Henry the Second 6

Henry the Second 6

We see everywhere, in fact, signs of the great contest which in one form

or another runs through the whole of the twelfth century, and gives its

main interest in our eyes to the English history of the time,--the

struggle between the iron organization of medieval feudalism and those

nascent forces of modern civilization which were fated in the end to

shatter and supersede it. In spite of the cry of lamentation which the

chroniclers carry down to us over the misery of a land stricken by plague

and famine and rapine, it is still plain that even through the terrible

years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement

by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a

larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was

fast growing into power,--the middle class of burghers and traders, who

desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval

enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower

found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance

of mercenary soldiers marked everywhere the development of peaceful

industries. Amid all the confusion of civil war the industrial activities

of the country had developed with bewildering rapidity; while knights and

barons led their foreign hirelings to mutual slaughter, monks and canons

were raising their religious houses in all the waste places of the land,

and silently laying the foundations of English enterprise and English

commerce. To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were

added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded

their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places

which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among

the swamps of Lincolnshire. A hundred and fifteen monasteries were built

during the nineteen years of Stephen's reign, more than had been founded

in the whole previous century; a hundred and thirteen were added to these

during the reign of Henry. In half a century sixty-four religious houses

were built in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone. Monastery and priory, in

which the decorated Romanesque was giving way to the first-pointed

architecture, towered above the wretched mud-hovels in which the whole of

the population below the class of barons crowded; their churches were

distinguished by the rare and novel luxury of glass windows, which, as

they caught the red light of the setting sun, startled the peasant with

omens of coming ill. Multitudes of men were busied in raising the vast

pile of buildings which made up a religious house,--cloisters, dormitories,

chapels, hospitals, granaries, barns, storehouses, whose foundations when

all else is gone still show in the rugged surface of some modern field.

Regular and secular clergy were alike spurred on in their work by jealous

rivalry. Archbishop Roger of York was at the opening of Henry's reign

building his beautiful church at Ripon, of whose rich decoration traces

still remain, while he gave scant sympathy and encouragement to the

Cistercian monks still busy with the austere mass of buildings which

they had raised at Fountains almost within sight of the Ripon towers.

 

We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the

founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms

and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of

these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside

for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools

were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which

still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that

are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and

channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the

newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding

villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land

brought to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless

cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they

for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate

churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests. They grew

famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the

day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and

knight's chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting. They thanked

Heaven for the "blessings of fatness and fleeces," as foreign weavers

sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their

treasure-houses. The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made

England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact,

fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards

modern Europe,--the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence

the raw material for commerce was supplied. In vain the Church by its

canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began

to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed

against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased "that many

people laying aside business practised usury almost openly."

 

Nor were the towns behindhand in activity. As yet, indeed, the little

boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary

of liberties--for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold

a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right

to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out

their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town. They were buying

from the lord, in whose "demesne" they lay, permission to gather wood in

the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their

services in harvest-time for "reap-silver," and of their bondage to the

lord's mill for "multure-penny." Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with

the king's justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the

borough perhaps to "swear by itself,"--that is, to a jury of its own or its

freedom from the general custom of "frank-pledge." As trade advanced

commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds;

and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the

town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole

body of its burghers--that is, of those who held land within its walls.

The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign "Commune."

Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers,

goldsmiths, pepperers, clothiers, and pilgrims appeared in London, York,

Gloucester, Nottingham, even in little boroughs such as that of St.

Edmunds; while in distant Cornwall, Totnes, Lidford, and Bodmin set up

their gilds. How Henry regarded the movement it is hard to say. The gilds

had to pay, as everything had to pay, to the needy Treasury; but otherwise

they were not interfered with, and went on steadily increasing in power and

numbers.

 

Prosperity brought with it the struggle for supremacy, and the history of

nations was rehearsed on a petty stage, with equal passions if with less

glory. A thriving village or township would begin to encroach on the

common land of its weaker neighbours, would try to seize some of its

rights of pannage in the forest, or fishing in the stream. But its most

strenuous efforts were given to secure the exclusive right of trading.

