Henry the second 16

Henry the second 16

A new attempt at

reconciliation was made in November at Montmartre, but Henry refused to

give the Primate the "kiss of peace," which in feudal custom was the

binding sign of perfect friendship; and when the Pope thought to compel

his submission, first by threats and promises, then by a formal threat of

interdict, he answered by despatching very decided orders to England.

Anyone who carried an interdict to England was to suffer as a traitor; all

clerks were summoned home from abroad; none might leave the kingdom

without an order from the king; if any man should observe an interdict he

was to be banished with all his kindred. All appeal to Pope or archbishop

was forbidden; no mandate might be carried to Pope or archbishop; if any

man favoured Pope or archbishop his goods and those of his kindred should

be confiscated. All subjects of the realm, from boys to old men, must

swear obedience to these articles.

 

But if Henry had long been used to see his mere will turn into absolute

law, he had now reached a point where the submission of his subjects

broke down. The laity indeed obeyed, but the clergy, with the Archbishop

of York at their head, absolutely refused to abjure obedience to Pope

and Primate. Throughout the strife the leading clergy had sought to

avoid taking sides, but as the king's attitude became more and more

arbitrary, a steady undercurrent of resistance made itself felt. As

early as 1166 the king's officer, Richard of Ilchester, sought counsel

of Ralph of Diceto as to the duty of observing his excommunication by

Thomas. The answer shows the nobler influence of the Church in maintaining

the rigid rule of law as opposed to arbitrary government, and its large

sense that general order was to be preferred to private good. He laid down

that an archbishop's spiritual rights are indestructible; that in all

cases submission to law was the highest duty; and that it was better

humbly to accept even a harsh sentence than to set an evil example of

disobedience by which others might be led to their ruin. In 1167 the

clergy had been called to London to swear fealty to the anti-Pope; but

"as the bishops refused to take so detestable an oath against God and the

Pope, this unlawful and wicked business came to an end." The bishops had

obeyed the excommunication of Foliot by the Primate; they had refused to

join in his appeal to Rome or to hold communion with him. It now seemed as

though in this last decree of 1169 Henry had reached the limits of his

authority over the Church, and it may be that some sense of peril

induced him at the Pope's orders to summon Thomas to Normandy to renew

negotiations for the peace of Montmartre. But the meeting never took

place. Before Thomas could reach Caen he was stopped by news that Henry

had suddenly left for England. In the midst of a terrible storm the king

crossed the Channel on the 3rd of March 1170, and barely escaping with his

life, landed at Portsmouth after four years' absence.

 

So sudden was his journey that a rumour spread that he had fled over sea

to avoid the interdict proclaimed by Thomas. But during his absence

trouble had been steadily growing in England. In his sore straits for

money during these last years, Henry could not always be particular as

to means. Jews were robbed and banished; the bishopric of Lincoln was

added to the half-dozen sees already vacant, and its treasure swept into

the royal Hoard; an "aid" was raised for the marriage of his daughter,

and a terrible list of fines levied under the Assize of Clarendon. The

sums raised told, in fact, of the general increase of wealth. The

national income, which at the beginning of Henry's reign had been but

£22,000, was raised in the last year to £48,000, and an enormous

treasure had been accumulated said to be equal to 100,000 marks, or, by

another account, to be worth £900,000. The increase of trade was shown

by the growing numbers of Jews, the bankers and usurers of the time. At

the beginning of Henry's reign they were still so few that it was

possible to maintain a law which forbade their burial anywhere save in

one cemetery near London. Before its close their settlements were so

numerous that Jewish burial-grounds had to be established near every

great town. Their banking profits were enormous, and Christians who saw

the wages of sin heaped up before their eyes, looked wistfully at a

business forbidden by the ecclesiastical standard of morals of that day.

 

The towns were stirred with a new activity. London naturally led the

way. The very look of the city told of its growing wealth. Till now the

poor folk in towns found shelter in hovels of such a kind that Henry II.

could order that the houses of heretics should be carried outside the

town and burned. But the new wealth of merchant and Jew and trader was

seen in the "stone houses," some indeed like "royal palaces," which

sprang up on every hand, and offered a new temptation to house-breakers

and plunderers of the thickly-peopled alleys. The new cathedral of St.

Paul's had just been built. The tower and the palace at Westminster had

been repaired by the splendid extravagance of Chancellor Thomas, and the

citizens, impatient of the wooden bridge that spanned the river, were on

the point of beginning the "London Bridge" of stone. In the next quarter

of a century merchants of Kiln had their guild-hall in the city, while

merchants of the Empire were settled by the river-side in the hall later

known as the Steel Yard. Already charters confirmed to London its own

laws and privileges, and only three or four years after Henry's death

its limited freedom was exchanged for a really municipal life under a

mayor elected by the citizens themselves. Oxford too, at the close of

Henry's reign, was busy replacing its old wooden hovels with new "houses

of stone"; and could buy from Richard a charter which set its citizens

as free from toll or due as those of London, and gave them, instead of

the king's bailiff, a mayor of their own election, under whom they could

manage their own judicial and political affairs in their own Parliament.

