by Jack Lindsay
Matilda correctly decided that now was the time to make her attack and precipitate civil war. In 1141 the earl of Chester, enraged that Cumberland could not be got back from the Scottish prince, revolted with his half-brother the Earl of Lincoln. The earl of Gloucester joined them. Stephen was defeated at Lincoln, and captured and imprisoned at Bristol. The breakdown of the state strengthened further the independence of the church, whose councils were the only deliberative assembly left in action. Also, the church could dominate the situation by holding a balance between the two battling factions. Two months after Lincoln, Henry of Blois took advantage of his brother’s disaster. He called a council at Winchester and declared that Stephen, by breaking his compact with the church, had forfeited allegiance. In effect, then, the church deposed Stephen, and Matilda was elected as ruler in his place — a wholly unprecedented event. The implication was that a king elect was not king until he was crowned and, as coronation depended on the church, the latter had the right of veto, which in turn involved the right of election.
Matilda was no wiser than Stephen, but she had, beside the unpleasant arrogances of her character, much obstinacy. When she invaded England Stephen could have soon disposed of her; but, accepting the counsel of a papal legate, he courteously let her out of the trap into which she had fallen and gave her safe-conduct to join her half-brother Gloucester. Civil war in England was accompanied by anarchy in Normandy. After much confused fighting and shifts of fortune, the objectionable Matilda was thrown out of London and Henry of Blois once more changed sides. The earl of Gloucester was captured and exchanged for Stephen. At a legatine council at Westminster in December 1141, Henry denounced Matilda on the same grounds as he had denounced Stephen, called for her excommunication, and urged support of Stephen. He had however sapped his own authority by such rapid volte-faces, and in 1143 the new pope did not renew his position as legate. Stephen as usual made the most possible mistakes; his appointment to the see of York brought denunciations from archbishop Theobald and St Bernard of Clairvaux, and it was annulled by the pope in 1147. But the Angevin party was also in a bad way. Gloucester died in 1147 and next year Matilda left England. (Stephen we may note had made one of his useless chivalric gestures when her son Henry, about fourteen years old, had attempted to enter England in 1144 with slight resources. He sent the boy money to pay his knights off so that he might return home with honour untarnished.) Success in the war had varied largely according to the amount of money available for paying mercenaries.[346]
Geoffrey de Mandeville was an outstanding example of the way in which an unscrupulous magnate could extend his lands during the disorders. A Essex magnate, he first supported Stephen and gained the earldom of his shire; in 1141 he left Stephen and Matilda rewarded him by making him sheriff and justiciar of Essex and constable of the Tower of London. Late the same year he transferred his allegiance back to Stephen; he was then made local justiciar of Essex, London, Middlesex and Hertfordshire, with precedence over the sheriffs there and full control of London. So he proceeded to intrigue again with Matilda, seeking a yet higher offer for his support. Stephen arrested him in 1142, but was unable to keep hold of such a slippery and powerful baron. However Geoffrey happened to die in 1144. On a grand scale he reflected the sort of tergiversation and treachery that was typical of the period.
Even more ominous as symptoms of the declining royal power were the treaties that some leading barons made with one another, as if private war and private combination were now in order. The earls of Chester and Leicester made such a treaty, as did the earls of Gloucester and Hereford in the uneasy months immediately after Henry II’s coronation, when they renewed an ‘alliance of love’ by which their fathers had bound themselves to maintain each other’s interests ‘during the present war between the Empress and king Stephen’. The treaty of Chester and Leicester, despite some formal references to the ‘liege lord’ (the king), reflected the attempts of some of the barons to create a system of balances which would save them from being engulfed in the growing anarchy. But, as well as recognizing the right of a great baron to make war at his pleasure, the document brings out clearly the military aspects of the private castles in central England; and one clause implies that a tenant who feels aggrieved by his lord may well refuse to stand to right in his court and withdraw his fealty altogether from him. The bishop of Lincoln is cited as security for the agreement:
on his Christianity, so that if anyone departs from this agreement and refuses to make amends within fifteen days after he has been requested to do so, without ill will, then the bishop of Lincoln and the bishop of Chester shall do justice upon him for broken faith. And the bishop of Lincoln and the bishop of Chester shall each give up the two pledges whom they have received as security for the observance of these agreements, to him namely who shall keep these aforesaid agreements.[347]
It has been suggested that the church in the person of the bishops arbitrated or intervened; but the terms of the charter are wholly feudal, with no sign of a church mediator from outside. What is of interest is the way in which the church gains from the disorders, appearing as the sole stable body able to stand above the conflicts.
