Chapter I: The England of Henry I (2)

Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the old English administrative system, had by this time become self-evident. The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the necessity and given him the justification for superseding them in all the more important functions of government, by carrying out, with a free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated under less favourable circumstances--the organization of a distinct ministerial body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and almost all upstarts--_novi homines_, “new men” in the phrase of the time--compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with the Conqueror; forming a sort of official caste, separate alike from the feudal nobility and from the mass of the people, and no doubt equally obnoxious to both, but very much better fitted than any instruments which either could have furnished for managing the business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and above the obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the instruments of royal justice or royal extortion, there was, however, another cause for the jealousy with which they were generally regarded. Henry is charged with showing, more especially in his later years, a preference for foreigners which was equally galling to all his native subjects, whatever their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth over both alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had in fact acquired a new meaning since the days of the Conquest. The sons and grandsons of the men who had come over with Duke William never lost one spark of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no longer their home; most of them were born in England, some had English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the chief territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects. Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and “French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the supporters of the king of England are all counted together indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen, nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife--though he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history to the world under the name of _Orderic the Englishman_. This last was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s whole policy, by the impartial character of his internal administration, by the nature and circumstances of his relations with his chief continental neighbours, France and Anjou; indirectly it was helped on by the sense of a common grievance in the promotion of “strangers”--men born beyond sea--over the heads of both alike. Slight as were the bonds between them at present, they were the first links of a chain which grew stronger year by year; and the king’s last and grandest stroke of policy, the marriage of his daughter and destined successor with the count of Anjou, did more than anything else to quicken the fusion of the two races by driving them to unite against sovereigns who were equally aliens from both.

[50] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 224.

[51] Suger, _Vita Ludovici Grossi_, c. 1 (_Rer. Gall.
Scriptt._, vol. xii. p. 12).

Roger’s great work as justiciar was the organization of the Exchequer. Twice every year the barons of the Exchequer met under his presidency around the chequered table whence they derived their name, and settled accounts with the sheriffs of the counties. As the sheriffs were answerable for the entire revenue due to the crown from their respective shires, the settlement amounted to a thorough review of the financial condition of the realm. The profits of the demesne lands and of the judicial proceedings in the shire-court, now commuted at a fixed sum under the title of “ferm of the shire”; the land-tax, or as it was still called, the Danegeld, also compounded for at a definite rate; the so-called “aids” which in the case of the towns seem to have corresponded to the Danegeld in the rural districts; the feudal sources of income, reliefs, wardships, marriage-dues, escheats; the profits arising out of the strict and cruel forest-law, the one grievance of his predecessor’s rule which Henry had from the beginning refused to redress; all these and many other items found their places in the exhaustive proceedings of King Henry’s court of Exchequer. Hand in hand with its financial work went the judicial work of the Curia Regis: a court in theory comprehending the whole body of tenants-in-chief, but in practice limited to the great officers of the household and others specially appointed by the king, and acting under him, or under the chief justiciar as his representative, as a supreme tribunal of appeal, and also of first resort in suits between tenants-in-chief and in a variety of other cases called up by special writ for its immediate cognisance. It had moreover the power of acting directly upon the lower courts in another way. The assessment of taxes was still based upon the Domesday survey; but transfers of land, changes in cultivation, the reclaiming of wastes on the one hand and the creation of new forests on the other, necessarily raised questions which called for an occasional revision and readjustment of taxation. This was effected by sending the judges of the King’s Court--who were only the barons of the Exchequer in another capacity--on judicial circuits throughout the country, to hold the pleas of the crown and settle disputed points of assessment and tenure in the several shires. As the justices thus employed held their sittings in the shire-moot, the local and the central judicature were thus brought into immediate connexion with each other, and the first stepping-stone was laid towards bridging over the gap which severed the lower from the higher organization.