Winchester, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Doncaster, Carlisle, Lincoln,

Scarborough, York, won their charters at the same time--bought by the

wealth which had been stored up in the busy years while Henry reigned. A

chance notice of Gloucester shows us its two gaols--the city gaol

which the citizens were bound to watch, and the castle prison of the

king. The royal officers marked by their exactions the growth of the

town's prosperity, and no longer limited themselves to time-honoured

privileges of extortion. Bristol could claim its own coroners; it could

assert its right to be free of frank-pledge; its burghers were in 1164

taken under the king's special patronage and protection; in 1172 he

granted them the right of colonizing Dublin and holding it with all the

liberties with which they held Bristol itself, to the wrath of the men of

Chester who had long been rivals of the Bristol men, and who hastened to

secure a royal writ ordering that they should be as free to trade with

Dublin as they had ever been, for all the privileges of Bristol. Its

merchants were fast lining the banks of the Severn with quays, and a

later attempt to hinder them by law was successfully resisted. The new

commercial spirit soon quickened alike the wits of royal officers and

burghers. The weavers did not keep to the legal measure for the width of

cloth. The woad-sellers no longer heaped up their measures, as of old,

above the brim. The constables on their side began to demand outrageous

dues on the sale of herrings, and what was more, whereas of old heavy

goods, such as wood, hides, iron, woad, were sold outside the fair and

escaped dues, now the constable of the castle insisted on tolls for every

sale even without the bounds--a pound of pepper, or even more, had to go

into his hand. The citizens of Lincoln had analized the Witham, and built

up an illustration of the rapid development of the trading towns. As early

as the beginning of the century its owner, the Bishop of Norwich, had seen

its advantages, lying as it did at the mouth of the Ouse, and forming the

only outlet for the trade of seven shires. It was not long before the

prudent bishops had made of it the Liverpool of medieval times. The Lynn

of older days, later known as "King's Lynn," with its little crowded

market shut in between Guildhall and Church, the booths then as now

leaning against the church walls, and a tangle of narrow lanes leading to

the river-side, was in no way fit for the great demands of an awakened

commerce; its life went on as of old, but the sea was driven back by a

vast embankment, and the "Bishop's Lynn" rose on the newly-won land along

the river-bank, with its great market-place, its church, its jewry, its

merchant-houses, and its guild-houses; and soon, in the thick of the

busiest quarter, by the wharves, rose the "stone house" of the bishop

himself, looking closely out on the "strangers' ships" that made their

way along the Ouse laden with provisions and with merchandise.

 

But this growing wealth was still mainly confined to the towns. The

great bulk of the country was purely agricultural, and had no concern in

any questions of trade. There is a record of over five hundred pleas of

the Gloucestershire fifty years later, and among all these there is

outside the _town_ of Gloucester but one case which deals with the lawful

width for weaving cloth, and one or two as to the sale of bread, ale, or

wine. The agricultural peasants seem, from the glimpses which we catch

here and there, to have for the most part lived on the very verge

of starvation. Every few years with dreary regularity we note the

chronicler's brief record of cattle-plague, famine, pestilence. Half

a century later we read in legal records the tale of a hard winter and

its consequences--the dead bodies of the famine-stricken serfs lying in

the fields on every side, and the judges of the King's Court claiming from

the starving survivors the "murder-fine" ordained by law to be paid for

every dead body found when the murderer was not produced. The system of

cultivation was ignorant and primitive. Rendered timid by the repeated

failure of crops, the poor people would set aside a part of their land to

sow together oats, barley, and wheat, in the hope that whatever were the

season something would come up which might serve for the rough black bread

which was their main food. The low wet grounds were still undrained, and

the number of cases of eye-disease which we find in the legends of

miraculous cures point to the prevalence of ophthalmia brought on by damp

and low living, as the army of lepers points to the filth and misery of

the poor .The "common fields" and pastures of the villages must have lain

on the higher grounds which were not mere swamps during half the year. But

to these a dry season brought ruin. In time of drought the cattle had to

be driven five or six miles to find water in the well or pool which served

for the whole district. If by any chance disease broke out, the wearied

beasts that met at the watering or drank of the tainted pool carried it

far and wide, and plague soon raged from end to end of the country. Even

in the days of Henry VIII. shrewd observers noted that the new grazing

farms, where the cattle were better fed and kept separate, alone escaped

these ravages, and that it was these farms whence came the only meat to be

found in the country through the long winter months or in time of murrain.

This purpose was doubtless served earlier by the great monastic estates,

but means of transport scarcely existed; each district had to live on its

own resources, and vast tracts of country were with every unfavourable

season stricken by hunger and by the plague and famine fever that followed it.