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• History of the Conquest of England By the Normans.
• Book VIII.: From the Battle of the Standard to the Insurrection of the Poitevins and Bretons Against Henry II. 1137—1189.
• Book IX.: From the Origin of the Quarrel Between King Henry II. And Archbishop Thomas Beket, to the Murder of the Archbishop. 1160—1171.
• Book X.: From the Invasion of Ireland By the Normans Established In England to the Death of Henry II. 1171—1189.
• Book XI.: From the Accession of King Richard I. To the Execution of the Saxon, William Longbeard. 1190—1196.
• Conclusion.
• I.: The Continental Normans and Bretons; the Angevins and the Populations of Southern Gaul.
• II.: The Inhabitants of Wales.
• III.: The Scots.
• IV.: The Native Irish and the Anglo-norman Irish.
• V.: The Anglo-normans and the English By Race.
• Magna Charta.
• Charta Forestæ. Made At Westminster, 10 Th Feb., Anno 9 Hen. III. Ad 1225, and Confirmed Anno 28 Edw. I. Ad 1299.
• Appendix.
• No. I.: Cruelties Exercised By the Norman-lords In Their Castles. 1
• No. II. (page 51.): War Song of the Troubadour Bertrand De Born, Seigneur De Hautefort. 1
• No. III. (page 139.): History of the Marriage of Gilbert Beket, Father of Archbishop Thomas; Fragment of a Life of the Archbishop, By a Contemporary. 3
• No. IV. (page 139.): Old Ballad On the Captivity and Marriage of Gilbert Beket. 1
• No. V. (page 139.): Particulars of the Worldly Life of Thomas Becket, Before His Elevation to the Bishopric, From William Fitzstephen, His Secretary. 1
• No. VI. (page 139.): Letter of John of Salisbury to Becket, Respecting the Views of the King of France, the Earl of Flanders, and the Court of Rome, Concerning Him.
• No. VII. (page 139.): Letter Relative to the Intrigues of Henry II. At the Court of Rome, and the Mission of Two Legates Into France. 1 ( Ad 1169.)
• No. VIII. (page 139.): Letter Op Thomas Beket to Cardinal Albert, On the Conduct of the Court of Rome Towards Him. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. IX. (page 139.): Letter From Thomas Beket’s Companions In Exile to Cardinal Albert, On the Injustice of the Court of Rome, and the Conduct of the Cardinals Towards Them. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. X. (page 139.): Letter of John of Salisbury On the Landing of Thomas Beket, and His Reception In England. 1 ( Ad 1170.)
• No. XI. (page 139.): Extract From a Letter of John of Salisbury, Relative to the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XII. (page 139.): Narrative of the Murder of Thomas Beket, By Edward Grim, Who Was Wounded While Endeavouring to Defend Him. 1
• No. XIII. (page 139.): Letter From King Louis VII. To Pope Alexander III., Demanding Vengeance Against the Murderers of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XIV. (page 139.): Letter From Thibault, Earl of Blois, to Pope Alexander III., On the Murder of Thomas Beket. 2 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XV. (page 139.): Letter In Which the Bishop of Lisieux, On the Part of All the Prelates of Normandy, Relates to the Pope the Conduct of Henry II. After the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XVI. (page 139.): Letter From Henry II. To the Pope, On the Subject of the Murder of Thomas Beket. 1 ( Ad 1171.)
• No. XVII. (page 139.): Letter From Henry II. To the Pope, On the Subject of the Rebellion of His Sons. 1 ( Ad 1173.)
• No. XVIII. (page 167.): Political Poems of Bertrand De Born, Preceded By the Historical Notices Given In the Manuscripts At the Head of Each of the Productions of This Troubadour.
• No. XIX. (page 220.): Sirvente of Richard Cœur-de-lion On His Captivity. 1
• No. XX. (page 223.): The King’s Disguise, and Friendship With Robin Hood. 2
• No. XXI. (page 224.): The Birth of Robin Hood. 1
• No. XXII. (page 237.): Sirvente of Bertrand De Born to Induce the Kings of France and England to Go to War. 1
• No. XXIII. (page 237.): Another Sirvente of Bertrand De Born, to the Same Purpose. 1
• No. XXIV. (page 240.): Sirvente of the Dauphin of Auvergne On His Quarrel With the King of England. 1
• No. XXV. (page 280.): Treaty of Alliance Between Lewellyn Ap-griffith, King of North Wales, With the King of France, Philip-le-hardi. 1
• No. XXVI. (page 282.): List of the Company of Yvain of Wales. 1
• No. XXVII. (page 282.): List of the Company of John Wynn. 1
• No. XXVIII. (page 282.): Receipt Given By Robin-ap-llwydin, and List of His Company. 1
• No. XXIX. (page 282.): List of the Company of Edward-ap-owen. 1
• No. XXX. (page 282.): List of the Company of Owen-ap Griffith, and Receipt Given Him. 1
• No. XXXI. (page 283.): Agreement of Yvain De Galles With King Charles V. For a Sum of 300,000 Francs D’or, and Alliance Made Between Them and Their Subjects. 2
• No. XXXII. (page 287.): Letter From Owen Glendowr, Prince of Wales, to the King of France, Charles VI. 1
• No. XXXIII. (page 303.): The Souters of Selkirk At the Battle of Flodden Field, a Scottish Ballad of the Sixteenth Century.
• No. XXXIV. (page 316.): The Battle of Bothwell Bridge—a Scottish

BOOK X.

FROM THE INVASION OF IRELAND BY THE NORMANS ESTABLISHED IN ENGLAND TO THE DEATH OF HENRY II.

1171—1189.