By the establishment of a careful and elaborate administrative routine Henry and Roger thus succeeded in binding together all branches of public business and all classes of society in intimate connexion with and entire dependence on the crown, through the medium of the Curia Regis and the Exchequer. The system stands portrayed at full length in the _Dialogue_ in which Bishop Roger’s great-nephew expounded the constitution and functions of the fully developed Court of Exchequer; its working in Roger’s own day is vividly illustrated in the one surviving record which has come down to us from that time, the earliest extant of the “Pipe Rolls” (so called from their shape) in which the annual statement of accounts was embodied by the treasurer. The value of this solitary roll of Henry I.--that of the year 1130--lies less in the dry bones of the actual financial statement than in the mass of personal detail with which they are clothed, and through which we get such an insight as nothing else can afford into the social condition of the time. The first impression likely to be produced by the document is that under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury--“the Lion of Justice” and “the Sword of Righteousness”--every possible contingency of human life was somehow turned into a matter of money for the benefit of the royal treasury. It must, however, be remembered that except the Danegeld, there was no direct taxation; the only means, therefore, of making up a budget at all was by the feudal levies and miscellaneous incidents; and these were no longer, as in the Red King’s days, instruments of unlimited extortion, but were calculated according to a regular and fairly equitable scale, subject to frequent modification under special circumstances. Still the items look strange enough. We see men paying to get into office and paying to get out of it; heirs paying for the right to enter upon their inheritance; would-be guardians paying that they may administer the estates of minors; suitors paying for leave to marry heiresses or dowered widows; heiresses and widows paying for freedom to wed the man of their own choice. The remittances are not always in money; several of the king’s debtors sent coursing-dogs or destriers; one has promised a number of falcons, and there are some amusingly minute stipulations as to their colour.[52] There is an endless string of land-owners, great and small, paying for all sorts of privileges connected with their property; some for leave to make an exchange of land with a neighbour, some to cancel an exchange already made; some to procure the speedy determination of a suit with a rival claimant of their estates, some on the contrary to delay or avoid answering such a claim, and some for having themselves put forth claims which they were unable to prove; the winner pays for his success, the loser for failing to make good his case; the treasury gains both ways. Jewish usurers pay for the king’s help in recovering their debts from his Christian subjects.[53] The citizens of Gloucester promise thirty marks of silver if the king’s justice can get back for them a sum of money “which was taken away from them in Ireland.”[54] This last-quoted entry brings us at once to another class of items, perhaps the most interesting of all; those which relate to the growing liberties of the towns.

[52] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 111.

[53] _Ib._ pp. 147, 148, 149.

[54] _Ib._ p. 77.

The English towns differed completely in their origin and history from those of the states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. The great cities of Italy and Gaul were daughters of Rome; they were the abiding depositaries of her social, municipal and political traditions; as such, they had a vitality and a character which, like their great mistress and model, they were able to preserve through all the changes of barbarian conquest and feudal reorganization. The English towns had no such imperial past; in their origin and earliest constitution they were absolutely undistinguishable from the general crowd of little rural settlements throughout the country. Here and there, for one reason or another, some particular spot attracted an unusually large concourse of inhabitants; but whether sheltered within the walls of a Roman military encampment like Winchester and York, or planted on the top of an almost immemorial hill-fort like Old Sarum, or gathered in later days round some fortress raised for defence against the Welsh or the Danes like Taunton or Warwick, or round some venerated shrine like Beverley or Malmesbury or Oxford, still the settlement differed in nothing but its size from the most insignificant little group of rustic homesteads which sent its reeve and four men to the court of the hundred and the shire. The borough was nothing more than an unusually large township, generally provided with a dyke and palisade, or sometimes even a wall, instead of the ordinary quickset hedge; or it was a cluster of townships which had somehow coalesced, but without in any way forming an organic whole. Each unit of the group had its own parish church and parochial machinery for both spiritual and temporal purposes, its own assembly for transacting its own internal affairs; while the general borough-moot, in a town of this kind, answered roughly to the hundred-court of the rural districts, and the character of the borough-constitution itself resembled that of the hundred rather than that of the single township. The earlier and greater towns must have been originally free; a few still retain in their common lands a vestige of their early freedom. But the later towns which grew up around the hall of a powerful noble, or a great and wealthy monastery, were dependent from the first upon the lord of the soil on which they stood; their inhabitants owed suit and service to the earl, the bishop, or the abbot, whichever he might chance to be, and their reeve was appointed by him. On the other hand, when it became a recognized principle that everybody must have a lord, and that all folkland belonged to the king, it followed as a natural inference that all towns which had no other lord were counted as royal demesnes, and their chief magistrate was an officer of the crown. In the great cities he usually bore the title of _port-reeve_, a word whose first syllable, though here used to represent the town in general, refers in strict etymology to the _porta_, or place where the market was held, and thus at once points to the element in the life of the towns which gave them their chief consequence and their most distinctive character. The Norman conquest had led to a great increase of their trading importance; a sense of corporate life and unity grew up within them; their political position became more clearly defined; they began to recognize themselves, and to win their recognition at the hands of the ruling powers, as a separate element in the state. The distinction was definitely marked by the severance of their financial interests from those of the shires in which they stood; a fixed “aid,” varying according to their size and wealth, was substituted in their case for the theoretically even, but practically very unfair pressure of the Danegeld; and to avoid all risk of extortion on the part of the sheriff, their contribution to the ferm of the shire was settled at a fixed round sum deducted from the total and accounted for as a separate item, under the name of _firma burgi_, either by the sheriff or, in some cases where the privilege had been specially conferred, by the towns themselves. At the same time the voluntary institution of the gilds, which had long acted as a supplement to the loose territorial and legal constitution of the boroughs, forced its way into greater prominence; the merchant-gilds made their appearance no longer as mere private associations, but as legally organized bodies endowed with authority over all matters connected with trade in the great mercantile cities; the recognition of their legal status--generally expressed by the confirmation of the right to possess a “gild-hall” (or, as it was called in the north, a “hans-house”)--became a main point in the struggles of the towns for privileges and charters. The handicraftsmen, fired with the same spirit of association, banded themselves together in like manner; the weavers of London, Huntingdon and Lincoln, the leather-sellers and weavers of Oxford, bought of the crown in 1130 a formal confirmation of the customs of their respective gilds.[55] The lesser towns followed, as well as they could, the example of the great cities; they too won from their lords a formal assurance of their privileges; Archbishop Thurstan’s charter to Beverley was expressly modelled on that granted by King Henry to York.[56]

