Chapter X: The New England (1)

1170–1206.

In the eyes of all contemporary Europe the most striking and important event in English history during the half-century which had passed away since the accession of Henry II. was the murder of Archbishop Thomas. The sensation which it produced throughout western Christendom was out of all proportion both to the personal influence of its victim during his lifetime and to its direct political results. The popular canonization bestowed upon the martyr was ratified by Rome with almost unprecedented speed, in little more than two years after his death;[2164] the stream of pilgrims which flowed to his shrine, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, was such as had hardly been seen even at the “threshold of the Apostles” or at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and it flowed on without a break for more than three hundred years. Yet Pope and pilgrims all alike were probably as blind as Thomas himself had been to the true significance for England of his life and his death. The great ecclesiastical struggle of which he was the hero and the martyr marks a turning-point in the social history of the reign of Henry II. even more than in its political history. With the quarrel between Henry and Thomas the direction of the moral and intellectual revival whose growth we have in earlier chapters endeavoured to trace from the accession of Henry I. to the death of Archbishop Theobald passed altogether out of the hands in which it had prospered so long and so well--the hands of the higher clergy and the monastic orders. The flight of Thomas scattered to the winds the little band of earnest churchmen who had been sharers with him in the inheritance of Theobald’s policy and Theobald’s work, and left the reforming party in the Church without a rallying-point and without a leader. One man alone still remained among the higher clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith.[2165]

[2164] He was canonized by Alexander III. on Ash-Wednesday,
February 21, 1173. Epp. dcclxxxiii.–dcclxxxvi., Robertson,
_Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 544–550.

[2165] The story of Gilbert’s dream, in Mat. Paris, _Chron.
Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 240, was probably suggested by a
line in the French _Life of S. Thomas_:

--“Gilebert Foliot, De lettres sout assez e servi Astarot”--

(Garnier, ed. Hippeau, p. 77)--where again in all likelihood the last words were prompted by nothing more than the exigencies of rime. That some such charges were however brought against Foliot we have seen above, p. 70, note 5{295}.

The final settlement of the controversy was in some sense a defeat of both parties; but the one which seemed to have gained the victory really suffered the heaviest loss. The king was indeed compelled to abandon his scheme for reforming the morals of the priesthood by the strong hand of his royal justice; the privilege of the clergy was saved, to fall at last before another King Henry four centuries later. Yet its staunchest champions must surely have felt their cause reduced well-nigh to an absurdity when they found that the first result of its triumph was to secure the primate’s very murderers from the penalty due to their crime;[2166] and far greater than the seeming gain of Henry’s surrender at Avranches was the loss to the English Church involved in the break-down of Theobald’s plans for the reform of the episcopate. The cowardice of the bishops during the struggle left them at its close wholly at the mercy of the king. The vacant sees, of which there were eight besides Canterbury, were filled after long delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the royal will; and before the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as completely secularized as it had been in the worst days of his grandfather. The inevitable consequences followed. As were the bishops, so, and even worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign through the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year, as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical policy. To that policy there were, indeed, two honourably marked exceptions. In 1186 Henry raised to the bishopric of Lincoln one of the holiest and wisest men then living, Hugh of Avalon. His dealings with the important and difficult question of the succession to the metropolitan see itself appear to have been prompted by equally disinterested motives. It was not the apathy or procrastination of the king, but the determination of the monks of Christ Church to use to the uttermost the favourable opportunity for asserting their independence, and the difficulty of finding any willing candidate for such a siege--perilous as the chair of S. Thomas was felt to be, that delayed the election of his successor for two years and a half, and his consecration for nine months longer still.[2167] The new Archbishop Richard was a monk of unblemished character, and though possessed of little talent or learning, fulfilled his office creditably for ten years;[2168] while Baldwin, who took his place in 1185, was a Cistercian of the best type--a type which, however, was now rapidly passing away.