The reader must now quit Britain and Gaul, to which this history has hitherto confined him, and, for some moments, transport himself to the Western Isle, called by its inhabitants Erin, and by the English Ireland.1 The people of this island, brothers of the Scottish highlanders, and forming with them the last remains of a great population, which, in ancient times, had covered Britain, Gaul, and part of the Spanish peninsula, had several of the physical and moral characteristics which distinguish the original races of the south. The major portion of the Irish were men with dark hair and impetuous passions, loving and hating with vehemence, prompt to anger, yet of a sociable disposition. Enthusiasts in many things, and especially in religion, they mixed up Christianity with their poetry and their literature, the most cultivated, perhaps, of all western Europe. Their island counted a host of saints and learned men, venerated in England and in Gaul, for no country had furnished more Christian missionaries, uninfluenced by other motives than pure zeal to communicate to foreign nations the opinions and faith of their own land.1 The Irish were great travellers, and always ingratiated themselves with the people they visited, by the extreme facility with which they conformed to their customs and modes of life.2

This facility of manner was combined in them with an intense love of their national independence. Invaded at various periods by different nations of the north and of the south, they had never admitted a prescription of conquest or made voluntary peace with the sons of the stranger; their old annals contain narratives of terrible acts of vengeance exercised, often after the lapse of a century, by the natives on their conquerors.3 The remnant of the ancient conquering races, or the small bands of adventurers who from time to time had sought lands in Ireland, avoided the effects of this patriotic intolerance, by incorporating themselves with the Irish tribes, by submitting to the ancient social order established among the natives, and by learning their language. This was the case with the Danish and Norwegian pirates, who, in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, founded on the eastern coast several colonies, where, renouncing their former life of robbery, they built towns and practised commerce.

When the Roman church had established its dominion in Britain by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, she laboured incessantly to extend over Erin the empire she claimed to exercise over all the worshippers of Jesus Christ. As in Ireland there were no pagan conquerors to convert, the popes were fain to content themselves with seeking, by letters and messages, to induce the Irish to establish in their island an ecclesiastical hierarchy similar to that of the continent, and, like it, calculated to serve as a step to the pontifical throne. The men of Erin, like the Britons of Cambria and of Gaul, having spontaneously organized Christianity in their country, without in any way conforming to the official organization decreed by the Roman emperors, had no fixed and determinate episcopal sees. Their bishops were simple priests, to whom had been confided, by election, the purely honorary charge of superintending or visiting the churches. They did not constitute a body superior to the rest of the clergy; there were no different degrees of hierarchy among them; in a word, the church of Ireland had no archbishop, and not one of its members needed to visit Rome to solicit or buy the pontifical pallium. Thus enjoying full independence of foreign churches, and administered, like any other free society, by elective and revocable chiefs, this church was at an early period stigmatized as schismatic by the consistory of Saint John Latran; a continuous system of attack was directed against it, with that perseverance inherent in the successors of the old senate, who, by dint of one unvarying will applied to one unvarying purpose, had subjugated the universe.

The new Rome had not, like the old, legions issuing from her gates to conquer nations; all her power was in address and in her skill to make alliance with the strong; an unequal alliance for the latter, which, under the names of friends and sons, rendered them subjects and vassals. The victories of the conquerors, and especially those of the still pagan barbarians, presented, as may have been observed more than once in this history, the most ordinary occasions for the political aggrandizement of the pontifical court. It carefully watched the rise of the first thought of ambition in the invading kings, as the moment at which to enter into association with them; and, in default of foreign conquests, it loved and encouraged internal despotism. Hereditary monarchy was the system it best liked, because under hereditary monarchy it only needed to gain possession of the mind of one family to acquire absolute authority over a whole nation.

Had such a system prevailed in Ireland, it is probable that the religious independence of this country would have been early destroyed by mutual agreement between the popes and the kings. But, although the Irish had chiefs to whom the Latin title of reges might be applied, and was, in fact, applied in public acts, the greater number of these kings, and their perpetual dependence on the various Irish tribes, whose simple name served them as a title,1 gave slight hold to Roman policy. There was, indeed, in Erin, a chief superior to all the rest, who was called the great king or the king of the country, and who was chosen by a general assembly of the chiefs of the different provinces;2 but this elective president of the national confederation swore to the whole nation the same oath which the chiefs of the tribes swore to their respective tribes, that of inviolably observing the ancient laws and hereditary customs. Moreover, the share in power of the great king was rather the execution than the decision of general affairs, all of which were regulated in councils held in the open air, upon a hill, surrounded by a deep ditch;3 here, the laws of the land were made, and here the disputes between province and province, town and town, and occasionally between man and man, were contested, sometimes in a very tumultuous manner.4

It may be easily understood that such a social order, whose basis was the people themselves, and where the impulsion always emanated from the variable and passion-led mass, was little favourable to the projects of the court of Rome. Accordingly, despite all their efforts with the kings of Ireland, during the four centuries and a half which elapsed between the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and the descent of the Normans into England, the popes effected not the slightest change in the religious practices and organization of the clergy of Erin, or the smallest tribute from the inhabitants of the island.1 After the conquest of England, the intrigues of the primate Lanfranc, a man devoted to the simultaneous aggrandisement of the papal power and of the Norman domination, energetically directed upon Ireland, began to make some slight impression on the national mind of the priests of this island; Lanfranc combining with his credit as a man of learning and eloquence, other efficacious means of persuading and seducing, for he had accumulated great wealth, the result of his share of the pillage of the Anglo-Saxons, and, if ancient testimonies are to be believed, of selling to the bishops of Norman race the pardon of their violence and excesses.2

