] The inquest was to be taken and the session of the justices held in full shire-court; no personal privileges of any kind were to exempt any qualified member of the court from his duty of attendance and of service on the jury of recognitors if required;[589] and no territorial franchise or private jurisdiction, whether of chartered town or feudal “honour,” was to shelter a criminal thus accused from the pursuit of the sheriffs on the authority of the justices.[590]
As was the case with most of Henry’s reforms, none of the methods of procedure adopted in this Assize were new inventions. Not only had the inquest by sworn recognitors been in use for civil purposes ever since the Norman conquest; it may even be that the germ of a jury of presentment in criminal cases, which in its modern shape appears for the first time in the Assize of Clarendon, is to be traced yet further back, to an ordinance of Æthelred II., whereby the twelve senior thegns in every wapentake were made to swear that they would “accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.”[591] The mission of itinerant justices—derived in principle from the early days of English kingship, when the sovereign himself perambulated his whole realm, hearing and deciding whatever cause came before him as he passed along—had been employed by Henry I., and revived by Henry II. immediately after his accession. A visitation of the greater part of England had been made by two of the chief officers of the Curia Regis in the first year of his reign, and again in the second; another circuit seems to have been made in 1159 by William Fitz-John; and in 1163 Alan de Neville held pleas of the forest in Oxfordshire, while the justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, made a journey into Cumberland to hold the pleas of the Crown there, for the first time since the district had passed into the hands of the king of Scots.[592] From the date of the Assize of Clarendon, however, these journeys became regular and general,[593] and the work of the judges employed on them became far more extensive and important.
The first visitation under the assize was at once begun by Richard de Lucy and Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex;[594] and the Pipe Roll of the year furnishes some indications of its immediate results. The sums credited to the treasury for the pleas of the Crown reach a far greater amount than in the earlier rolls, and its receipts are further swelled by the goods and chattels of criminals condemned under the assize,[595] which were explicitly declared forfeit to the king.[596] The clause binding all qualified persons to be ready to serve on the juries was strictly enforced; one attempt to evade it was punished with a fine of five marks.[597] Another clause, enjoining upon the sheriffs the construction and repair of gaols for the detention of criminals, was carried into effect with equal vigour.[598] The work of the two justiciars was apparently not completed till the summer of 1167.[599] In that year pleas of the forest were held throughout the country by Alan de Neville; and in 1168 seven barons of the Exchequer made a general visitation of the shires for the collection of an aid on the marriage of the king’s eldest daughter.[600] This last was primarily a fiscal journey; the aid itself was a strictly feudal impost, assessed at one mark on every knight’s fee.[601] It was however levied in a remarkable manner. The Domesday survey, which by a few modifications in practice had been made to serve as the rate-book of the whole kingdom for eighty years, was at last found inadequate for the present purpose. A royal writ was therefore addressed to all the tenants-in-chief, requiring from them an account of the knights’ fees which they held and the services due upon them, whether under the “old infeoffment” of the time of Henry I., or under the “new infeoffment” since the resettlement of the country by his grandson.[602] The answers were enrolled in what is known as the Black Book of the Exchequer[603] and the aid was levied in accordance with their contents. The whole process occupied a considerable time; the preparations seem to have begun shortly after Matilda’s betrothal, for we hear of the purchase of “a hutch for keeping the barons’ letters concerning their knights” as early as 1166,[604] yet the collection of the money was not finished till the summer of 1169,[605] a year and a half after her marriage. The labours of the barons employed in it were however not confined to this one end; as usual, their travels were turned to account for judicial purposes,[606] and the system begun by the assize of Clarendon was by no means suffered to fall into disuse.
It was too soon as yet for the beneficial results of these measures to become evident to the people at large; but it was not too soon for them to excite the resentment of the barons. The stringency with which in the assize of Clarendon every claim of personal exemption or special jurisdiction was made to give way before the all-embracing authority of the king’s supreme justice shewed plainly that Henry still clave to the policy which had led him to insist upon the restoration of alienated lands and the surrender of unlicensed castles in England, to lose no opportunity of exercising his ducal right to seize and garrison the castles of his vassals in Normandy[607]—in a word, to check and thwart in every possible way the developement of the feudal principle. The assessment of the aid for his daughter’s marriage seems indeed at first glance to have been based on a principle wholly favourable to the barons, for it apparently left the determination of each landowner’s liabilities wholly in his own hands. But the commissioners who spent nearly two years in collecting the aid had ample power and ample opportunity to check any irregularities which might have occurred in the returns; and the impost undoubtedly pressed very heavily upon the feudal tenants as a body. Its proceeds seem, however, not to have come up to Henry’s expectations, and the unsatisfactory reports which reached him from England of the general results of his legal measures led him to suspect some failure in duty on the part of those who were charged with their execution.