[2166] Henry, not knowing what to do with the archbishop’s
murderers, counselled or connived at their flight into
Scotland. The Scot king and people, however, shewed such a
strong disposition to hang them that they were driven to
re-cross the border (MS. Lansdown., Robertson, _Becket_, vol.
iv. p. 162). They then, it seems, took refuge at Knaresborough,
and there lay hid till hunger compelled them to issue from
their lurking-place. Finding themselves everywhere shunned like
wild beasts, they at last in desperation gave themselves up to
the mercy or the vengeance of the king. But the murderer of
a priest was legally amenable to none save an ecclesiastical
tribunal; Henry could do nothing with them but send them on
to the Pope; and all that the Pope could do with them was to
sentence them to lifelong exile and penance in Holy Land.
Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 163, 164);
cf. MS. Lansdown (as above), pp. 162, 163. See also a minor
illustration of the inconveniences attaching to this other side
of the clerical immunities, in a letter of Archbishop Richard
to some of his suffragans; Ep. dccxciv., Robertson, _Becket_,
vol. vii. pp. 561–564.

[2167] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 239–245, 247.

[2168] “Homo quidem mediocriter literatus, sed laudabiliter
innoxius, et, ne ambularet in magnis, modulo suo prudenter
contentus.” Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp.
235, 236).

The monastic revival which had shed such brightness over the earlier half of the twelfth century died down long before its close. S. Bernard had not yet been seven years in his grave when John of Salisbury, certainly not a hostile witness, was compelled to acknowledge that the love of power and the greed of gain had infected the whole monastic body, not excepting even the White Monks. Rome herself soon found it needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance of the military orders.[2169] Reformers in the next generation vied with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux.[2170] The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all; within the space of two generations their name, once the symbol of the highest moral and spiritual perfection which the men of their day were capable of conceiving, had become a by-word for the lowest depths of wickedness and corruption. Startling as was the change, its causes are not far to seek. Pledged though they were by the origin and primitive constitution of their order to be a standing protest against the wealth and luxury of the Benedictines, they had nevertheless become, in less than a hundred years from their first appearance in England, the richest and most powerful body of monks in the realm. At the time of their coming, almost the whole extent of arable land throughout the country was already occupied; the only resource open to the new-comers was the yet unexhausted and, as it seemed in England at least, well-nigh inexhaustible resource of pasturage. They brought to their sheep-farming the same energy, skill and perseverance which characterized all their undertakings; and their well-earned success in this pursuit, together with the vast increase of the wool-trade which marked the same period, made them in a few years masters of the most productive branch of English industry. Temptation came with prosperity. But the more obvious temptations of wealth, the temptations to ease and vanity and luxurious self-indulgence, had little power over the stern temper of the White Monks; it was a deeper and a deadlier snare into which they fell; not sloth and gluttony, but avarice and pride, were their besetting sins. In the days of Richard and John, when we find them struggling and bargaining almost on equal terms with the king’s ministers and the king himself, they were indeed a mighty power both in Church and state; but the foundation on which their power now rested was wholly different from that upon which it had first arisen; its moral basis was gone. As an element in the nation’s spiritual life the Order of Cîteaux, once its very soul, now counted for worse than nothing.

[2169] See a canon of the third Lateran Council (A.D. 1179),
in Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 3 (as above, pp. 221–223). On the
Templars and Hospitaliers see also W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._,
dist. i. c. 23 (Wright, pp. 36–38).

[2170] See especially Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, distt. ii.
and iii. (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 29 _et seq._). “Grex albus,
ordo nefandus,” is a description of the Cistercians quoted
apparently from W. Map by his opponent W. Bothewald; Wright,
_Latin Poems attributed to W. Mapes_, introd. p. xxxv. See also
King Richard’s opinion of these two orders and of the Templars,
in Gir. Cambr. as above, dist. ii. c. 12 (p. 54).

