In the following spring a fit of characteristic Angevin penitence—fervent and absorbing while it lasted, but passing away all too soon—moved the king to make some amends for his extortions as well as for his other sins; he began to replace the church-plate which had been given up for his ransom;[1754] no fresh tax was imposed till late in the year, and then it was only a scutage of the usual amount—twenty shillings on the knight’s fee—for the war in Normandy.[1755] Next year, however, the king’s mood again changed. He was now resolved to carry into effect, with or without Hubert’s assent, the inquiry into the financial administration which Hubert had postponed in 1194. For this purpose he sent over to England Robert, abbot of S. Stephen’s at Caen, who, notwithstanding his monastic profession, had acquired great experience as a clerk of the Norman exchequer, and seems to have there enjoyed a high reputation for knowledge and skill in all matters of finance.[1756] The abbot, accompanied by the bishop-elect of Durham, Philip of Poitiers,[1757] reached London in Lent 1196, and demanded Hubert’s co-operation in fulfilling the royal orders. The justiciar, though displeased and hurt, had no choice but to comply, and an order was issued in the king’s name bidding all sheriffs and officers of the Crown be ready to give an account of their stewardship in London on a certain day—apparently the day of the usual Exchequer-meeting in Easter-week.[1758] Before Easter came, the abbot of Caen himself was gone to his last account; he was seized with illness while dining with Archbishop Hubert on Passion Sunday, and five days later he died.[1759] The intended inquisition never took place; but the mere proposal to conduct it thus through the medium of a stranger from over sea was a direct slight offered to the justiciar by the king;[1760] and it coincided with a disturbance which warned Hubert of a possible danger to his authority from another quarter.

Strive as he might to equalize the burthens of taxation, he could not prevent them from pressing upon the poorer classes with a severity which grew at last well-nigh intolerable. The grievance was felt most keenly in London. The substitution of the “commune” for the older shire-organization of London in 1191 was a step towards municipal unity, and thus indirectly towards local independence and self-government; but it had done nothing for the poorer class of citizens. It had placed the entire control of civic administration, including the regulation of trade and the assessment of taxes, in the hands of a governing body consisting of a mayor and aldermen, one of whom presided over each of the wards into which the whole city was divided, the head of them all being the mayor.[1761] This corporation was the representative of the merchant-gild, which had thus absorbed into itself all the powers and privileges of the earlier ruling class of territorial magnates, in addition to its own. As might be expected, the rule of this newly-established oligarchy over the mass of its unenfranchized fellow-citizens was at least as oppressive as that of the sheriffs and “barons of the city” which had preceded it; and it was less willingly borne, owing to the jealousy which always existed between the craftsmen and the merchant-gild. As the taxes grew more burthensome year by year, a suspicion began to spread that they were purposely assessed in such a manner as to spare the well-filled pockets of the assessors, and wring an unfair proportion of the required total from the hard-earned savings of the poor.[1762] Whether the injustice was intentional or not, the grievance seems to have been a real one; and it soon found a spokesman and a champion. William Fitz-Osbert—“William with the Long Beard,” as he was commonly called—was by birth a member of the ruling class in the city.[1763] He seems to have shared with a goldsmith named Geoffrey the leadership of a band of London citizens who in 1190 formed part of the crusading fleet, and did good service, not indeed, so far as we know, in Holy Land, but like their brethren forty-three years earlier, in helping to drive the Moors out of Portugal.[1764] Since his return, whether fired by genuine zeal for the cause of the oppressed, or, as some of his contemporaries thought, moved by the hope of acquiring power and influence which he found unattainable by other means,[1765] he had severed himself from his natural associates in the city to become the preacher and leader of another sort of crusade, for the deliverance of the poorer classes from the tyranny of their wealthy rulers. At every meeting of the governing body he withstood his fellow-aldermen to the face, remonstrating continually against their corrupt fiscal administration. They could not silence and dared not expel him, for they knew that his whispers were stirring up the craftsmen; and although the rumour that he had more than fifty thousand sworn followers at his back must have been an exaggeration, yet there could be no doubt of the existence of a conspiracy sufficiently formidable to excuse, if not to justify, the terror of the civic rulers.[1766] When after a visit to Normandy William began openly to boast of the king’s favour and support, the justiciar thought it time to interfere. He called the citizens together, endeavoured to allay their discontent by reasonings and remonstrances, and persuaded them to give hostages for their good behaviour.[1767] William however set his authority at defiance. Day after day, in the streets and open spaces of the city, and at last even in S. Paul’s itself,[1768] this bold preacher with the tall stately form, singular aspect and eloquent tongue gathered round him a crowd of eager listeners to whom he proclaimed himself as the “king and saviour of the poor.” One of his audience afterwards reported to a writer of the time his exposition of a text from Isaiah: “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of the Saviour.”[1769] “I,” said William, “am the saviour of the poor. Ye poor who have felt the heavy hand of the rich, ye shall draw from my wells the water of wholesome doctrine, and that with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters. The people are the waters; and I will divide the humble and faithful people from the proud and perfidious people. I will divide the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.”[1770]