[55] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), Oxford, pp. 2 and 5;
Huntingdon, p. 48; Lincoln, pp. 109, 114; London, p. 144.

[56] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109, 110 (3d ed.).

WINCHESTER in the XII century.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]

We may glance at some of the towns of southern England in company with some travellers from Gaul who visited them in the later years of Henry’s reign. The cathedral church of Laon had been burnt down and its bishop Waldric slain in a civic tumult in 1112. Waldric had once been chancellor to King Henry,[57] and the reports which he and others had brought to Laon of the wealth and prosperity of the island[58] led some of the canons, after perambulating northern Gaul to collect donations for the restoration of their church, to venture beyond sea for the same object. They set sail from Wissant--seemingly in an English ship, for its captain bore the English-sounding name of Coldistan--in company with some Flemish merchants who were going to buy wool in England, and they landed at Dover after a narrow escape from some pirates who chased their vessel in the hope of seizing the money which it was known to contain.[59] They naturally made their way to Canterbury first, to enlist the sympathies of the archbishop and his chapter, as well as those of the scarcely less wealthy and powerful abbey of S. Augustine.[60] Thence they apparently proceeded to Winchester.[61] The old West-Saxon capital had lost its ancient rank; London, which had long surpassed it in commercial and political importance, had now superseded it as the crowning-place and abode of kings. But its connexion with the crown was far from being broken. Its proximity to the New Forest made it a favourite residence of the Conqueror and his sons; William himself had built not only a castle on the high ground at the western end of the city, just below the west gate of the Roman enclosure, but also a palace in its south-eastern quarter, hard by the cathedral and the New Minster; it was here that he usually held his Easter court, and his successors continued the practice. One very important department of the royal administration, moreover, was still permanently centred at Winchester--the Treasury, which under its English title of the “Hoard” had been settled there by Eadward the Confessor, and which seems not to have been finally transferred to Westminster till late in the reign of Henry II.[62] Of the two great religious foundations, one, the “Old Minster,” or cathedral church of S. Swithun, the crowning-place and burial-place of our native kings, assumed under the hands of its first Norman bishop the aspect which, outwardly at least, it still retains. The other, the “New Minster,” so strangely placed by Ælfred close beside the old one, had incurred William’s wrath by the deeds of its abbot and some of its monks who fought and fell at Senlac; to punish the brotherhood, he planted his palace close against the west front of their church; and they found their position so intolerable that in 1111, by Henry’s leave, they migrated outside the northern boundary of Winchester to a new abode which grew into a wealthy and flourishing house under the name of Hyde Abbey, leaving their old home to fall into decay and to be represented in modern days by a quiet graveyard.[63] As a trading centre Winchester ranked in Henry’s day, and long after, second to London alone; the yearly fair which within living memory was held on S. Giles’s day upon the great hill to the east of the city[64] preserved a faint reminiscence of the vast crowds of buyers and sellers who flocked thither from all parts of the country throughout the middle ages.

[57] On Waldric (or Gualdric) and Laon see Guibert of Nogent,
_De Vitâ suâ_, l. iii. c. 4, _et seq._ (D’Achéry, _Guib.
Noviog. Opp._, p. 498, _et seq._). Cf. above, p. 22.

[58] “Quæ [sc. Anglia] tunc temporis magnâ divitiarum florebat
opulentiâ pro pace et justitiâ quam rex ejus Henricus ... in
eâ faciebat.” Herman. Mon. _De Mirac. S. Mariæ_, l. ii. c. 1
(D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._, p. 534).

[59] _Ib._ c. 4 (pp. 535, 536).

[60] _Ib._ c. 6 (p. 536).

[61] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 7 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog. Opp._,
p. 536).

[62] At the date of the _Dialogus de Scaccario_ (A.D. 1178)
its headquarters seem to have fluctuated between London and
Winchester, and to have been quite recently, if they were
not even yet, most frequently at the latter place. See the
payments to the accountants: “Quisque iii denarios si Londoniæ
fuerint; si Wintoniæ, quia inde solent assumi, duos quisque
habet.”--_Dial. de Scacc._, l. i. c. 3 (Stubbs, _Select
Charters_, p. 175, 3d ed.).