Still the monastic impulse which had guided so many religious movements in the past was not wholly dead. On the continent it was giving indeed fresh proofs of its vitality in the growth of two remarkable orders, those of Grandmont and of the Chartreuse, both of earlier origin than that of Cîteaux, but overshadowed until now by its transcendent fame. These however had little influence upon English religious life. The “Good Men” of Grandmont--as the brotherhood were commonly called--although special favourites of King Henry, never set foot in his island realm; the Carthusians reached it only in his last years, and the few settlements which they formed there never rose to any great importance.[2171] Out of all the English monasteries, of various orders, whose dates of foundation are known, only one hundred and thirteen arose during the thirty-five years of Henry’s reign, while a hundred and fifteen owed their origin to the nineteen troubled winters of his predecessor. In Yorkshire alone no less than twenty new houses had been founded under Stephen; only eleven were founded there under Henry.[2172] Towards the close of the century, indeed, the reputation of English monachism had fallen so low that in the high places of the Church a reaction in favour of secular clerks began to set in once more. One bishop, Hugh of Coventry, not only ventured to repeat the experiment which had been vainly tried elsewhere under the Confessor and the Conqueror, of turning the monks out of his cathedral and replacing them by secular canons, but actually proposed that all the cathedral establishments served by monks should be broken up and put upon a new foundation of a like secular character. Hugh himself was however scarcely the man to meet with general recognition in the capacity of a reformer; and his bold anticipation of the ecclesiastical revolution which was to come four centuries later ended in ignominious failure.[2173] It was, however, no less a personage than Archbishop Baldwin himself who in 1186 proposed to endow out of his archiepiscopal revenues a college of secular priests at Hackington by Canterbury, with the avowed object of providing a dwelling-place and a maintenance for the scholarship which monkish jealousy and monkish sloth had all but driven out of the cloisters where from the days of Theodore to those of Theobald it had found a home. This scheme was at once met by a determined opposition on the part of the monks of Christ Church, who suspected, perhaps not without reason, that it was part of a design for curtailing the privileges and destroying the independence of the metropolitan chapter. They instantly appealed to Rome, and the appeal opened a contest which absorbed the unlucky primate’s energies throughout the remainder of his life. He was steadily supported by the king; but the weight of the whole monastic body, except his own order, was thrown into the opposite scale; the general drift of ecclesiastical feeling still lay in the same direction; and after nearly four years of wearisome litigation at Rome and almost open warfare at Canterbury, the building of the new college was stopped by order of the Pope. The undaunted primate transferred his foundation to a new site at Lambeth, where it might have seemed less open to suspicion of rivalry with the Canterbury chapter; but the jealousy of the monks pursued it with relentless hatred, and Baldwin’s absence and death in Holy Land enabled them to secure an easy victory a year later. The next archbishop, Hubert Walter, took up his predecessor’s scheme with a zeal doubtless quickened by the fact that he was himself a secular clerk. The dispute dragged on for five more years, to end at last in the defeat of the primate, and, with him, of the last attempt made in England systematically to utilize the superfluous wealth of a great monastic corporation for the promotion of learning and the endowment of study.[2174] The attempt was made under unfavourable circumstances, perhaps by unskilful hands; and it was moreover made too soon. In English national sentiment, monachism was inseparably bound up with Christianity itself. To the monastic system England owed her conversion, her ecclesiastical organization, her earliest training as a nation and as a Church. Even if the guides to whom she had so long trusted were failing her at last, the conservatism and the gratitude of Englishmen both alike still shrank from casting aside a tradition hallowed by the best and happiest associations of six hundred years. The bent of popular sympathy was strikingly shewn by an episode in Baldwin’s quarrel with his monks, when their insolent defiance of his authority provoked him to cut off all their supplies, in the hope of starving them into submission. For eighty-four weeks not a morsel of food reached them save what was brought by their friends or by the pilgrims who crowded to the martyr’s shrine; so great however was the amount of these contributions, some of which came even from Jews, that--if we may believe the tale of one who was himself an inmate of the convent at this time--the brethren were able out of their superabundance to give a daily meal to two hundred poor strangers.[2175] As a spiritual force, however, monachism in England was well-nigh dead. Though it still kept a lingering hold upon the hearts of the people, it had lost its power over their souls. It might produce individual saints like Hugh of Lincoln; but its influence had ceased to mould the spiritual life of the nation. The time was almost ripe for the coming of the Friars.