Powerless to deal with these assemblies within the city, Hubert determined at least to check the spread of such teaching as this, and issued orders that any citizen of the lower class found outside the walls should be arrested as an enemy to king and kingdom. Some chapmen from London were accordingly arrested at Mid-Lent at Stamford fair.[1771] A day or two afterwards—the justiciar’s fears being perhaps quickened by the arrival of the abbot of Caen, which William might easily interpret as the effect of his own remonstrances with the king—an attempt was made to call William himself to account for his seditious proceedings. The bearer of the summons found him surrounded by such a formidable array of followers that he dared not execute his commission, and a forcible arrest was decided on. Guided by two citizens who undertook to catch him at unawares, a party of armed men was sent to seize him;[1772] one of the guides was felled with a blow of a hatchet by William himself, the other was slain by his friends; William, with a few adherents, took sanctuary in the church of S. Mary-at-Bow. The justiciar, after surrounding the church with soldiers, ordered it to be set on fire,[1773] and William, driven out by the smoke and the flames, was stabbed on the threshold by the son of the man whom he had killed an hour before.[1774] The wound however was not immediately fatal; the soldiers seized him and carried him to the Tower for trial before the justiciars, who at once condemned him to death; he was stripped, tied to a horse’s tail, thus dragged through the city, and hanged with eight of his adherents.[1775] The rest of the malcontents were so overawed by this spectacle that they at once made complete submission.[1776] The justiciar had triumphed; but his triumph was dearly bought at the cost of what little still remained to him of personal popularity and ecclesiastical repute. The common people persisted in reverencing William Longbeard as a martyr;[1777] the clergy were horrified at the sacrilege involved in the violation of the right of sanctuary and the firing of a church, a sacrilege all the more unpardonable because committed by an archbishop; while his own chapter seized upon it as the crowning charge in the already long indictment which they were preparing against their primate.[1778] Thus overwhelmed with obloquy on all sides, Hubert in disgust for a moment threw up the justiciarship, but resumed it as soon as he was once more assured of Richard’s confidence.[1779] For two more years he toiled on at his thankless task. The budget of 1196 was made up by the safe expedient of another scutage.[1780] Next year the sole legislative act ventured upon by the justiciar was an attempt to enforce uniformity of weights and measures throughout the kingdom by means of an Assize,[1781] whose provisions however turned out to be so impracticable that, like a similar ordinance issued earlier in the reign, it seems to have remained inoperative, and six years later was abolished altogether.[1782] In the autumn Hubert went over to Normandy, where he was occupied for some weeks in diplomatic business for the king.[1783] A month after his return the crisis came.

Richard, at the height of his struggle with Philip of France, found himself short not only of money but of men,[1784] at any rate of men whom he could trust. He called upon Hubert to send him over from England either a force of three hundred knights to serve him at their own charges for a year, or a sum which would enable him to enlist the same number of mercenaries for the same period, at the rate of three English shillings a day.[1785] For some reason or other it seems that Hubert, somewhat unwisely, at once decided to ignore the second alternative; in a great council held at Oxford on December 7[1786] he simply proposed, in his own name and that of his colleagues in the government, that the barons of England, among whom the bishops were to be reckoned, should come to the rescue of their distressed sovereign by supplying him with three hundred knights to serve him at their own cost for a year. Hubert himself, in his character of archbishop, declared his readiness to take his share of the burthen; so did the bishop of London, Richard Fitz-Nigel the treasurer. The bishop of Lincoln, Hugh of Avalon, was then asked for his assent. “O ye wise and noble men here present,” said the Burgundian saint, “ye know that I came to this land as a stranger, and from the simplicity of a hermit’s life was raised to the office of a bishop. When therefore my inexperience was called to rule over the church of our Lady, I set myself carefully to learn its customs and privileges, its duties and burthens; and for thirteen years I have not strayed from the path marked out by my predecessors, in preserving the one and fulfilling the other. I know that the church of Lincoln is bound to do the king military service, but only in this land; outside the boundaries of England she owes him no such thing. Wherefore I deem it meeter for me to go back to my native land and my hermit’s cell, rather than, while holding a bishopric here, to bring upon my church the loss of her ancient immunities and the infliction of unwonted burthens.”[1787]