In the year 1074, an Irishman, named Patrick, after having been elected bishop by the clergy and people, and confirmed by the king of his province and by the king of all Ireland, went to be consecrated at Canterbury, instead of contenting himself, as was the ancient custom, with the benediction of his colleagues; this was the first act of obedience to the laws of the Roman church, which required that every bishop should be consecrated by an archbishop who had received the pallium, and it was not long ere these new seeds of religious servitude bore their fruit. From that time, several Irish bishops accepted in succession the title of pontifical legate in Hibernia; and about the period at which this history has arrived, Christian, bishop of Lismore and papal vicar, conjointly with Papirius, a Roman cardinal, undertook to reorganize the church of Ireland, according to the views and interests of the court of Rome. After four years’ efforts he succeeded, and in a synod attended by the bishops, abbots, kings, chiefs, and other magistrates of Hibernia, with the consent of all present, say the old acts, and by apostolical authority, four archbishops were instituted, to whom were assigned, as fixed sees, the cities of Armagh, Dublin, Cashel, and Tuam.3 But notwithstanding the appearance of national consent given to these measures, the ancient spirit of independence still prevailed: the clergy of Ireland exhibited little docility in their submission to the new hierarchal order, and the people had infinite repugnance towards the foreign practices, and especially to the money-tributes which it was sought, under various names, to levy for the benefit of the ultramontane church. Still dissatisfied with the Irish, despite their concessions, the court of Rome continued to call them bad Christians, lukewarm Christians, rebels to apostolical discipline; it watched as closely as ever an occasion to obtain better hold upon them, by associating its ambition with some temporal ambition, and this occasion soon offered itself.

When Henry, son of Geoffroy Plantegenest, became king of England, it occurred to him to signalize his accession as first king of Angevin race, by a conquest almost as important as that of his paternal ancestor, the Norman William. He resolved to take possession of Ireland, and, following the example of the Conqueror of England, his first care was to send to the pope a proposition to concur in this new enterprise, as his predecessor, Alexander II., had taken part in the first.1 The reigning pope was Adrian IV., a man of English birth, whose family name was Breakspear, and who, by expatriating himself at a very early age, had escaped the miseries of his condition. Too proud to work in the fields or to beg in England, says an ancient historian, he adopted a bold resolution, inspired by necessity;2 he went to France, then to Provence, then to Italy, entered a rich abbey as secretary, became abbot, then bishop, and finally pope;3 for the Roman church was thus far liberal, that she made the fortune of all who devoted themselves to her service, without distinction of origin. On the pontifical throne, Adrian seemed to have forgotten all the resentment of an Englishman against the oppressors of his nation; far from showing anything of that spirit which, a few years afterwards, animated the opposition of Thomas Beket, he exhibited the greatest complaisance towards king Henry II. He received very graciously his message relative to the project of subjugating Ireland, and with the sanction of the sacred college, replied to it in a bull, from which we will make some extracts:—

“Adrian, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his dearly beloved son in Jesus Christ, the illustrious king of England, salutation and apostolic benediction.

“Thou hast let us to know, dearly beloved son in Jesus Christ, that thou desirest to enter the island of Hibernia, to subject the people there to the yoke of the laws, to extirpate the seeds of vice, and also to enforce the payment to the blessed apostle Peter, of the annual pension of a penny for each house. According to this laudable and pious desire, the favour it merits, and a gracious reply to thy request, we consent that, to extend the limits of holy church, to arrest the course of vice, to reform men’s manners, implant virtue, and propagate the Christian religion, thou enter into that island, and execute there, according to thy prudence, whatever thou shalt judge fitting for the honour of God and the salvation of souls. We command that the people of that country receive thee and honour thee as their lord and master, saving the right of the churches, which must remain intact, and also the annual pension of a penny from every house to the blessed Peter and to the most holy Roman church.

“If, then, thou thinkest fit to put into execution what thou hast conceived in thought, employ all thy care in forming that people to good manners, so that, by thy efforts and by those of men of known sufficiency in faith, word, and life, the church may in that country be adorned with a new lustre; that the religion of Christ may be planted there and grow; that, in a word, everything concerning the honour of God and the salvation of souls may, by thy prudence, be ordered in such a manner that thou mayest become worthy to obtain in heaven eternal recompence, and upon earth a glorious name in all ages.”1

This flow of mystic eloquence served, we may see, as a sort of decent envelop for a political compact exactly similar to that of William the Bastard with pope Alexander II. Henry II. would probably have hastened to accomplish, like William, his singular religious mission, if another conquest, that of Anjou from his own brother Geoffroy, had not at the precise moment diverted his attention. He next fought against the Bretons and Poitevins, who, unluckily for their safety, preferred their national independence to the yoke of a friend of the church. Lastly, the rivalry of the king of France, ever at work openly or secretly, and, above all, the long and serious quarrel with the primate of Canterbury, prevented his going to conquer in Ireland temporal royalty for himself, and for the pope spiritual royalty and the rent of a penny for each house. When Adrian IV. died, his bull still slept, awaiting employment, in the treasure-chest of the royal charters of England, and it would perhaps have ripened there during the whole of the king’s life, had not unexpected events created an occasion for bringing it out to daylight.

We have seen above how Norman and Flemish adventurers had conquered Pembrokeshire and part of the western coast of Wales. In establishing themselves in the domains usurped by them, these men had not quitted their old manners for habits of order and repose; they consumed in gaming and debauchery all the revenues of their lands, which they drained instead of bettering, calculating upon new expeditions, rather than upon economy, for the repair of their fortunes. Briefly, in the condition of great landed proprietors, of rich seigneurs terriens, to use the language of the epoch, they had retained the character of soldiers of fortune, ever disposed to run the chances of a foreign war, either on their own account or in the pay of others. It was under this aspect they were remarked by the people of Erin, who, in the prosecution of their commerce, often visited the coasts of Wales. For the first time, they saw, in the vicinity of Ireland, a colony of men trained to wear those complete suits of steel which the language of the period called armure Française;1 the sight of the coats of mail and great Flemish war-horses of the companions of Richard Strongbow, a new thing for the Irish, who were only acquainted with light arms, caused them great surprise.2 The travellers and merchants on their return spread marvellous accounts of the strength and warlike skill of the new inhabitants of the west of Britain. Just at this time, the chief of one of the eastern provinces of Ireland was at war with a neighbouring chief; struck with the accounts he heard of the conquerors of Pembrokeshire, he bethought himself of asking some of them to enlist in his service for high pay, and to aid him in destroying his enemy, whose downfal he prosecuted with that passionate fury which the Irish ever exhibited in their civil wars.1