A large share of responsibility rested with the sheriffs; and the sheriffs were still for the most part, as they had been in his grandfather’s days, the chief landowners in their respective shires, men of great local importance, and only too likely to have at once the will and the power to defeat the ends of the very measures which by their official position they were called upon to administer. Henry therefore on his return to England at Easter 1170 summarily deposed all sheriffs of counties and bailiffs of royal demesnes, pending an inquisition into all the details of their official conduct since his own departure over sea four years ago. The inquiry was intrusted not to any of the usual members of the King’s Court and Exchequer, but to a large body of commissioners specially chosen for the purpose from the higher ranks of both clergy and laity.[608] These were to take pledges of all the sheriffs and bailiffs that they would be ready to appear before the king and make redress on an appointed day; an oath was also to be exacted from all barons, knights and freemen in every shire that they would answer truthfully and without respect of persons to all questions put to them by the commissioners in the king’s name.[609]
The subject-matter of these inquiries, as laid down in the king’s instructions, embraced far more than the conduct of the sheriffs. Not only were the commissioners to examine into all particulars of the sums received by the sheriffs and bailiffs in the discharge of their functions, and the manner and grounds of their acquisition,[610] and into the disposal of all chattels and goods forfeited under the assize of Clarendon; they were also to ascertain whether the collection of the aid pour fille marier had been honestly conducted; they were at the same time to investigate the administration of the forests[611] and the condition of the royal demesnes;[612] to find out and report any persons who had failed to do homage to the king or his son;[613] and they were moreover to make inquisition into the proceedings of all the special courts of the various franchises, whether held by archbishop or bishop, abbot, earl or baron, as fully and minutely as into those of the ordinary hundreds.[614] Only two months were allowed to the commissioners for their work, which nothing but their great number can have enabled them to execute in the time. Unhappily, the report which they brought up to the king on S. Barnabas’s day is lost, and we have no record of its results save in relation to one point: out of twenty-seven sheriffs, only seven were allowed to retain their offices. The rest, who were mostly local magnates owing their importance rather to their territorial and family influence than to their connexion with the court, were replaced by men of inferior rank, and of whom all but four were officials of the Exchequer.[615]
This significant proof of Henry’s determination to pursue his anti-feudal policy was followed up next year by the last step in that resumption of alienated demesnes which in England had been virtually completed thirteen years ago, but which had been enforced only by slower degrees on the other side of the channel. In 1171 Henry ordered a general inquisition into the extent and condition of the demesne lands and forests held by his grandfather in Normandy, and into the encroachments since made upon them by the barons; and we are told that the restitution which resulted from the inquiry almost doubled his ducal revenue.[616] The endurance of the barons was now almost at an end; and moreover, their opportunity had now come. From that same council at Westminster whence the decree had gone forth for the inquest of sheriffs, there had gone forth also the summons for the crowning of the young king; that other assembly which on S. Barnabas’s day saw the deposition of the delinquent officers saw also, three days later, the new and dangerously suggestive spectacle of two kings at once in the land. When, six months later still, the first consequences of that coronation appeared in the murder of S. Thomas, the barons could not but feel that their hour was at hand. His regal dignity no longer all his own, but voluntarily shared with another—his regal unction washed out in that stream of martyr’s blood which cut him off from the support of the Church—Henry seemed to be left alone and defenceless in the face of his foes. The year which he spent in conquering Ireland was a breathing-space for them as well as for him. They used it to adapt to their purposes the weapon which he had so lately forged for his own defence; they found a rallying-point and a pretext for their designs against him in the very son whom he had left to cover his retreat and supply his place at home.