[63] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe) vol. ii. p. 64. Ann. Waverl. a.
1111. The king’s charter confirming the removal is dated 1114;
Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. p. 444.

[64] It is mentioned in Henry’s charter to Hyde; Dugdale, as
above.

At the opposite end of the New Forest the little town of Twinham, or Christchurch as it was beginning to be called from its great ecclesiastical establishment, whose church had been rebuilt on a grand scale by Ralf Flambard, had, on the octave of Pentecost, a fair which the travellers took care to attend, much to the disgust of the dean, who was anxious to secure all the offerings of the assembled crowd for the improvement of his own church, and had no mind to share them with our Lady of Laon.[65] They met with a warmer welcome at Exeter at the hands of its archdeacon and future bishop Robert.[66] In the next reign Exeter was counted as the fourth city in the kingdom.[67] Natural wealth of its own it had none; the bare rocky soil of the south coast of Devon produced nothing but a few oats, and those of the poorest quality;[68] but the mouth of the Exe furnished a safe and convenient anchorage for small merchant vessels either from Gaul or from Ireland, and though Bristol was fast drawing away this latter branch of her trade, Exeter could still boast of “such an abundance of merchandise that nothing required for the use of man could ever be asked for there in vain.”[69] It was far otherwise with Salisbury, to which the travellers were probably drawn chiefly by the fame of its bishop;[70] the Salisbury of those days was not the city in the plain which now spreads itself around the most perfect of English Gothic minsters, but the city whose traces, in a very dry summer, may still now and then be seen in the fields which cover the hill of Old Sarum. Crowded as it was into that narrow circle--narrow, and without possibility of enlargement--Bishop Roger’s Salisbury was an excellent post for military security, but it had no chance of attaining industrial or commercial importance, although he did not disdain to accept the grant of its market tolls, which till 1130 formed part of the ferm of Wilton.[71] Wilton was apparently still the chief town of the shire to which it had originally given its name; like Christchurch it had its fair, but, like Christchurch too, its importance was mainly derived from its abbey, where the memory of S. Eadgyth or Edith, a daughter of Eadgar, was venerated by English and Normans alike, by none more than the queen who shared Eadgyth’s royal blood and had once borne her name.[72] The visitors from Laon, however, seem to have been more impressed by another name which one is somewhat startled to meet in this southern region--that of Bæda, whose tomb was shown them in the abbey church of Wilton, and was believed to be the scene of miraculous cures.[73] They retraced their steps into Devonshire, where they found the legends of Arthur as rife among the people as they were among the Bretons of Gaul; they were shown the chair and oven of the “blameless king,” and a tumult nearly arose at Bodmin out of a dispute between one of their party and a man who persisted in asserting that Arthur was still alive.[74] After visiting Barnstaple and Totnes[75] they turned northward towards the greatest seaport of the west, and indeed, with one exception, of all England: Bristol.

[65] Herman. Mon., l. ii. cc. 10, 11 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, pp. 537, 538).

[66] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 12 (p. 539).

[67] _Gesta Stephani_ (Sewell), p. 21.

[68] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 94 (Hamilton, p.
201).

[69] _Ibid._

[70] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 13 (p. 539).

[71] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 13.

[72] _Ibid._

[73] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 14 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, p. 539).

[74] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 15, 16 (pp. 539, 540).

[75] _Ib._ l. ii. cc. 17–19 (p. 540).

BRISTOL in the XII century.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]

To trace out the Bristol of the twelfth century in the Bristol of to-day is a matter of difficulty not only from the enormous growth of the town, but from the changes which have taken place in the physical conformation of its site. Nominally, it still stands on the peninsula formed by the junction of the Frome and the Avon; but the courses of both rivers have been so altered and disguised that the earlier aspect of the place is very hard to realize. The original Bristol stood wholly upon the high ground which now forms the neck of the peninsula, then a small tongue of land surrounded on the south-east by the Avon, on the north, west and south by the Frome, which flowed round it almost in the form of a horse-shoe and fell into the Avon on the southern side of the town, just below the present Bristol Bridge.[76] Before the Norman conquest, it seems, the lower course of the Frome had already been diverted from its natural bed;[77] its present channel was not dug till the middle of the thirteenth century, across a wide expanse of marsh stretching all along the right bank of both rivers, and flooded every day by the tide which came rushing up the estuary of Severn almost to the walls of the town, and made it seem like an island in the sea.[78] Within its comparatively narrow limits Bristol must have been in general character and aspect not unlike what it is to-day--a busy, bustling, closely-packed city, full of the eager, active, surging life of commercial enterprise. Ostmen from Waterford and Dublin, Northmen from the Western Isles and the more distant Orkneys, and even from Norway itself, had long ago learnt to avoid the shock of the “Higra,” the mighty current which still kept its heathen name derived from the sea-god of their forefathers,[79] and make it serve to float them into the safe and commodious harbour of Bristol, where a thousand ships could ride at anchor.[80] As the great trading centre of the west Bristol ranked as the third city in the kingdom,[81] surpassed in importance only by Winchester and London. The most lucrative branch of its trade, however, reflects no credit on its burghers. All the eloquence of S. Wulfstan and all the sternness of the Conqueror had barely availed to check for a while their practice of kidnapping men for the Irish slave-market; and that the traffic was again in full career in the latter years of Henry I. we learn from the experiences of the canons of Laon. They eagerly went on board some of the vessels in the harbour to buy some clothes, and to inspect the strange wares brought from lands which can have had little or no intercourse with the inland cities of Gaul. On their return they were solemnly implored by their friends in the city not to run such a risk again, as they would most likely find the ships suddenly put to sea and themselves sold into bondage in a foreign land.[82]