Free trade between village and village in England was then, in fact, as

much unknown as free trade at this day between the countries of modern

Europe. Producer, merchant, manufacturer saw in "protection" his only

hope of wealth or security. Jealously enclosed within its own borders,

each borough watched the progress of its neighbours "with anxious

suspicion." If one of them dared defiantly to set up a right to make and

sell its own bread and ale, or if it bought a charter granting the right

to a market, it found itself surrounded by foes. The new market was

clearly an injury to the rights of a neighbouring abbot or baron or town

gild, or it lessened the profits of the "king's market" in some borough

on the royal demesne. Then began a war, half legal, half of lawless

violence. Perhaps the village came off victorious, and kept its new

market on condition that it should never change the day without a royal

order (unless in deference to the governing religious feeling of the

time, it should change it from Sunday to a week day). Perhaps, on the

other hand, it saw its charter vanish, and all the money it had cost with

it, its butchers' and bakers' stalls shattered, its scales carried off,

its ovens destroyed, the "tumbril" for the correction of fraudulent baker

or brewer destroyed. Of such a strife we have an instance in the fight

which the burghers of Wallingford carried on with their neighbours. They

first sought to crush the rising prosperity of Abingdon by declaring that

its fair was an illegal innovation, and that in old days nothing might be

sold in the town save bread and ale. Oxford, which had had a long quarrel

with Abingdon over boat cargoes and river tolls, readily joined in the

attack, but ultimately by the king's judgment Abingdon was declared to

have had right to a "full market", and Wallingford was discomfited. A

little later its wrath was kindled afresh by the men of Crowmarsh, who,

instead of coming to the Wallingford market, actually began to make their

own bread and ale--by what warrant no one knew, said the Wallingford

bakers and brewers. Crowmarsh held out through the later years of Henry's

reign and Richard's, had a sore struggle under John, and at last under

Henry III. saw the officers of justice come down upon them a second time,

and make a general wreck of ovens and "tumbril," while the weights were

carried off to triumphant Wallingford.

 

But if an era of industrial activity had opened, the new intellectual

impulse of the time was yet more striking. Great forces had everywhere

worked together under the one name of the Church: the ecclesiastical

organization which was represented in Rome, in the Episcopate, and in the

Canon law; the democratic monachism; the intellectual temper with its

pursuit of pure knowledge; the religious mystical spirit which was

included in all the rest and yet separate from them. But other elements

than these were at work in the twelfth century,--the literary and historic

movement, the legal revival, the new scepticism, the spirit of wide

imperialism, the romantic impulse. Education had up to this time been

wholly undertaken by the Church. The work of teaching had been one of the

main objects of the cathedral; the school and its chancellor were as

essential parts of the foundation as dean or precentor. No rivals to the

cathedral schools existed save those of the monasteries, and education

naturally bore the impress given to it in these great institutions;

profane learning was only valued so far as it could be used to illustrate

the Bible, and the ordinary teaching was almost wholly founded on four or

five authors, who wrote when the struggle of the Empire against the

barbarians was almost over, and who represented the last efforts of a

learning which was ready to vanish. The monastic libraries show how

narrow was the range of reading. The great monastery of Bec had about

fifty books. At Canterbury the library of Christ Church, which a century

later possessed seven hundred volumes, had at this time but a hundred and

fifty. Its single Greek work was a grammar; and if it could boast of a

copy of the Institutes of Justinian, it did not yet possess a single book

of civil law, not even Gratian's _Decretum_. The age of Universities,

however, had now begun, and English scholars went abroad in numbers to

study law at Bologna and the Italian universities, or to learn philosophy

and the arts at Paris, or at some of the less costly schools in Gaul. On

all sides they met with the stir of political and religious speculation.

The crusades and the intercourse with the East had broken down the

boundaries between Christian and Mohammedan thought; the Jews were

teaching science and medicine, and had just brought from the East the

philosophy of Aristotle. France struck the first note of a new literature

in her chronicles, her national poems, and the songs of her troubadours.