The younger Henry had passed over to Normandy just before his father quitted it, in July 1171.[617] There he apparently stayed with his mother and her younger children till the opening of the next year, when he and his wife went to England, and there remained as titular king and queen until his father’s return from Ireland.[618] The youth’s kingship, however, was scarcely more than nominal; in his presence no less than in his absence, the real work of government in England was done by the justiciars; and his own personal interests lay chiefly beyond the sea. The influences which surrounded him there were those of his father’s open or secret foes:—of his wife’s father, King Louis of France, of his own mother, Queen Eleanor, her kindred and her people; and Eleanor had ceased to be a loyal vice-gerent for the husband who had by this time forfeited his claims to wifely affection from her. She seems to have taken for her political confidant her uncle, Ralf of Faye[619]—one of the many faithless barons of Poitou; and it is said to have been at her instigation that Ralf and an Angevin baron, Hugh of Ste.-Maure, profited by Henry’s absence in Ireland to whisper to her eldest son that a crown was worthless without the reality of kingly power, and that it was time for him to assert his claim to the substance of which his father had given him only the shadow.[620] Young Henry, now seventeen years old, listened but too readily to such suggestions; and it was a rumour of his undutiful temper, coupled significantly with a rumour of growing discontent among the barons, that called Henry back from Ireland[621] and made him carry his son with him to Normandy[622] in the spring of 1172. After the elder king’s reconciliation with the Church, however, and the second coronation of the younger one, the danger seemed to have subsided; and in November Henry, to complete the pacification, allowed his son to accompany his girl-wife on a visit to her father, the king of France.[623] When they returned,[624] the young king at once confronted his father with a demand to be put in possession of his heritage, or at least of some portion of it—England, Normandy, or Anjou—where he might dwell as an independent sovereign with his queen.[625] The father refused.[626] He had never intended to make his sons independent rulers of the territories allotted to them; Richard and Geoffrey indeed were too young for such an arrangement to be possible in their cases; and the object of the eldest son’s crowning had been simply to give him such an inchoate royalty as would enable his father to employ him as a colleague and representative in case of need, and to feel assured of his ultimate succession to the English throne. The king’s plans for the distribution of his territories and for the establishment of his children had succeeded well thus far. He had secured Britanny in Geoffrey’s name before he quitted Gaul in 1171; and a month after his return, on Trinity Sunday (June 10) 1172, Richard was enthroned as duke of Aquitaine according to ancient custom in the abbot’s chair in the church of S. Hilary at Poitiers.[627] One child, indeed, the youngest of all, was still what his father had called him at his birth—“John Lackland.”[628] Even for John, however, though he was scarcely five years old,[629] a politic marriage was already in view.
One of the many branches of Henry’s continental policy was the cultivation of an alliance with those small but important states which lay on the border-land between Italy, Germany, and that old Aquitanic Gaul over which he claimed dominion in his wife’s name. The most important of these was the county of Maurienne, a name which in strictness represents only a small mountainous region encircled to east and south by the Graian and Cottian Alps, and to west and north by another chain of mountains bordering the outermost edges of two river-valleys, those of the Isère and the Arc, which again are severed from each other by a line of lesser heights running through the heart of the district. In the southern valley, that of the Arc, stood the capital of the county, S. Jean-de-Maurienne, the seat of a bishopric from the dedication of whose cathedral church the town itself took its name. In the northern valley, at the foot of the Little S. Bernard, some few miles above the source of the Isère, the counts of Maurienne were advocates of the abbey of S. Maurice, which long treasured the sacred symbol of the old Burgundian royalty, the spear of its patron saint. The power of the counts of Maurienne, however, was not bounded by the narrow circle of hills which stood like an impregnable rampart round about their native land. On the shore of the lake of Bourget they held Chambéry, guarding the pass of Les Echelles, through which southern Gaul communicated with the German lands around the lake of Geneva; the county of Geneva itself was almost surrounded by their territories, for on its western side their sway extended from Chambéry across the valley of the Rhône northward as far as Belley, while eastward they held the whole southern shore of the lake. To north-east of Maurienne, again, the great highway which led from Geneva and from the German lands beyond it into Italy, through the vale of Aosta by the passes of the Pennine Alps or up the valley of the Isère by S. Maurice under the foot of the Little S. Bernard, was in their hands; for Aosta itself and the whole land as far as Castiglione on the Dora Baltea belonged to them. Across the Graian Alps, their possession of the extreme outposts of the Italian border, Susa and Turin, gave them the title of “Marquises of Italy,”[630] and the command of the great highway between Italy and southern Gaul by the valley of the Durance and through the gap which parts the Cottian from the Maritime Alps beneath the foot of the Mont Genèvre; while yet further south, on either side of the Maritime Alps where they curve eastward towards the Gulf of Genoa, Chiusa, Rochetta and Aspromonte all formed part of their territories.[631] In one word, they held the keys of every pass between Italy and north-western Europe, from the Great S. Bernard to the Col di Tenda. Nominally subject to the Emperor in his character of king of Burgundy, they really possessed the control over his most direct lines of communication with his Imperial capital; while the intercourse of western Europe with Rome lay almost wholly at their mercy;[632] and far away at the opposite extremity of Aquitania the present count Humbert of Maurienne seems to have claimed, though he did not actually hold, one of the keys of another great mountain-barrier, in the Pyrenean county of Roussillon on the Spanish March.[633]