[76] See the description of Bristol in _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell),
p. 37.

[77] Seyer, _Memoirs of Bristol_, vol. ii. pp. 18–27.

[78] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.

[79] See the description of the “Higra,” and of Bristol, in
Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. cc. 153, 154 (Hamilton, p.
292).

[80] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 37.

[81] In _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 21, Exeter is called the
fourth city in the realm. As London and Winchester are always
counted first and second, the third can only be Bristol.

[82] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 21 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, p. 541).

No such dangers awaited them at Bath. With their reception there by the bishop[83]--whom the healing virtues of its waters had induced first to remove his bishopstool thither from its lowlier seat at Wells, and then to buy the whole city of King Henry for the sum of five hundred pounds[84]--their itinerary comes to an abrupt end. If they penetrated no further up the Severn valley than Bristol they turned back from the gates of a region which was then reckoned the fairest and wealthiest in England. The vale of Gloucester is described as a sort of earthly paradise, where the soil brought forth of its own accord the most abundant and choicest fruits, where from one year’s end to another the trees were never bare, where the apples hung within reach of the traveller’s hand as he walked along the roads;--above all, where the fruit of the vine, which in other parts of England was mostly sour, yielded a juice scarcely inferior to the wines of Gaul. Another source of wealth was supplied by the fisheries of the great river, the fertilizer as well as the highway of this favoured district. Religion and industry, abbeys and towns, grew and flourished by Severn-side.[85] Worcester was still the head of the diocese; but in political rank it had had to give way to Gloucester. Standing lower down the river, Gloucester was more accessible for trade, while its special importance as the key of the South-Welsh border had made it one of the recognized places for assemblies of the court from the time of the Danish kings. The chief town of the neighbouring valley of the Wye, Hereford, had once been a border-post of yet greater importance; but despite its castle and its bishop’s see, it was now a city “of no great size,” whose broken-down ramparts told the story of a greatness which had passed away.[86]

[83] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 22 (p. 541).

[84] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. ii. c. 90 (Hamilton, p.
194). The grant of the city is in Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. pt.
i. p. 8; date, August 1111.

[85] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 153 (Hamilton, pp.
291, 292).

[86] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontiff._, l. iv. c. 163 (Hamilton, p.
298).

Far different was the case of Chester. What the estuary of the Severn was to the southern part of western England, that of the Dee was to its northern part; Chester was at once the Bristol and the Gloucester of the north-west coast--the centre of its trade and its bulwark against the Welsh. Beyond the Dee there was as yet little sign of industrial life. Cultivation had made little or no progress among the moorland and forest-tracts of western Yorkshire, and its eastern half had not yet recovered from the harrying with which the Conqueror had avenged its revolt in 1068. For more than sixty miles around York the ground still lay perfectly bare. “Cities whose walls once rose up to heaven--tracts that were once well watered, smiling meadows--if a stranger sees them now, he groans; if a former inhabitant could see them, he would not recognize his home.” The one thing which had survived this ruin was, as ever, the work of the Roman.[87] York still kept its unbroken life, its ecclesiastical primacy, its commercial greatness; the privileges of its merchants were secured by a charter from the king; they had their gild with its “alderman” at its head,[88] their “hans-house” for the making of bye-laws and the transaction of all gild business; and they were freed from all tolls throughout the shire.[89] Far to the north-west, on the Scottish border, Carlisle, after more than two centuries of ruin, had been restored and repeopled by William Rufus. The city had been destroyed by the Danes in 875, and its site remained utterly desolate till in 1092 the Red King drove out an English thegn who occupied it under the protection of Malcolm of Scotland, and reunited it to the English realm.[90] The place still kept some material relics of its earlier past; fragments of its Roman walls were still there, to be used up again in the new fortifications with which the Red King encircled his conquest; and some years later the _triclinium_ of one of its Roman houses called forth the admiring wonder of a southern visitor, William of Malmesbury.[91] But the city and the surrounding country lay almost void of inhabitants, and only the expedient of a colony sent by Rufus from southern England, “to dwell in the land and till it,”[92] brought the beginnings of a new life. Yet before the end of Henry’s reign, that life had grown so vigorous that the archbishop of York found himself unable to make adequate provision for its spiritual needs, and was glad to sanction the formation of Carlisle and its district into a separate diocese.