Hugh of Lincoln was the universally-acknowledged leader of the English Church in all matters of religion and morals; he had exercised in Henry II.’s later years such an influence over the king as no one, except perhaps Thomas Becket, had ever possessed; the whole Church and nation reverenced him as it had never reverenced any man since the death of S. Anselm. When he took up the position of Thomas and Anselm as a champion of constitutional liberty, the victory was sure. Strangely enough, his action seems to have taken the primate completely by surprise. For a moment Hubert stood speechless; then he turned to Bishop Herbert of Salisbury, and with quivering lips asked what he was minded to do for the king’s assistance. As a son of Richard of Ilchester and a kinsman of the great ministerial house founded by Roger of Salisbury,[1788] Herbert represented the traditions of an old and venerated political school, as Hugh represented those of the best school of ecclesiastics. The statesman’s reply was an echo of the saint’s: “It seems to me that, without grievous wrong to my church, I can neither do nor say aught but what I have heard from my lord of Lincoln.” The justiciar, hurling a torrent of reproaches at Hugh, broke up the assembly, and wrote to the king that his plan had been foiled through Hugh’s opposition.[1789] Richard in a fury ordered the property of the two recalcitrant bishops to be confiscated; in the case of Salisbury this was done, but no Englishman dared lay a finger on anything belonging to the saint of Lincoln, “for they feared his curse like death itself.” In vain did the king reiterate his command, till at last his own officers begged Hugh to put an end to the scandal by making his peace, for their sakes if not for his own; Hugh therefore went to seek Richard in Normandy, and literally forced him into a reconciliation on S. Augustine’s day. Herbert, on the other hand, had to purchase his restoration at a heavy price;[1790] but the king and his justiciar were none the less completely beaten. The death of Rees Ap-Griffith and a dispute between his sons for the succession in South Wales gave Hubert an opportunity of renewing his fading laurels by a brilliant expedition to the Welsh marches, where he succeeded in restoring tranquillity and securing the border-fortresses for the king.[1791] He had however scarcely had time to recover from his political defeat before he was overwhelmed by the bursting of an ecclesiastical storm which had long been hanging over his head. Pope Celestine died on January 8, 1198. On the morrow the cardinals elected as his successor a young deacon named Lothar, who took the name of Innocent III., and began at once to sweep away the abuses of the Roman court and to vindicate the rights of his see against the Roman aristocracy with a promptness and vigour which were an earnest of his whole future career.[1792] The monks of Canterbury lost no time in sending to the new Pope their list of grievances against their primate; and at the head of the list they set a charge which, in the eyes of such a pontiff as Innocent, could admit of no defence. Hubert, said they, had violated the duties and the dignity of his order by becoming the king’s justiciar, acting as a judge in cases of life and death, and so entangling himself in worldly business that he was incapable of paying due attention to the government of the Church. Innocent immediately wrote to the king, charging him, if he valued his soul’s health, not to suffer either the archbishop of Canterbury or any other priest to continue in any secular office; and at the same time he solemnly forbade the acceptance of any such office by any bishop or priest throughout the whole Church. Discredited as Hubert now was in the eyes of all parties, he had no choice but to resign, and this time Richard had no choice but to accept his resignation.[1793]

The last few months of his justiciarship were however occupied with the projection, if not the execution, of a measure of great constitutional importance. Early in the spring he had, in his master’s name, laid upon England a carucage to the amount of five shillings upon every carucate or ploughland. The great increase in the rate of taxation, as compared with that of 1194, was not unjustifiable; for since that year the socage-tenants, on whom the impost fell, had paid no direct taxes at all, while two scutages had been exacted from the tenants-in-chivalry. But a far more important change was made in the assessment of the new impost. Until now, the carucate, like the hide, had been a term of elastic significance. It represented, as the literal meaning of the word implied, the extent of land which could be cultivated by a single plough; and this of course varied in different parts of the country according to the nature of the soil, and the number and strength of the plough-team. In general, however, a hundred acres seem to have been reckoned as the average extent both of the carucate and of the hide. In order to avoid the endless complications and disputes which under the old system had made the assessment of the land-tax a matter of almost more trouble than profit, Hubert Walter adopted this average as a fixed standard, and ordered that henceforth, for purposes of taxation, the word “carucate” should represent a hundred acres. It followed as a necessary consequence that the whole arable land of England must be re-measured. The old customary reckoning of hides, based upon the Domesday survey, would no longer answer its purpose: the venerable rate-book which had been in use for more than a hundred years, partially superseded since 1168 by the Black Book of the Exchequer, was now to be superseded entirely. Hubert therefore issued in the king’s name a commission for what was virtually a new Domesday survey. Into every shire he sent a clerk and a knight, who, together with the sheriff and certain lawful men chosen out of the shire, were, after swearing that they would do the king’s business faithfully, to summon before them the stewards of the barons of the county, the lord or bailiff of every township and the reeve and four lawful men of the same, whether free or villein, and two lawful knights of the hundred; these persons were to declare upon oath what ploughlands there were in every township—how many in demesne, how many in villenage, how many in alms, and who was responsible for these last. The carucates thus ascertained were noted in a roll of which four copies were kept, one by each of the two royal commissioners, one by the sheriff, and the other divided among the stewards of the local barons. The collection of the money was intrusted to two lawful knights and the bailiff of every hundred; these were responsible for it to the sheriff; and the sheriff had to see that it agreed with his roll, and to pay it into the Exchequer. Stern penalties were denounced against witnesses, whether free or villein, who should be detected in trying to deceive the commissioners. No land was to be exempted from the tax, except the free estates belonging to the parish churches, and lands held of the king by serjeanty or special service; even these last, however, were to be included in the survey, and their holders were required to come and prove their excuses at its conclusion, in London at the octave of Pentecost.[1794]