Meanwhile Angevin power had been increasing. In the early summer of 1144 Geoffrey Plantagenet took the title of duke of Normandy, and in 1149, when his overlord King Louis VII returned from his crusade, he gave up the Vexin to him and was rewarded by recognition of his conquest. He had done much to restore the governmental system of exchequer and chancery to order (as his son was later to do in England), and the methods of the Norman chancery were imported into Anjou. He used the sworn inquest extensively to recover ducal revenue and demesne; and the privilege of using this ducal machinery was sold to lords who had suffered losses during the years of anarchy. (Henry was to introduce this practice in England.) The Norman church had been posing a threat to the state as had the church in England; here the reasons lay in the general growth of papal centralized organization, with the fading out of such local forms of expression as the provisional council. The Norman church was thus being drawn into the French system, with political effects leading in the same direction.
Later in 1149 Geoffrey resigned the duchy to his eldest son Henry Fitzempress, who made an unsuccessful attempt to get hold of his maternal inheritance. Until 1151 he was occupied with sporadic warfare with Louis, who had allied himself with his brother-in-law Eustace of Boulogne and had various grievances against the Angevins. But in August that year peace was made and Henry paid homage to Louis. At once he began preparations for invading England. His father died on 7 September, leaving him all his fiefs and advising him to keep the various customs distinct and intact. There might have been a provision in the will that the younger brother Geoffrey should get Anjou and Maine if Henry won England.
It was natural enough for Normans in England to feel for some time that Normandy was their homeland and that the conquests in north and south redounded essentially to its glory. It was still the custom for a great lord often to leave his Norman estate to his eldest son, his English estate to a younger son. Thus in 1107 the count of Meulan got from Henry I a charter authorizing the division of his large inheritance in England and Normandy between his twin sons Waleran and Robert. Robert the younger twin was to get the English lands apart from those at Sturminster. If Robert died or proved incapable of ruling, the English inheritance was to go to Waleran, and similarly if Waleran died or proved incapable, the Norman part was to go to Robert. If land in either country was lost, what was left was to be divided among the brothers. (We also see here how the kings could control the devolution of even the greatest fiefs of England or Normandy). With Geoffrey as duke of Normandy, there seems to have been a resurgence of Norman patriotism. An anonymous poem, cited by Henry of Huntingdon, declares that Rouen, Rothomagus, is a noble, ancient, fair and mighty city, adorned by imperial favour — the empress Maud having taken up residence there in 1147. It is like Rome, not only in its good report, but even as a name: take out the middle
of Rothoma and you get Roma. Normans had chosen Rouen as their capital, and it had reduced to tribute Brittany and England, Scotland and Wales, and now reposed under the rule of Duke Geoffrey, whose very name spells Joy: Gaufregus, gaudia fert dux. Another son of Rouen is Roger, ‘ruler of Italy and Sicily, Africa, Greece, and Syria; even Persia trembles, even the bright skies of Ethiopia and the dark gloom of Germany seek protection. Rouen alone is worthy of the empire of the world.’ And indeed Rouen was soon to send forth Geoffrey’s son to gain England.