[87] _Ib._ l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, pp. 208, 209).

[88] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 34.

[89] Charter of Beverley, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 109,
110 (3d ed.).

[90] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

[91] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p.
208).

[92] Eng. Chron. a. 1092.

The chief importance of Carlisle was in its military character, as an outpost of defence against the Scots. On the opposite coast we see springing up, around a fortress originally built for the same purpose, the beginning of an industrial community at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The “customs” of the town contain provisions for the regulation of both inland and outland trade; if a merchant vessel put in at the mouth of the Tyne, the burghers may buy what they will; if a dispute arise between one of them and a foreign merchant, it must be settled before the tide has ebbed thrice; the foreign trader may carry his wares ashore for sale, except salt and herrings, which must be sold on board the ship. No merchant, save a burgher, may buy wool, hides, or any other merchandise outside the town, nor within it, except from burghers; and no one but a burgher may buy, make, or cut cloth for dyeing.[93] Round the minster of S. John of Beverley, on the marshy flats of Holderness, there had grown up a town of sufficient consequence to win from the lord of the soil, Archbishop Thurstan of York, a charter whose privileges were copied from those of the metropolitan city itself. As a whole, however, the north was still a wild region, speaking a tongue of which, as William of Malmesbury complained, “we southrons could make nothing,” and living a life so unconnected with that of southern England that even King Henry still thought it needful to reinforce his ordinary body-guard with a troop of auxiliaries whenever he crossed the Humber.[94]

[93] Customs of Newcastle, Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 111,
112.

[94] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 99 (Hamilton, p.
209).

This isolation was in great part due to physical causes. What is now the busy West Riding was then mainly a vast tract of moor and woodland, stretching from Wakefield to the Peak and from the Westmoreland hills to the sources of the Don; while further east, the district between the lower course of the Don and that of the Trent was one wide morass. Such obstacles were still strong enough to hinder, though not to bar, the intercourse of Yorkshire with mid-England. The only safe line of communication was the Foss Way, which struck across the central plain and along the eastern side of the Trent valley to Lincoln, and thence turned north-westward to cross the Trent and wind round between forest and fen to York. Lincoln was thus the chief station on the highway between York and the south. Under the Norman rule the city had risen to a new importance. Two of its quarters had been entirely transformed; the south-western was now covered by a castle, and the south-eastern by a cathedral church. Neither building was the first of its kind which had occupied the spot. Few sites in England could have been more attractive to a soldier’s eye than the crest of the limestone ridge descending abruptly to the south into a shallow sort of basin, watered by the little river Witham, and on the west sloping gradually down to a broad alluvial swamp extending as far as the bank of the Trent. The hundred and sixty-six houses which the Conqueror swept away to make room for his castle[95] were but encroachments on an earlier fortification, a “work” of mounds and earthen ramparts of the usual old English type, which now served as a foundation for his walls of stone.[96] To the ardent imagination of the medieval Church, on the other hand, the rocky brow of Lincoln might well seem to cry out for a holier crown, and a church of S. Mary was already in existence[97] on the site where Bishop Remigius of Dorchester, forsaking his lowly home in the valley of the Thames, reared his bishopstool amid the foundations of that great minster of our Lady whose noble group of towers now rises on the crest of the hill as a beacon to all the country round.[98] But there were other reasons for the translation of the bishopric than those of sentiment or of personal taste. Of the vast Mid-Anglian diocese, which stretched from the Thames to the Humber, Lincoln was beyond all comparison the most important town. Even in Roman times the original quadrangular enclosure of Lindum Colonia had been found too small, and a fortified suburb had spread down to the left bank of the Witham. During the years of peace which lasted from the accession of Cnut to that of William, the needs of an increasing population, as we have seen, covered the site of the older fortress with dwellings: when these were cleared away at William’s bidding, their exiled inhabitants found a new home on a plot of hitherto waste ground beyond the river; and a new town, untrammelled by the physical obstacles which had cramped the growth of the city on the hill, sprang up around the two churches of S. Mary-le-Wigford and S. Peter-at-Gowts.[99] Some fifty years later Lincoln was counted one of the most populous and flourishing cities in England.[100] The roads which met on the crest of its hill to branch off again in all directions formed only one of the ways by which trade poured into its market. Not only had the now dirty little stream of Witham a tide strong enough to bring the small merchant vessels of the day quite up to the bridge: it was connected with the Trent at Torksey by a canal, probably of Roman origin, known as the Foss Dyke; this after centuries of neglect was cleared out and again made navigable by order of Henry I.,[101] and through it there flowed into Lincoln a still more extensive trade from the lower Trent Valley and the Humber. The “men of the city and the merchants of the shire” were already banded together in a merchant-gild;[102] and it is doubtless this gild which is represented by the “citizens of Lincoln” who in 1130 paid two hundred marks of silver and four marks of gold for the privilege of holding their city in chief of the king.[103]

[95] Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b.