The Normans and Flemings of Wales, although decorated since their conquest with the titles of honour designating the rich and powerful, in the French language of the middle ages, saw nothing strange in the proposition of the Irishman Dermot Mac Morrogh, chief or king of the province of Lagheniagh, or Leinster. Having made an agreement with him as to the pay2 and the duration of the service, they embarked, four hundred knights, squires and archers, under the command of Robert Fitz-Stephen, Maurice Fitz-Gerauld, Hervè de Mont-Maurice and David de Barry.3 They sailed in a straight line from the westernmost point of Wales to the easternmost point of Ireland, and landed near Wexford, a town founded by the Danes in one of their expeditions of mixed piracy and commerce. This town, which formed part of the territory of Dermot Mac Morrogh, had been taken from him by a stratagem of his adversary and the defection of the inhabitants. Its present garrison came out to meet the hostile army and its auxiliaries; but, when they saw the horses barbed with iron and the steel-clad warriors of Wales, in all their panoply, wholly new to them, a sort of panic terror seized upon them; though far more numerous, they dared not venture an engagement in the open fields, and burning in their retreat all the surrounding villages and all the provisions they could not carry with them, they shut themselves up within the walls of Wexford.4

Dermot and the Normans besieged it, and made upon it three consecutive assaults, with little success, because the great horses, the lances twelve feet long, the cross-bows, and cuirasses of mail of the assailants, were mainly of advantage in the open field. But the intrigues of the bishop of Wexford,5 who had influence enough to reconcile the inhabitants with their king, opened the gates to the ally of the foreigners, who, entering the town without striking a blow, immediately marched in a north-westerly direction to pursue his adversaries and deliver his kingdom. In this expedition, the military skill and complete armour of his allies were a vast assistance to him. The most formidable weapons of the people of Erin were a small steel axe, long javelins, and short, but very sharp arrows. The Normans, secured by their armour from injuries by such weapons as these, rode in upon the natives, and while the shock of their great chargers overthrew the small horses of Ireland, attacked with their strong lances or large swords, the rider, whose only defensive armour was a shield of light wood and long tresses of hair, plaited on each side of the head.1 The whole province of Leinster was reconquered by Mac Morrogh, who, delighted with the prodigious aid given him by the Normans, after having faithfully paid them their hire, invited them to dwell with him, and offered them, as an inducement, more lands than they possessed elsewhere.2 In the effusion of his gratitude, he gave to Robert Fitz-Stephen and to Maurice Fitz-Gerauld the government and revenue of the town of Wexford and its precincts; to Hervé de Mont-Maurice two districts on the coast, between Wexford and Waterford; and to the rest, lands proportionate to their rank and military talent.3

This intervention of strangers in the internal quarrels of the country, and above all, the establishment of these foreigners in permanent colonies in the towns and on the territory of the king of Leinster, alarmed all the surrounding provinces, and private enmity to Dermot was converted into national hostility.4 He was placed, as a public enemy, under the ban of the Irish confederation, and, instead of one king, well-nigh all the kings of the country declared war against him. The new colonists, seeing their cause closely bound up with his, resolved to exert every effort to support him while defending themselves, and at the first murmur of the gathering storm they sent some of their followers to England to collect fresh vagabond-adventurers, Normans, French, and even English. They were promised pay and lands; numbers came, whom king Dermot received as he had done the first, raising the fortune of each on his landing far above its previous condition, the depression of which was self-declared by the surnames of some of them, such as Raymond le Pauvre,1 who, without changing the appellation, became a high and puissant baron on the eastern coast of Ireland.

The foreign colony, gradually augmented under the auspices of the chief of Leinster, who now saw in it his only protection, had, despite its engagements, a tendency to separate its cause from that of the Irish king, and to form of itself an independent society. Ere long, the adventurers disdained to march to battle under the leadership of the man whose pay they were receiving, a man ignorant of skilled warfare—of, as the phrase then ran, les faits d’armes de la chevalerie. They desired to have a captain of great military reputation, and invited over to command them, Richard, son of Gilbert Strongbow, and grandson of the first earl of Pembroke.2 This man, noted among the descendants of the conquerors of Wales as possessor of the most extensive domains, was at this time so impoverished by his excessive expenditure, and so harassed by his creditors, that, to avoid their pursuit and to repair his fortunes, he did not hesitate to comply with the summons of the Normans in Ireland.3

His reputation and his rank procured for him many followers. He landed, with several vessels filled with soldiers and munitions of war, at the same spot where the allies of Dermot had landed two years before, and was received with great honours by his countrymen and by the king of Leinster, fain to welcome this new friend, who might yet one day become formidable to himself.4 Richard, joining with his army the Norman colony, assumed the command of the united forces, and attacked Waterford, a city of the kingdom of Mumham or Munster, nearest to the territory occupied by the Normans. This city, founded by the northern corsairs, as is evidenced by its Teutonic name, was taken by assault.

The Normans left a garrison in it, and, advancing northwards, attacked Dyvlin or Dublin, another city founded by the Danes, and the largest and richest on the eastern coast. Supported by all the troops of king Dermot, they took Dublin, whence they made incursions in different directions upon the open country, seizing upon some districts, obtaining others by capitulation, and laying the foundations of many fortresses, edifices still rarer in Ireland than they had been in England before the conquest.1

The Irish, vividly struck with the rapid progress of the foreigners, attributed it to the Divine anger, and, mingling a sentiment of humanity with their superstitious fears, thought to allay the scourge come upon them from England, by emancipating all the men of English race who, captured by pirates or purchased, had become slaves in Ireland.2 This generous resolution, decreed in a great council of the chiefs and bishops of the country, did not sheathe the sword of Richard Fitz-Gilbert. Master of the kingdom of Leinster, in the name of the Irishman Dermot, whose daughter he married,3 and who became the protégé and vassal of his late mercenaries, the Norman threatened to conquer all the country with the help of new supplies of adventurers whom he summoned from England.

