henry the second 25

henry the second 25

One of the most striking features of the court was the group of great

lawyers which surrounded the king. The official nobility trained at the

Exchequer and Curia Regis, and bound together by the daily work of

administering justice, formed a class which was quite unknown anywhere

on the continent. It was not till a generation later that a few clerks

learned in civil law were called to the king's court of justice in

France, and the system was not developed till the time of Louis IX.; in

Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries. But in England

judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific

study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and

great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the

Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the _Dialogus de Scaccario_,

an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville,

the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have

of the Conqueror's laws and the English usages which still prevailed in

the inferior jurisdictions. A few years later he wrote his _Tractatus de

Legibus Angliae_, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and

described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the

Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas

Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings,

left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.

 

The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred

to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the

contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years

that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of

Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had

carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years

later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of

Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no

contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers

had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to

draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in

1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in

1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far

as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up

by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity.

A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in

Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the

treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the _Dialogus_, who in 1172

began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical,

political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time--a work which

some scholars say is included in the _Gesta Henrici II_ that was once

connected with the name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk

and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for

the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when

he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase

of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great

town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of _Otia Imperialia_ for

the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger

King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the

king, was the brilliant historian of the Irish conquest and the mighty

deeds of his cousins, the Fitz Geralds and Fitz Stephens. "In process of

time when the work was completed, not willing to hide his candle under a

bushel, but to place it on a candlestick that it might give light to all,

he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and

famous English clergy were at that time to be found. And as there were

three distinctions or divisions in the work, and as each division occupied

a day, the reading lasted three successive days. On the first day he

received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town, on the

next day all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their

pupils as were of fame and note, on the third day the rest of the scholars

with the _milites_, townsmen, and many burgesses. It was a costly and noble

act; the authentic and ancient times of poesy were thus in some measure

renewed, and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of

such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."

 

Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while

it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the

first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were

avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to

tell "the doings of the people." He declared his intention to use common

and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales,

of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary

instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of

folk-lore or of classical learning or of Bible phrases, which might

serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The

independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church

was illustrated in his _Speculum Ecclesiae_, a bitter satire on the

monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and

vice which disgraced the Church inspired the _Apocalypse_ and the

_Confession of Bishop Goliath_, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of

Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor,

justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater

part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of

Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were

used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated

independently of Rome. His _Courtier's Triflings_, suggested by John of

Salisbury's _Polycraticus_, is the only book which actually bears his

name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its

fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its

philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir

and quickening of men's minds--a stir which found __EXPRESSION__ in other

works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of _Ralph Niger_, and in the

violent attacks on the monks by _Nigellus_.

 

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole

country shared in the movement. Good classical learning might be had in

England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men

had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and

physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning

to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies.

Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain

treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written

by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools,

such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in

our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the

earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the

remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of

Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the

__Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the

time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the

discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of

the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere

enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of

Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto,

always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and

politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection

of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more

famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man

of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion

write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told

on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or

Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The

greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet

little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the

Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham,

of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the

priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of

its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital.

Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author

of a Latin poem on the _Troy Story_, and of a poetic history of the first

crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which

could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.

 

Even the feudal nobles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not

content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his

household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread

beyond the class of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and

worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular

literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher.

Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155

dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the _History

of Geoffrey of Monmouth_, a book which came afterwards to be called the

_Brut d'Engleterre_, and was one of the sources of the first important

English poem, Layamon's _Brut_. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told

in the _Roman de Rou_ the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem,

especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to

history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the

rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred

Thomas--poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin

fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic

brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast

grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature

beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics of thought and

feeling. Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still

lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and

Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen

English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were

too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech

foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their

minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them.