[96] G. T. Clark, _Lincoln Castle_ (_Archæol. Journal_, vol.
xxxiii. pp. 215–217).

[97] “Sancta Maria de Lincoliâ in quâ nunc est episcopatus,”
Domesday, vol. i. p. 336. The patron saint of this older
church, however, was the Magdalene, not the Virgin. See John
de Schalby’s _Life of Remigius_, in Appendix E. to Gir. Cambr.
(Dimock), vol. vii. p. 194, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks in
preface, _ib._ pp. lxxx., lxxxii.

[98] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p.
312). Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 30.

[99] See Domesday, vol. i. p. 336 b, and Mr. Freeman’s remarks
in _Norm. Conq._, vol. iv. pp. 218, 219.

[100] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 177 (Hamilton, p.
312).

[101] Sim. Durh. _Gesta Reg._ a. 1121.

[102] Said to date from the time of Eadward; Stubbs, _Select
Charters_, p. 166.

[103] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 114.

LINCOLN in the XII century.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]

The removal of Bishop Remigius from Dorchester to Lincoln was in accordance with a new practice, which had come in since the Norman conquest, of placing the episcopal see in the chief town of the diocese. The same motive had prompted a translation of the old Mercian bishopric from Lichfield, now described as “a little town in the woodland, with a rivulet flowing by it, far away from the throng of cities,”[104] to Chester, whence, however, it was soon removed again to the great abbey of Coventry.[105] The same reason, too, caused Norwich to succeed Thetford as the seat of the bishopric of East-Anglia. It was but very recently that Lincoln had outstripped Norwich as the chief city of eastern England. The mouth of the Yare, which had a tideway navigation quite up to the point where the Wensum falls into it, was no less conveniently placed than that of the Witham for intercourse with northern Europe; and the Scandinavian traders and settlers in the first half of the eleventh century had raised Norwich to such a pitch of prosperity that at the coming of the Norman it contained twenty-four churches, and its burghers seem to have been more numerous than those of any town in the realm except London and York.[106] Twenty years later their number was indeed greatly diminished; the consequences of Earl Ralf’s rebellion had wrought havoc in the city. But if its native population had decreased, a colony of Norman burghers was growing up and flourishing in a “new borough,” now represented by the parishes of S. Peter Mancroft and S. Giles; the number of churches and chapels had risen to forty-four,[107] and in the Red King’s last years the foundations of the cathedral were laid by Bishop Herbert Lozinga, whose grave may still be seen before its high altar.[108] Once in the next reign Norwich supplanted Gloucester as the scene of the Midwinter Council; King Henry kept Christmas there in 1121.[109] It may have been on this occasion that the citizens won from him their first charter; but the charter itself is lost, and we only learn the bare fact of its existence from the words of Henry II., confirming to the burghers of Norwich “all the customs, liberties and acquittances which they had in the time of my grandfather.”[110]

[104] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 172 (Hamilton, p.
307).

[105] _Ib._ cc. 172–175 (pp. 307–311).

[106] Domesday, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117.

[107] _Ib._ pp. 116–118.

[108] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, p.
151).

[109] Eng. Chron. a. 1122.

[110] Charter printed in Blomefield, _Hist. of Norfolk_, vol.
iii. p. 34.

OXFORD in the XII century.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]