[2171] On Grandmont (founded in 1176, by Stephen of Tierny,
near Muret in the diocese of Limoges) see _Gall. Christ._, vol.
ii. col. 645; _Vita S. Steph. Muret._ (Labbe, _Nova Biblioth._,
vol. ii. pp. 674–683); Bern. Guidon, _De Ordine Grandimont._
(_ib._ p. 275 _et seq._); W. Map, _De Nug. Curial._, dist. i.
cc. 17, 27 (Wright, pp. 28, 29, 58, 59); and Gir. Cambr. _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 21 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 254). Henry’s
reverence for the brethren showed itself not only in frequent
visits and benefactions to their house, and also in his desire
to be buried there (above, p. 270), but also by the remarkable
way in which he deferred to their suggestions and sought their
counsel on grave matters of policy. Examples of this are
frequent during the Becket controversy; another may be seen
in _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 194. For the Chartreuse
(diocese of Grenoble--founded in 1084 or 1086 by Bruno of
Cöln, a canon of Reims) see W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i.
cc. 16 and 28 (Wright, pp. 26–28, 59, 60); Gir. Cambr. _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 20 (as above, pp. 248–252); _Gall.
Christ._, vol. xvi. cols. 268, 269. The history of the English
Carthusian houses is in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, vol. vi. pt.
i.; a full account of one, Witham, is given in the Life of S.
Hugh of Lincoln, who had been its first prior.

[2172] These figures are from Mr. Howlett’s introduction to
Will. Newb., vol. i. pp. xiii, xiv.

[2173] Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 23 (as above,
pp. 65, 67). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 65–67. Gerv. Cant.
(Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 470, 488, 489, 550.

[2174] The history of this quarrel is told at wearisome length
by Gervase of Canterbury, and in the _Epistolæ Cantuarienses_.
It is summed up and explained by Bishop Stubbs in his preface
to the last-named book.

[2175] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 405.

Meanwhile the decay of holiness and learning in the cloister was brought into more vivid light by a great outburst of intellectual vigour of a wholly new type. The literary activity of the reign of Henry I. had been all but quenched by the troubles of Stephen’s reign. Chronicler after chronicler lays down his pen, as if in disgust or despair, in the middle of the dreary story, till Henry of Huntingdon and the nameless English annalist at Peterborough are left to struggle almost alone through the last years of anarchy to welcome the new king; and he is no sooner crowned than they, too, pass away into silence.[2176] The first half of Henry’s reign has no contemporary historian at all. The other branches of literature continued equally barren; and a promise of better things had scarcely dawned in the miscellaneous treatises of John of Salisbury when the whole intellectual horizon was darkened by the great ecclesiastical storm. No sooner had it subsided, however, than the literary impulse revived under wholly changed conditions. Its bent was still mainly historical; and, as might be expected, the first subject-matter upon which it seized was the history of the new martyr. Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters--his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. Modern research has ascertained that the book which may fairly be called the foundation-stone of this new school, as well as the primary authority for English political history from the death of S. Thomas to the third year of Richard Cœur-de-Lion--- the “Acts of King Henry and King Richard,” long attributed to Benedict abbot of Peterborough--is really the work of Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of London and treasurer. Its continuator, Roger of Howden, was a clerk of the royal chapel and an active and trusted officer of the royal administration under both Henry and Richard.[2177] A third chronicler of the period, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1153 to 1180, when he became dean of S. Paul’s, an office of great political as well as ecclesiastical importance, which he filled with distinction until his death in the fourth year of King John.[2178] The works of these three writers are examples of a species of historical composition which is one of the most valuable literary products of the later twelfth century. They are chronicles in the strictest sense of the word:--records of facts and events arranged year by year in orderly chronological sequence, and for the most part without any attempt at illustration, comment or criticism. But the gap which parts them from the ordinary type of monastic chronicle is as wide as that which parted the highly-placed ecclesiastical dignitary, the trusted minister of the Crown, or the favourite court-chaplain from the obscure monk who had spent, it may be, well-nigh his whole life in copying manuscripts in the scriptorium of Burton or Dunstable or Waverley. Their writers were not merely chroniclers; they were statesmen and diplomatists as well. Their position as members of the royal administration, dwelling in the capital or at the court, placed them in constant and intimate communication with the chief actors in the events which they narrate, events of which not only were they themselves frequently eye-witnesses, but in which they even took a personal, though it might be subordinate, share; it gave them access to the most authentic sources of political intelligence, to the official records of the kingdom, to the state-papers and diplomatic correspondence of the time, whereof a considerable part, if not actually drawn up by themselves, must at any rate have passed through their hands in the regular course of their daily business. The fulness and accuracy, the balance of proportion, the careful order which characterize the work of these statesmen-chroniclers are scarcely more remarkable than its cosmopolitan range; Henry’s historiographers, like Henry himself, sweep the whole known world into the wide circle of their intelligence and their interest; the internal concerns of every state, from Norway to Morocco and from Ireland to Palestine, find a place in the pages of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, side by side with the narrative of their sovereign’s wars with France or with the text of the various assizes whereby he was reforming the legal and judicial administration of their own native land. While, however, the first works of this new historical school thus rose far above the level of mere annals, they still stood far below the literary standard of history in the higher sense, which had been set up by a monk at Malmesbury half a century before. The only writer who in the latter half of the twelfth century, like William of Malmesbury in its earlier half, looked at history in its true light, not as a mere record of facts, but according to its old Greek definition, as “philosophy teaching by examples,” must be sought after all not in the court but in the cloister. William indeed had left no heir to his many-sided literary genius; but if some shreds of his mantle did fall upon any historian of the next generation, they fell upon one who bore his name, in an Augustinian priory among the Yorkshire moors.