In March 1152 Louis VII was foolish enough to divorce his wife Eleanor duchess of Aquitaine; and in May Henry hastily married her. He was nineteen and she was eleven years older; but she was a great political prize. He outwitted the others, including his brother Theobald, who were after her, and gathered afresh an invasion army. Louis belatedly repented his action, and with Theobald of Blois, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and Eustace of Boulogne, he attacked Henry. But by the end of August the latter had scattered his enemies and in January 1153 he invaded England. Stephen was weary of fighting and depressed by the loss of his wife and his son Eustace. He agreed that his other son William should be barred from the English throne and be satisfied with the fiefs his father had held before becoming king. Stephen was to rule until his death, treating Henry as an adopted son and acting on his advice. The church added its threats of anathema to deter any breaking of the agreement. There seems also to have been an understanding that all castles built since Henry I’s death should be razed, foreign soldiers (especially Flemings) sent away, and the rights of the crown regained.
On 25 October 1154 Stephen died in Kent and was buried beside his wife and son at the Cluniac monastery he had founded some six years before at Faversham. On 8 December Henry landed on the Hampshire coast and was accepted as king. With him began the Angevin line of kings, though perhaps they ought more properly to be called the Norman-Angevins.
He set about restoring a centralized government and repairing the damage of Stephen’s reign. There had been much ravaging and destruction in the civil war, and much building of unlicensed castles. Normal life could not but have been deranged by campaigns in which both sides used bands of mercenaries, the resumption of private feuds, the banditry liable to irrupt on unsuspecting areas, the conflagrations and lootings that struck many towns, and the disturbances in regions long inured to quiet developments: East Anglia, the Thames valley, Berkshire and Wiltshire. There had been local dearths and pestilences, economic growth had been checked, legal and fiscal systems built up since 1066 disrupted. Yet it is a tribute to the general toughness of the underlying structures in English society that no lasting breakdowns occurred. The governmental system was never totally paralysed: writs went out, in many areas sheriffs and justices continued to administer justice. Henry II, despite the difficulties he had to overcome, was able to continue with Henry I’s centralizing work on a new level. But England could never be quite the same again. The civil and ecclesiastical clashes were the precursors of Magna Carta and Thomas Becket’s challenge to the secular state. The struggle to re-establish royal power in a world that had suffered so many disruptions and separatist trends could not result in the recreation of the situation that had prevailed before the disorders. Either things had to grow more chaotic or the centralization had to be more complete and effective. Under Henry II the second alternative was realized.
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We cannot here examine his reign in detail, but we must look at the main lines of his reconstruction. England was now, under the first Norman king without rivals, to become one of the leading European powers, with territory stretching from the Solway Firth to the Pyrenees. It was by the extension of royal justice that Henry set about building his central controls; for in this way he could best get rid of anarchy, strengthen his hold on the country through one deep-rooted and comprehensive system of government, and at the same time gain ever greater profits. In 1166 he brought about a new feudal assessment, asking all his tenants-in-chief, lay and ecclesiastical, for the details of their owed services and their enfeoffed knights; there was a great outcry from the church, which he overrode. All knights were to pay him homage as liege lord, though they paid their incidents to their direct lord as usual. Thus the Anglo-Saxon concept of fealty was given a primacy over the Norman idea of feudal homage At the Assize of Arms in 1181, which regulated the military equipment to be used by nobles and all free men, Henry forbade the export of ships and timber for ships, and reconstituted the fyrd. The Cinque Ports, in return for various privileges, contracted to provide ships in time of war.
In 1170 he made a survey of the administration called the Inquest of Sheriffs; he removed the local justiciars, first appointed by Rufus, who he felt had gained too much power, and developed the system of itinerant justices. The eyres or circuits existed before 1166, but we know little of them then; by 1170 an almost complete circuit system was operating. Henry made an increased use of writs, and sworn juries became an essential part of the judicial machinery. He transferred the work of punishing criminals to royal courts, while keeping the old English method of communal prosecution. The criminal jury emerged from the obscure levels of the local courts, into the full light of royal records. Free men (though not villeins) were enabled to use the king’s prerogative; if they wished they could establish their title to land by means of a sworn inquest. Some central tribunal continuously at work was now necessary; so Henry set the curia regis at the disposal of ordinary men.