But the rumour of the prodigious aggrandisement of this new power reaching king Henry II. aroused his jealousy.4 So far he had beheld without uneasiness, and even with satisfaction, the establishment of the warriors of Pembroke on the coasts of Ireland, and their connexion with one of the kings of the country, who was thus engaged against his countrymen in an hostility favourable to the designs of the king of England, should he ever realise his plan of conquest. But the possession of a great portion of the island by a man of Norman race, who every day augmented his forces by opening an asylum to adventurers, and who could already, if he chose, pay to the pope the rent of a penny for each house, greatly alarmed the king’s ambition. He issued a threatening proclamation, ordering all his liegemen then in Ireland to return to England before the approaching festival of Easter, under penalty of forfeiture of all their property, and perpetual banishment. He also forbad any vessel from his territories in England or the continent to proceed to Ireland under any pretext. This prohibition arrested the progress of Richard Strongbow, who suddenly found himself cut off from all supplies of men, provisions, or arms.1

From want of personal daring, or of the means of maintaining himself by his own strength, Richard endeavoured to negotiate an accommodation with the king, and sent one of his lieutenants, Raymond le Gros, to wait upon him in Aquitaine. The envoy was ill received by the king, who would not reply to any of his propositions, or rather replied to them in a very expressive manner by confiscating all Richard’s domains in England and Wales. At the same time, the Norman colony in Leinster underwent a fierce attack from the men of Danish race established on the north-eastern coast of Ireland, in conjunction with the native Irish. The confederates were supported by Godred, king of the Isle of Man, a Scandinavian by name and origin, and chief of a mixed people of Gauls and Teutons. They attempted to recover Dublin; the Normans resisted, but fearing the effects of this new league formed against them at a moment when they were deprived of all external aid in consequence of the royal ordinances, they thought they could not do better than to reconcile themselves with the king, at whatever cost. Henry II. required very hard conditions, but the earl of Pembroke and his companions submitted to them. They gave to the king the city of Dublin and the best of the other towns they had conquered. In return, the king gave back to Richard Fitz-Gilbert his confiscated domains, and confirmed to the Normans in Ireland their territorial possessions there, to hold in fief of him on condition of fealty and homage. From supreme chief that he then was, Richard Strongbow became seneschal in Ireland of the king of England; and the king himself immediately set forth to visit the new possessions he had thus easily acquired.2

The rendezvous assigned to the royal army was on the western coast of Pembrokeshire. Before going on board his vessel, Henry II. paid his devotions in the church of Saint David, and recommended to Heaven the expedition he was about to undertake, as he said, for the advancement of holy church. He landed at Waterford, where the Norman chiefs of the kingdom of Leinster, and Dermot Mac Morrogh, still king in name, but whose titular royalty necessarily expired on the landing of the foreign king, received him as, in that century, vassals received a sovereign lord.1 Their troops formed a junction with his army, and marching westward, the combined forces reached the city of Cashel without opposition. The inhabitants of the surrounding districts, hopeless of successfully resisting so powerful an army, emigrated in crowds to the mountainous country beyond the Shannon. The kings of the southern provinces, left by this panic terror at the mercy of the foreigner, were obliged to obey his summons, to swear fealty to him, and to declare themselves tributaries.2 The Normans divided out among themselves the lands of the fugitive Irish; and when the latter returned, driven back by distress, the conquerors received them in the quality of serfs on their own fields. Norman garrisons were placed in the towns, Norman officers superseded the old national chiefs and a whole kingdom, that of Cork, was given by king Henry to Robert Fitz-Stephen, one of the captains of adventurers who had opened for him so facile a road into Ireland.3

After having thus shared out and organized the provinces of the south, the king proceeded northwards to the great city of Dublin. Immediately upon his arrival, in the name of his right of lordship, founded, as he said, upon donation by the church, he summoned all the Irish kings to appear at his court to take the oath of faith and homage.4 The kings of the south attended, but the sovereign of the great western province of Connaught, to whom belonged at this time the supremacy over all the rest, and the national title of king of the country, replied that he would attend no man’s court, he himself being the only chief of all Ireland.5 The altitude and ruggedness of the mountains, and the extent of the marshes of his province, permitted him with impunity to set this example of patriotic haughtiness.1 It was alike in vain that the summons of the king of England reached the north of the island; not a chief of the province of Thuall or Ulster came to do homage at the Norman court of Dublin; and the nominal sovereignty of Henry II. remained bounded by a line from north-east to south west, from the mouth of the Boyne to that of the Shannon.2

A palace of wood, polished and painted in the Irish fashion, was constructed at Dublin, and it was here that the chiefs who had consented to place their hands as vassals in those of the foreign king,3 passed Christmas. Here was displayed for several days all the pomp of Norman royalty; and the Irish, a docile and sociable race, fond of novelty and susceptible of vivid impressions, took pleasure, if we may believe the ancient authors, in viewing the splendour which surrounded their masters, their horses, their arms, and the gold adorning their dresses.4 The members of the clergy, and especially the archbishops, installed a few years before by the pontifical legates, played a great part in this submission to the law of the strongest. The prelates of the western and northern provinces, indeed, did not, any more than the political chiefs of these provinces, attend at Dublin; but those of the south and east swore fidelity to king Henry, towards and against all men.5 They addressed the bearer of the bull of Adrian IV. in this verse, so often applied by the clergy to conquerors: “Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord.” But Henry II. was not content with these uncertain proofs of obedience and resignation; he required others of a more solid nature, demanding that every Irish bishop should give him letters, signed and sealed, in the shape of a formal charter, by which all declared that of their own free will and motion they had constituted “king and lord of Ireland, the glorious Henry Fitz-Empress, and his heirs for ever.”6