[2176] Henry of Huntingdon, we know, intended to “devote a new
book to the new king”; but it seems that this intention was not
fulfilled.

[2177] On the _Gesta Hen._ and Rog. Howden see Bishop Stubbs’s
prefaces to his editions of them in the Rolls series.

[2178] Stubbs, _R. Diceto_, vol. i. pref. pp. xxvi–lxxxiii.

William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in 1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a child--probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew towards its close, he wrote his _English History_, from the Norman conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry, no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old, hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian; the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S. Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life; its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes proved unavailing--when the men of the north were only too thankful to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one--a brief account of Scarborough[2180]--contains no distinct proof of having been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic, though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious and trustworthy.

[2179] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1, pp. 284, 285.

[2180] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 104).

The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of these--Bæda and Gildas--he has of course no ground in common; while the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never been quickened by a sight of the _Gesta Regum_ and _Historia Novella_, of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation. Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract from them their moral and political significance for the instruction of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary, written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad. In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told, but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal; his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale; he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive true history altogether out of the literary field.

[2181] On Will. Newb. and his work see Mr. Howlett’s preface to
vol. i. of his edition of the _Historia Anglicana_ in the Rolls
series.

[2182] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 69, 70).

[2183] See _e.g._, l. ii. c. 10, and l. iv. c. 32 (as above,
pp. 123–125, 385, 386), l. v. cc. 6 and 14 (vol. ii. pp.
424–427, 451–453).

[2184] L. i. c. 26 (vol. i. p. 81).

[2185] From Mr. Freeman, in the _Contemporary Review_, vol.
xxxiii. (1878), p. 216.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature. Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the accession of Henry II. Long before that time--probably in the days when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude--Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I. Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole credit of the _History of the British Kings_ to which his name is attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of their calling--doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac--beguiled their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187] Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into French verse for her entertainment.[2188]

[2186] Geoff. Monm. _Hist. Reg. Brit._, l. i. c. 1 (Giles,
Caxton Soc., pp. 1, 2).

[2187] Alf. Beverl. (Hearne), pp. 1–3.

[2188] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6436–6460 (Wright, Caxton Soc., pp.
224, 225).

The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace, a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his later work, the _Roman de Rou_ or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings. It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood, this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and eloquent protest in the preface to his _Historia Anglicana_.[2189] Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the _Brut_ (as Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects, but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought, Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface of the ground, Henry--so the monks afterwards declared--guided by what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin, hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree, was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]

[2189] Will. Newb. proœm. (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 11–18).

[2190] “Hanc [sc. Britanniam] sub jure tuo, sub pace tuâ,
teneamus;
Jus tibi, pax nobis, totaque terra simul”--

ends Henry’s letter to Arthur in the _Draco Norm._, l. ii. c.
22, vv. 1279, 1280 (Howlett, _Will. Newb._, vol. ii. p. 707).
See above, p. 57, note 2{226}. The whole story is extremely
curious; but I feel too doubtful about the character of the
source from which it comes to venture upon any discussion of its
possible significance.