It was, however, in the valley of the Thames that English town-life was growing up most vigorously. Tried by the test of statistics, indeed, Oxford was still but a small place; in the time of the Confessor it had only contained about a thousand dwellings, and before the Domesday survey was made the town had, through some unexplained cause, suffered such decay that more than half of these were waste.[111] But the “waste” was quickly repaired under the wise government of Robert of Oilly, to whom the chief command at Oxford was entrusted by the Conqueror, and of his nephew and namesake who succeeded to his office. Before the close of Henry’s reign every side of that marvellously varied life of Oxford which makes its history seem like an epitome of the history of all England was already in existence, though only in germ. The military capabilities of the site, recognized long ago by Eadward the Elder, had been carefully strengthened; within the natural protection of its encircling rivers, the town was “closely girt about with rampart and ditch,”[112] and the mound, raised probably by Eadward himself, at its western end had been made the nucleus of a mighty fortress which was soon to become famous in the struggle of Stephen and Matilda.[113] Nor was fortification the sole care of the D’Oillys; within and without the city, works of piety and of public utility sprang up under their direction. The ancient ford which had given the town a name was no longer the sole means of crossing the network of streams which fenced it in on every side save one; the High Bridge of our own day represents one built by the first Robert of Oilly.[114] Of the sixteen churches and chapels which Oxford now contained,[115] S. George’s-in-the-Castle was certainly and S. Peter’s-in-the-East probably founded by him;[116] several of the older parish churches which had fallen into decay were restored at his expense;[117] and those of S. Michael and S. Mary the Virgin, as well as that of S. Mary Magdalene without the walls, were all founded in his time or in that of his nephew, if not actually by their munificence.[118] One of these, S. Mary the Virgin, was to become famous in after-days as the University church. As yet, the centre of intellectual life at Oxford was the ancient monastery of S. Fritheswith or Frideswide, which after many vicissitudes had finally passed into the hands of the Austin canons,[119] and entered upon a new career of prosperity under its learned prior Guimund, the builder of the beautiful church which now stands hidden away beneath the later splendours of Christ Church, like a buried and yet living relic of an earlier and simpler age. Even S. Frideswide’s, however, had a formidable rival in the priory of Oseney which the younger Robert of Oilly founded, also for Austin canons, in the island-meadow overlooked by his castle-tower.[120] The Augustinians were a new order whose rise was closely associated with the revival of intellectual and social culture; their houses were the best schools of the time--schools in which the scholars were trained for secular no less than for clerical careers--and their presence at Oseney and S. Frideswide’s was already preparing the intellectual soil of Oxford to receive, at the close of Henry’s reign, the seeds of the first English University in the divinity lectures of Robert Pulein.[121] The burgher-life of the city had long gathered round the church of S. Martin; in its churchyard was held the portmannimot or general assembly of the citizens; they had their merchant-gild and their gild-hall;[122] they had their common pasture-land,[123] the wide green “Port-meadow” beyond the Isis; and we see the growth of a local industry in the appearance of the leather-sellers’ and weavers’ gilds. Shortly before Henry’s death, there were indications that Oxford was soon to regain the political position which it had held under the old English and Danish kings, but had entirely lost since their time. A strange legacy of awe had been left to the city by its virgin patroness. The story went that Fritheswith, flying from the pursuit of her royal lover, sank down exhausted at the gate, and, despairing of further escape, called upon Heaven itself to check him; as he entered the town he was struck blind, and though her prayers afterwards restored his sight, no king after him dared set foot within the boundaries of Oxford for fear of incurring some similar punishment.[124] It must be supposed that the councils held at Oxford under Æthelred and Cnut met outside the walls; we cannot tell whether any countenance was given to the legend by the circumstances of Harald Harefoot’s death; but from that time forth we hear of no more royal visits to Oxford till 1133--the very year of Robert Pulein’s lectures. Then we find that Henry I., whose favourite country residence was at Woodstock, had been so drawn to the neighbouring town as to build himself a “new hall” there,[125] just outside the northern wall, on the ground afterwards known as Beaumont-fields. He held but one festival there, the last Easter which he ever spent in England; but each in turn of the rival candidates for the throne left vacant by his death found Oxford ready to become a political as well as a military centre of scarcely less importance than London itself.

[111] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154. Mr. Parker, in his _Early Hist.
of Oxford_ (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), pp. 200, 201, suggests that the
damage was done by the army of Eadwine and Morkere on their
southward march in 1065.

[112] _Gesta Steph._ (Sewell), p. 88.

[113] The chief stronghold of the new fortress, however, was
not on the mound; it was a lofty tower--still standing--on the
western side of the enclosure. It was built by the first Robert
of Oilly, in 1071; Ann. Osen. ad ann. See Parker, _Early Hist.
Oxf._, pp. 202–204.

[114] _Hist. Monast. de Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 15,
284. See also Parker, _Early Hist. Oxf._, p. 219.

[115] See lists in Parker as above, pp. 284–286.

[116] He founded S. George’s in 1074; Ann. Osen. ad ann. On S.
Peter’s see Parker as above, pp. 250–254.

[117] _Hist. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. p. 15.

[118] See the evidence in Parker’s _Early Hist. of Oxford_, pp.
209, 223, 258–261.

[119] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton, pp.
315, 316). Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. ii. pp. 143, 144. The
Augustinians came there in 1111, according to the chronicle
of Tynemouth, quoted in _Monast._ (as above), p. 143; but the
local record in p. 144 gives 1121.

[120] Ann. Osen. a. 1129.

[121] _Ib._ a. 1133.

[122] Charter of Henry II., Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 167.

[123] Domesday, vol. i. p. 154.

[124] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 178 (Hamilton p.
315).

[125] “Ad Pascha fuit rex apud Oxineford in novâ aulâ.” Rob. of
Torigni, a. 1133.

LONDON in the XII century.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic. London, Macmillan & Co.
]