King Henry resolved to send these letters to the reigning pope, Alexander III., to obtain from him a formal confirmation of the bull of pope Adrian. To prove in a striking manner his intention to execute the clauses stipulated in that bull for the advantage of the Romish church, he assembled in the city of Cashel a synod of Irish bishops and Norman priests, chaplains, abbots, or simple monks, to arrange the definitive establishment of the papal dominion in Hibernia. This synod prescribed the strict observance of the canons prohibiting marriage within the sixth degree of consanguinity, a law quite new to Ireland, where, in the utmost innocence, were contracted a host of unions reprobated by the church in the other Christian countries. The council of Cashel also passed other resolutions, having for their object the general enforcement of canonical discipline, and it was decreed that the services of the churches of Ireland should for the future be modelled upon those of the churches of England. “Hibernia,” said the acts of this council, “being now, by the grace of divine providence, subjected to the king of England, it is just that she should receive from that country the order and the rules best adapted for reforming her, and for introducing into her a better manner of life.”1

These events took place nearly two years after the murder of Thomas Beket, at a period when king Henry found himself compelled by political necessity to display infinite humility towards the pope; all his former haughtiness in reference to cardinals and legates, and his resolution to maintain against the episcopal power what he then called the rights and dignity of his crown, had now vanished. The need to obtain the sanction and support of the sovereign pontiff for the securing his authority in Ireland, was not the only cause of this change; the death of the primate of Canterbury had also contributed to it. However great the king’s desire had been to be relieved of his antagonist; however emphatically he might have expressed this desire in his passion, the circumstances of the assassination, committed in broad daylight, at the foot of the altar, displeased and disquieted him. “He was vexed,” says a contemporary, “at the manner in which the martyrdom took place, and feared to be called a traitor, for having, in sight of all men, given his full peace to the holy man, and then immediately sent him to perish in England.”2

The political enemies of Henry II. had eagerly availed themselves of this accusation of treason and perjury; they disseminated it zealously, and gave the name of the field of traitors to the meadow in which the reconciliation of the primate and the king of England had taken place.1 The king of France exhausted himself in invectives and messages to excite in every quarter hatred towards his rival, and more especially to renew the insurrection of the provinces of Aquitaine and Brittany. Following the example of the Anglo-Saxon population, but from wholly different motives, king Louis did not await a decree of the Roman church to exalt as a saint and martyr him whom he had by turns assisted, abandoned, and again assisted, at the dictate of his own interest. The impression of horror which the murder of the archbishop had produced on the continent furnished him with a pretext for breaking the truce with king Henry, and he flattered himself that he should have the sovereign pontiff as an auxiliary in the war he proposed to recommence. “Let the sword of Saint Peter,” he wrote, “be drawn from the scabbard to avenge the martyr of Canterbury. For his blood cries aloud in the name of the universal church, and demands satisfaction from the church.”2 Thibaut, earl of Blois, vassal of the king of France, who desired to extend, at the expense of the other king, his territories around Touraine, was still more violent in the despatches he sent to the pope. “The blood of the just,” he said, “has been spilled; the dogs of the court, the familiars, the servants of the king of England, became the ministers of his crime.3 Most holy father, the blood of the just cries to you; may the Father Almighty inspire you with the will, and give you the power to avenge it.”4

Lastly, the archbishop of Sens, who styled himself primate of the Gauls, pronounced a sentence of interdict upon all the continental provinces of the king of England.5 This was a potent means of arousing popular discontent in these provinces, for the execution of a sentence of interdict was accompanied by lugubrious forms, which made a deep impression on the mind. The altars were stripped, the crucifixes placed on the ground, the bones of the saints were taken from their shrines and strewed over the pavement of the churches, the doors were taken away and replaced by heaps of bushes and thorns, and no religious ceremony took place, except the baptism of infants and the confession of the dying.1

The Norman prelates, who bore no political hatred to Henry II., did not execute this sentence; and the archbishop of Rouen, who assumed the authority of primate of the continental provinces subject to the king of England, forbad, by pastoral letters, the bishops of Anjou, Brittany, and Aquitaine, to obey the interdict until it had been ratified by the pope.2 Three bishops and several Norman priests departed on an embassy to Rome to exonerate Henry II. from the accusation of murder and perjury.3 No member of the Aquitan clergy took part in this mission, the king distrusting them, from their having manifested a disposition unfavourable to his cause. We can judge of the spirit which animated them by the following letter, addressed to the king himself, by William de Trahinac, prior of the abbey of Grandmont, near Limoges, an abbey to which Henry was greatly attached, and the church of which he was at this time rebuilding. “Ah! lord king, what is this I hear of you? I would not have you ignorant that, since the day I learned you had fallen into a mortal sin, I sent away the workmen who, in your pay, were building the church of our house of Grandmont, in order that there might no longer be anything in common between you and us.”4

While the king of France and the other enemies of Henry II. were directly charging him with the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury, and endeavouring to represent the crime of the four Norman knights as the result of an express mission, the friends of the king were labouring to spread an entirely different version of the affair. They represented the violent death of Thomas Beket as a mere accident, in which the king’s animosity had no share. A fictitious narrative of the facts, drawn up and signed by a bishop, was sent to pope Alexander III., in the name of all the clergy of Normandy. The Norman prelates related, that being one day with the king to discuss the affairs of the church and of the state, they had suddenly learned from some persons just returned from England, that certain enemies of the archbishop, driven to extremities by his provocations, had thrown themselves upon him and killed him;1 that this melancholy news had been for some time concealed from the king, but that at last it had necessarily reached his ears, it being impossible to allow him longer to remain ignorant of a crime, the punishment of which appertained to him by the right of power and the sword; that at the first words of this sad recital, he had burst into lamentations, and given way to a grief which revealed the soul of the friend rather than that of the prince, now appearing stupified, now uttering cries and sobs; that he had passed three whole days shut up in his chamber, refusing all nourishment and all consolation, and seeming to have the project of putting an end to his life. “So much so,” added the narrators, “that we, who at first lamented the fate of the primate, began to despair of the king, and to believe that the death of the one would calamitously involve that of the other. At length his intimate friends ventured to ask him what afflicted him to this degree, and prevented his returning to himself: ‘It is,’ he answered, ‘that I fear the authors and accomplices of this abominable crime have promised themselves impunity, relying upon my former displeasure towards the archbishop, and that my reputation may suffer from the malevolence of my enemies, who will not fail to attribute all to me; but, by Almighty God, I have in no way concurred therein, either by will or by acquiescence, unless it be construed into a crime on my part that heretofore I misliked the archbishop.’ ”2