[2191] “Sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo,”
Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 192.
“Ex gestis Britonum et eorum cantoribus historicis,” _Spec.
Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 49). These
pyramids were there in William of Malmesbury’s day, when one
of them was already threatening to fall “præ nimiâ vetustate.”
They were covered with “antiquitatis nonnulla spectacula, quæ
plane possunt legi licet non plane possunt intelligi.” These
were pictures of bishops and kings, with old English names
written under them; Arthur, however, is not in the list.
William thought that the persons represented were buried
underneath. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 21 (Hardy, pp.
34, 35).

[2192] See the various accounts of the invention and
translation of Arthur in Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii.
cc. 9, 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 48–51), and _De Instr. Princ._
(Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 191, 192; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson),
p. 36; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 48, and Ann. Margam, a.
1190 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. pp. 21, 22). Gerald seems
to have been present himself. He tells us the “translation”
was made by the king’s order; and indeed his account, taken by
itself, would leave an impression that the whole thing occurred
during King Henry’s lifetime; but R. Coggeshall and Rog. Wend.
both distinctly give the date, 1191; the Margam Annals place it
only a year earlier; and in both those years the reigning king
was far away.

It is easy to see what was, at any rate in Henry’s mind, the political significance of this transaction. When Arthur could be thus publicly exhibited as dead and buried, it was because the long-cherished dreams of Celtic national independence, of which his name had been the symbol and the watchword, were dead and buried too. But the scene thus enacted at Glastonbury in 1191 had also another meaning of which perhaps none of the actors in it could be fully aware. It marked the final “passing of Arthur” out of the sphere of politics into a wholly new sphere of pure intellect and philosophical romance. If Geoffrey of Monmouth corrupted the sources of British history, he atoned for his crime by opening to the poets of the generation succeeding his own a fount of inspiration which is hardly exhausted yet. Their imagination seized upon the romantic side of these old-world legends, and gradually wove them into a poetic cycle which went on developing all through the later middle ages not in England alone, but over the whole of civilized Europe. But in the hands of these more highly-cultured singers the wild products of bardic fancy took a new colour and a new meaning. As usual, it was the Church who first breathed into the hitherto soulless body the breath of spiritual and intellectual life. The earliest of the Arthurian romances, as we possess them now, is a wholly new creation of the religious mysticism of the twelfth century, the story of the Holy Grail--

“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with His own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat--
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o’er Moriah--the good saint,
Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear’d.”

As one by one the older legends of Arthur and Merlin, the later stories of Lancelot and Tristan and Gawaine, were moulded into literary form, a link to bind them all together was found in the “quest of the Grail,” vowed by the whole company of Arthur’s knights assembled at the Table Round, achieved only by one, the Galahad whose pure figure has gleamed upon all after-time, as it flashed first upon the corrupt court of the Angevins, the mirror of ideal Christian chivalry.

The greater part--certainly the noblest part--of this vast fabric of romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet, an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most varied capacities--as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household he held several ecclesiastical preferments--a canonry at S. Paul’s, the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name, the treatise _De Nugis Curialium_--“Courtiers’ Triflings”--is a fruit of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to 1189. By its title and origin it recalls the _Polycraticus_; and the difference between the two books marks the change which had come over the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes--scraps of folklore from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip, court-scandal--all, as it seems, picked out at random from the writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of it all is as earnest as that of the _Polycraticus_, though veiled under a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John; he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories--for a moral they always have--he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman; I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry--if we may venture to borrow his own metaphor--with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor. King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation, the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas--perhaps we should rather say of Theobald--and now sees no way of dealing with the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force; which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves. That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which drew Bishop Goliath.

[2193] On these Arthur-romances and Walter Map’s share in
them see Sir F. Madden’s introduction to his edition of _Sir
Gawayne_ (Bannatyne Club), and that of M. Paulin Paris to the
first volume of his _Manuscrits Français de la Bibliothèque du
Roi_, summarized in Mr. H. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i.
pp. 562–569.

[2194] For the life of Walter Map see Mr. Wright’s _Biog.
Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 295–298, and his preface to _De
Nug. Cur._ (Camden Soc.) pp. i.–viii.

[2195] “Venator vester sum, feras vobis affero, fercula
faciatis.” W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. ii. c. 32 (Wright, p.
106).

[2196] They have been edited, under the title of _Latin Poems
ascribed to Walter Mapes_, by Mr. T. Wright for the Camden
Society.