Henry the Second 11

Henry the Second 11

CHAPTER V

 

 

THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON

 

In the January of 1163 Henry once more landed in England. His absence off

our and a half years had given time for dangers and alarms to spring up

in the half-settled realm. Mysterious prophecies passed from mouth to

mouth that the king would never be seen in the island again, and even

Theobald, before his death in 1161, had sent urgent entreaties for his

return. The king had, in fact, during the first eight years of his rule

been mainly occupied in building up his empire, and providing for its

defence against external dangers. He had only twice visited the kingdom,

each time for little more than a year. He was now, however, prepared to

take the work of administration seriously in hand. In the next eighteen

years, from 1163 to 1180, he landed on its shores seven times, and spent

altogether eight years in the country. Once he was busied with the

conquest of Ireland; one visit of a month was spent in crushing a

dangerous rebellion; but with these two exceptions every coming of the

king was marked by the carrying out of some great administrative reform.

In his half-compacted empire order was still only maintained by his

actual presence and the sheer force of his personal authority, as he

hurried from country to country to quell a rising in Gascony or a revolt

in Galloway, to wage war in Wales, to finish the conquest of Britanny or

of Ireland, to order the administration of Poitou or Normandy. But in the

swift and terrible progresses of a king who visited the shires to north

and south and west in the intervals of foreign war, a long series of

experiments as to the best forms of internal government was ceaselessly

carried out, and the new administration securely established.

 

Henry, however, was at once met by a difficulty unknown to earlier days.

The system which the Conqueror had established of separate courts for

secular and ecclesiastical business had utterly broken down for purposes

of justice. Until the reign of Stephen much of the business of the

bishops was done in the courts of the hundred and the shire. The Church

courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions

of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular

laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the

canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they

could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the

development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century,

it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of

civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, the scientific study

of law had hardly begun, and there was much debatable ground which might

be won by the most arrogant or the most skilful of the combatants. Every

brawl of a few noisy lads in the Oxford streets or at the gates of some

cathedral or monastic school was enough to kindle the strife as to the

jurisdiction of Church or State which shook medieval society to its

foundation.

 

The Church courts not only had jurisdiction over the whole clerical order,

but exercised wide powers even over the laity. To them alone belonged the

right to enforce spiritual penalties, to deal with cases of oaths,

promises, anything in which a man's faith was pledged; to decide as to the

property of intestates, to pronounce in every case of inheritance whether

the heir was legitimate, to declare the law as to wills and marriage.

Administering as they did an enlightened system of law, they profited by

the new prosperity of the country, and the judicial and pecuniary disputes

which came to them had never been so abundant as now. Henry was keenly

alive to the fact that the archdeacons' courts now levied every year by

their fines more money than the whole revenue of the crown. Young

archdeacons were sent abroad to be taught the Roman law, and returned to

preside over the newly-established archdeacons' courts; clergy who sought

high office were bound to study before all things, even before theology,

the civil and canon law. The new rules, however, were as yet incomplete

and imperfectly understood in England; the Church courts were without the

power to put them in force; the procedure was hurried and irregular; the

judges were often ill-trained, and unfit to deal with the mass of legal

business which was suddenly thrown on them; the ecclesiastical authorities

themselves shrank from defiling the priesthood by contact with all this

legal and secular business, and kept the archdeacons in deacons' orders;

the more religious clergy questioned whether for an archdeacon salvation

were possible. In the eight years of Henry's rule one hundred murders had

been committed by clerks who had escaped all punishment save the light

sentences of fine and imprisonment inflicted by their own courts, and

Henry bitterly complained that a reader or an acolyte might slay a man,

however illustrious, and suffer nothing save the loss of his orders.

 

Since the beginning of Henry's reign, too, there had been an enormous

increase of appeals to Rome. Questions quite apart from faith or morals,

and that mostly concerned property, were referred for decision to a

foreign court. The great monasteries were exempted from episcopal control

and placed directly under the Pope; they adopted the customs and laws

which found favour at Rome; they upheld the system of appeals, in which

their wealth and influence gave them formidable advantages. The English

Church was no longer as in earlier times distinct from the rest of

Christendom, but was brought directly under Roman influence. The clergy

were more and more separated from their lay fellow citizens; their rights

and duties were determined on different principles; they were governed by

their own officers and judged by their own laws, and tried in their own

courts; they looked for their supreme tribunal of appeal not to the King's

Court, but to Rome; they became, in fact, practically freed from the

common law.