This story, in which the exaggeration of the sentiments, the dramatic display, the attempt to exhibit the king as the tender friend of the primate, are manifest proofs of falsity, obtained little credit at the court of Rome or elsewhere. It did not prevent the malevolent from propagating the equally false report, that Thomas Beket had been killed by the express order of Henry II. To weaken this impression, the king resolved himself to address to the pope an account of the murder and of his own deep regret, more conformable with the truth than that of the prelates of Normandy, but still inexact.1 The king took care not to admit that the four assassins had left his court after having heard him utter an exclamation of fury which might pass for an order, and he exaggerated his kindness towards the primate, alike with the offences of the latter. “I had,” he said, “restored to him my friendship and the full possession of his property; I had allowed him to return to England at my expense; but, on his return there, instead of the joys of peace, he brought with him sword and flame. He questioned my royal dignity, and excommunicated my most zealous followers without reason. Then, those whom he had excommunicated, and others, no longer able to support the insolence of this man, threw themselves upon him and killed him, which I cannot relate without great grief.”2

The court of Rome at first made a great noise about the sacrilegious outrage committed upon the Lord’s anointed; and when the Norman clergy sent thither, presented their credentials, and pronounced the name of Henry, by the grace of God, king of England, all the cardinals arose, exclaiming: “Hold! hold!”3 But when, on quitting the hall of audience, each had privately seen the glitter of the king’s gold,4 they became much more tractable, and consented not to consider him a direct accomplice in the murder. Thus, despite the public clamour and the efforts of his enemies, the king of England was not excommunicated; and two legates proceeded from Rome to receive his justification and to absolve him.5 Things had arrived at this point, when Henry II. departed for Ireland, and by its easy conquest gave a diversion to his disquietude. But this very success placed him in a new relation of dependence on the papal power. In the midst of his military and political labours in the country he had just conquered, he had his eyes unceasingly fixed upon the opposite coast, anxiously awaiting the coming of the Roman ambassadors. When, at length, in the Lent which closed the year 1172, he learned that the cardinals Albert and Theodin had arrived in Normandy, he laid aside everything else to visit them, and departed, leaving his conquests in Ireland to the care of Hugh de Lacy.1

King Henry had already obtained from the court of Rome the erasure of his name from the list of persons excommunicated for the murder of Thomas Beket; but this court, then sovereign in such cases, still allowed the accusation of indirect complicity to weigh upon him.2 An absolute and definitive pardon was not to be pronounced until after fresh negotiations and fresh pecuniary sacrifices. In case the king should not submit to the conditions of the treaty, the legates were charged to lay England and the continental possessions of England under interdict, which would open to the king of France admission to Brittany and Poitou. But, on the other hand, if Henry II. yielded to all their demands, the legates were to oblige the king of France, by the threat of a similar sentence, immediately to conclude peace with the other king.3

The first interview of the king of England with the two cardinals took place in a convent near Avranches. The demands of the Romans, thoroughly alive to the difficult position in which the king was placed, were so exorbitant, that the latter, notwithstanding his resolution to go a great way to please the church, refused to submit to their proposals. He said, on leaving them: “I return to Ireland, where I have much to do; as to you, go in peace throughout my territories, wherever you please, and accomplish your mission.”4 But Henry II. reflected that the weight of his affairs in Ireland would soon be too heavy for him, unsupported by pontifical favour; and on their side, the cardinals became less exacting. They again met, and after mutual concessions, peace was concluded between the court of Rome and the king, who, according to the official report of the legates, manifested great humility, fear of God, and obedience to the church.1 The conditions imposed upon Henry II. were, a money tribute towards the expenses of the war against the Saracens, the obligation to repair in person to that war, or to take the cross, as it was then called, and lastly, the abolition of the statutes of Clarendon, and of all other laws, ancient or modern, which should be condemned by the pope.2

In pursuance of previous arrangement, the king went in state to the cathedral of Avranches and, laying his hand on the Gospel, swore before all the people, that he had neither ordered nor desired the death of the archbishop of Canterbury, and that, on learning it, he had felt more grief than joy. The legates repeated to him the articles of peace and the promises he had made, and he swore to execute them all in good faith and without fraudulent reservation.3 Henry, his eldest son and colleague in royalty, swore this at the same time with him; and, as a guarantee of this double promise, the conditions were drawn up in a charter, at the foot of which was affixed the royal seal.4 This king, so lately full of haughty assumption in reference to the pontifical power, called upon the cardinals not to spare him. “Lord legates,” he said, “here is my body; it is in your hands; and know, for a certainty, that whatever you order, I am ready to obey it.” The legates contented themselves with making him kneel before them as they gave him absolution for his indirect complicity, exempting him from the obligation to receive upon his bare back the stripes ordinarily administered to penitents.5 The same day he forwarded to England letters sealed with his great seal, announcing to all the bishops that they were thenceforth dispensed from keeping their promise to observe the statutes of Clarendon,6 and to the nation, that peace was re-established, to the honour of God and of the church, of the king and of the kingdom.1 A pontifical decree, declaring the archbishop saint and martyr, with which the legates had come provided as a diplomatic document necessary to their purpose, was also sent to England, with orders to promulgate it in the churches, public squares, and in all the places where previously those who had dared to call the assassination of the king’s enemy a crime, had been flogged and pilloried.