These changes struck hard at many of the barons’ powers. Their courts were ignored. The assize of mort d’ancestor was in effect aimed at them, since it was they who would most likely try to keep an heir out of his property. The Grand Assize sapped their rights to administer justice as it laid down that no freeholder need defend his title to property unless called on to do so by royal writ; and if he wished, he could have the case transferred from the lord’s court to the king’s, where he could buy the privilege of trial by jury instead of having to undergo trial by battle.
If such developments weakened the power of the aristocracy by producing an administration which no longer depended on feudalism for its support, they were certainly favourable to the middle classes. They lifted the free tenants out of their feudal surroundings and gained their support; they brought about a permanent liaison between royal justice and the justice of the local courts. The magnificent result of these vast and unremitting labours was the foundation of a rule of law, a royal law, and not a customary or feudal law, a law which commanded respect all over the country and obedience in places where the king had no direct authority (Sayles).[348]
All that is true of the new tendencies, but the actions of Henry II and their results were not so clear-cut or so final. He, like many kings to follow, was king in a feudal world. Still, the system he worked out had indeed lifted the whole internal struggle of feudalism to a new level, in which many new possibilities had been opened up.
Chapter Ten – More on the Normans in the South
We left Roger de Hauteville engaged in the conquest of Sicily, but still far from complete success. After defeating the moslems at Cerami, he was safely established in the hill-city of Troina; but he had an uncertain hold on Messina and could not extend his control south and west. He was, however, able to take advantage of quarrels among the emirs, who came together only in their dislike of the Arabs despatched from Africa to fight in the cause of their overlord. In 1068 Roger moved towards Palermo, winning a victory at Miselmeri near that city. But it was three years before he was able to break the resistance. In 1071 Robert Guiscard, helped by Roger in the siege of Bari, set sail with him with a fleet of fifty-eight ships manned by Greeks, Calabrians and Apulians. They declared themselves friendly to the Moslems of Catania, were admitted, and at once took the port over. Through the sweltering summer Roger led the main body of their forces via Troina across the island, while Robert went round the north coast by sea. At Palermo they began a siege by sea and land. as at Bari. The defenders were weakened by hunger; and on 7
January 1072 the Normans began their assault. Roger attacked the citadel on a hilltop. The Normans forced their way in, while Robert, moving round to the coast, entered the lower city, climbed the hill, and assailed the citadel from the rear. The Moslems held out a few days, but they were doomed. On 10 January the Normans were in secure possession of the great city, a trading and cultural centre of the Byzantine-Arabic world, surrounded by parks and fountained gardens, with some quarter of a million inhabitants. The butcher’s guild alone had some seven thousand members.
A century earlier it had been described as containing three hundred mosques, countless markets, exchanges, streets of craftsmen, and one of the first paper mills in Europe. (A deed sealed by Roger in 1102 is the oldest known European document on paper.) When the Normans camped in the district of palaces and orange groves owned by the big merchants, ‘even the knights’, says Amatus, ‘were royally provided for in what was truly an earthly paradise’. After Byzantion, Palermo was now by far the most populous and magnificent city in Christian hands; and the Christian hands were those of the Normans. Robert Guiscard did not behave at all like the crusaders who, twenty-seven years later, massacred all Moslems on taking Jerusalem and burned the Jews alive in the chief synagogue. He demanded only allegiance and a yearly tribute, and permitted the continuance of Islamic religion and law. Apart from Palermo, half Messina, and half the mountainous region of the north-east where he had shared in the conquest, he appointed Roger as tenant-in-chief over the island. Roger then set himself to subjugate it completely. He had more trouble now with the Greeks than with the Moslems. They found the knights more brutal than their previous masters, and disliked their use of the despised Latin liturgy. But, though Latin priests and monks thronged in, Roger did not try to suppress the Greek church; rather, he helped the Greeks in its material reconstruction. All he asked was that they should cut themselves off from Byzantine patriarch and emperor. The Latin hierarchy was to be dominant, but the Greeks were treated mildly and even at times exempted from the local bishop’s jurisdiction.