 

No king, and Henry least of all, could watch unmoved the first great

body which threatened to stand wholly outside the law of the land; and

the ecclesiastical pretensions of the time were perhaps well matched by

the pretensions of the State. The king had prepared for the coming

conflict by a characteristic act of high-handed imperiousness in the

election of the chancellor-archbishop to carry out his policy. But all

such schemes of imperative despotism were vain. No sooner was Thomas

consecrated than it became plain that his ecclesiastical training would

carry the day against the influence of Henry. As rapidly as he had "thrown

off the deacon" to become the chancellor, so he now went through the

sharper change of throwing off the chancellor to become the archbishop.

With keen political sagacity he at once sought the moral support of the

religious party who had so vehemently condemned his appointment. The

gorgeous ostentation of his old life gave way to an equally elaborate

scheme of saintliness. He threw away with tears his splendid dress to put

on sackcloth and the black cloak of the monk. His table was still covered

with gold and silver dishes and with costly meats, but the hall was now

crowded with the poor and needy, and at his own side sat only the most

learned and holy among the monks and clergy. Forty clerks "most learned

in the law" formed his household. He visited the sick in the infirmary,

and washed the feet of thirteen poor men daily. He sat in the cloister

like one of the monks, studying the canon law and the Holy scriptures. He

joined their prayers in the Church and took part in their secret councils.

The monks who had suffered under the heavy hand of Theobald, when their

dainty foods were curtailed and their cherished privileges sharply denied

them, hailed joyfully the unexpected attitude of their new master. "This

is the finger of God," men said, "this, indeed, is the work of the right

hand of the Most High." "As he had been accustomed to the pre-eminence

over others in worldly glory," commented another observer, "so now he

determined to be the foremost in holy living."

 

Rumours spread that there were to be other changes besides that of "holy

living." The see of Canterbury under the new primate was to win back all

lands and privileges lost during the civil wars, at whatever cost to the

interests of the whole court party, of barons who found their rights to

Church appointments and Church lands questioned, and of clerks of the

royal household who trembled for their posts and benefices. There was

soon no lack of enemies at court, old and new, ready to carry to Henry

whispers that would appeal most subtly to his fears,--whispers that the

royal dignity itself was in danger; that he must look to himself and his

heirs, or the story of Stephen's time would be told over again, and that

man alone would in future be king, whom the clergy should elect and the

archbishop approve. Henry's bitter anger was aroused when Thomas

resigned the chancellorship, "not now wishing to be in the royal court,

but desiring to have leisure for prayers, and to superintend the

business of the Church." The king retorted by forcing Thomas to resign

his archdeaconry with its rich fees; and at his landing in January 1163

he received the archbishop, who came to meet him, "with averted face."

Thomas, on his part, added another grievance by refusing on ecclesiastical

grounds to allow Henry to marry his brother to Stephen's daughter-in-law,

the Countess of Warenne; and on the general question of the relations of

Church and State, he hastened to define his views with sharp precision in

an eloquent sermon preached before the king. "Henry observing it word by

word, and understanding from it how greatly Thomas put the ecclesiastical

before the civil right, did not receive this doctrine with an equal mind,

for he perceived that the archbishop was far from his own view, that the

Church had neither rights nor possessions save by his favour." The

attitude of Thomas was yet further strengthened and defined when, in May

1163, he went to attend a great Council held at Tours, where he was

brought more immediately under the influence of the ecclesiastical

movement of the day. There he sought, with a meaning that Henry must

clearly have understood, to procure the canonization of Anselm from Pope

Alexander, who, however, was far too politic amid his own difficulties,

and in his need for Henry's help, to commit himself either by consent or

by refusal.

 

The inevitable controversy declared itself soon after the return of

Thomas from Tours. Throughout July and August one question after another

was hurried forward for settlement between king and primate. On July 1

the king proposed a change in the collection of the land tax, which

would have increased the royal revenues at the expense of the revenues

of the shire. Since the Conquest there had never been a single instance

of an attempt to resist the royal will in matters of finance, but Thomas

showed no hesitation. He flatly refused consent to an arbitrary act of

this kind. He made no objection to the payment of the tax, but he was

determined to prevent the local revenues being seized in this way by the

king. His action seems to have been wise and patriotic, and his triumph

was complete. Henry was forced to abandon the scheme. Having awakened

the anger of the king, Thomas next alienated the whole party of the

barons by pressing his demands for the recovery of lands belonging to

his see. Tunbridge, Rochester, now in the custody of the crown itself,

Hythe, Saltwood, and a number of other manors became the subjects of

sharp contention. The archbishop urged a doubtful claim, which he had

inherited from Theobald, to appoint the priest to a church on the land

of William of Eynesford, a tenant of the king. William resisted, and

Thomas made his first false move by excommunicating him. Henry at once

appealed to the "customs" of the kingdom, which forbade such sentence on

the king's barons without the royal consent, and Thomas had to withdraw