On the arrival of this news and of the brief of canonization, there was great commotion among the high personages of England, laymen and clergy, thus suddenly called upon to change their language and opinion, and to adopt as an object of public worship the man whom they had persecuted with such fierce inveteracy. The earls, viscounts, and barons who had awaited Thomas Beket on the sea-shore, to kill him, the bishops who had insulted him in his exile, who had envenomed the king’s hatred against him, and brought to Normandy the denunciation which occasioned his death, assembled in the great hall of Westminster, to hear the reading of the papal brief, which was couched in these terms:—

“We give you all to wit, whoever you be, and enjoin you by our apostolic authority, solemnly to celebrate the memory of Thomas, the glorious martyr of Canterbury, every year on the day of his passion, so that by addressing your prayers and vows to him, you may obtain the pardon of your offences, and that he, who living underwent exile, and dying suffered martyrdom for the cause of Christ, being invoked by the faithful, may intercede for us with God.”2

Scarcely was the reading of this letter concluded, when all the Normans, priests and laymen together, raised their voices and exclaimed: “Te Deum laudamus.” While some of the bishops continued to chant the verses of the hymn of thanks-giving, the others burst into tears, saying, with passionate sobs: “Alas! miserable creatures that we are! we had not for our father all the respect we owed him, neither in his exile, nor when he returned from exile, nor even after his return.3 Instead of assisting him in his troubles, we obstinately persecuted him. We confess our error and our iniquity.”4 And as though these individual exclamations were not enough to prove to king Henry II. that his faithful bishops of England could turn whichever way the wind of his royal will blew, they arranged among themselves that one of them should, in public, in the name of the others, pronounce their solemn confession.1 Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, once the most eager persecutor of the primate, the man most deeply compromised with the pontifical court for the part he had taken in the persecution of the new saint, and in the catastrophe which had crowned them, swore publicly that he had not participated in the death of the archbishop, either by deed, word, or writing. He was one of those who, by their complaints and their false statements, had so violently excited the king’s anger against the primate; but an oath wiped out all; the Romish church was satisfied, and Foliot retained his see.

The political advantages which were to result from this great change were speedily obtained by the king of England. First, by the mediation of the legates, he had an interview with the king of France on the frontiers of Normandy, and concluded peace upon conditions as favourable as he could hope for.2 Next, as the price of the relinquishment he had just made of his former projects of ecclesiastical reform, he received from pope Alexander III. the following bull relative to the affairs of Ireland: “Alexander, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his dearly beloved and illustrious son Henry, king of England, salutation, grace, and apostolic benediction.

“Seeing that the gifts granted for good and valid cause by our predecessors, ought to be ratified and confirmed by us, having maturely weighed and considered the grant and privilege of possession of the land of Hibernia, belonging to us, delivered by our predecessor Adrian, we ratify, confirm, and grant, in like manner, the said grant and privilege, reserving the annual pension of a penny from each house, due to Saint Peter and the Roman church, as well in Hibernia as in England, and providing also that the people of Hibernia be reformed in their lives and in their abominable manners, that they become Christian in fact as in name, and that the church of that country, as rude and disorderly as the nation itself, be brought under better laws.”1 In support of this donation of an entire people, body, and goods, a sentence of excommunication handed over to Satan all who should dare to deny the rights of king Henry and his heirs over Ireland.

Everything now appeared settled in the most satisfactory manner, for the great grandson of the conqueror of England. The man who had troubled him for nine years was no more; and the pope who had made use of the obstinate determination of that man to alarm the ambition of the king, now amicably aided the king in his projects of conquest. That nothing might disturb his repose, he dispensed him, by absolution, from all the remorse which might trouble his conscience, after a murder committed, if not by his order, at least to please him. He even exempted him, by implication, from the obligation of punishing those who had committed that murder, in excess o zeal for his interest;2 and the four Normans, Traci, Morville, Fitz-Ours, and Le Breton, dwelt safely and at peace in a royal castle in the north of England. No justice prosecuted them but that of public opinion, which spread a thousand sinister reports respecting them;3 for example, that even animals were horrified at their presence, and that the dogs refused to touch the bones from their table. In gaining the sanction of the pope against Ireland, Henry II. was, by this augmentation of external power, amply recompensed for the diminution of his influence over ecclesiastical affairs; and there is nothing to show that he did not readily assent to the latter sacrifice. A pure taste for good was not the motive which had actuated him in his legislative reforms; and it will be remembered that he had already more than once proposed to the pope to abandon to him the statutes of Clarendon, and still more, if on his side he would consent to sacrifice Thomas Beket. Thus, after protracted turmoil and agitation, Henry II. enjoyed in repose the delight of satisfied ambition: but this calm was of brief duration; new vexations, with which, by a singular fatality, was again mixed up the memory of the archbishop, soon afflicted the king.

The reader bears in mind that, during the life of the primate, Henry, being unsuccessful in persuading the pope to deprive him of his title, had resolved to abolish the primacy itself, and with this view had caused his eldest son to be crowned by the archbishop of York.

This step, apparently of no other importance than that it attacked in its foundation the hierarchy established by the conquest, had consequences which none had foreseen. As there were two kings of England, the courtiers and flatterers having, as it were, double employment, divided themselves between the father and the son. The younger and more active in intrigue sided with the latter, whose reign offered a longer perspective of favour.1 A peculiar circumstance more especially procured him the affection of the Aquitans and Poitevins, able, insinuating, persuasive men, eager after novelty, and prompt to avail themselves of any opportunity of weakening the Anglo-Norman power, which they obeyed with reluctance. The good understanding between Eleanor of Guienne and her husband had long ceased to exist. The latter, once in possession of the honours and titles which the daughter of earl William had brought to him as her portion, and for which, as the old historians say, he had alone loved and married her,2 kept mistresses of every rank and nation. The duchess of Aquitaine, passionate and vindictive as a woman of the south, endeavoured to inspire her sons with aversion towards their father, and by treating them with the utmost tenderness and indulgence, to raise up in them a support against him.3 Ever since the eldest had shared the royal dignity, she had given him friends, councillors, and confidants, who, during the father’s numerous absences, excited as much as possible the ambition and pride of the young man.4 They had little difficulty in persuading him that his father, in crowning him king, had fully abdicated in his favour; that he alone was king of England, and that no other person ought to assume the title or exercise the sovereign authority.5

The old king, as Henry II. was now designated, soon perceived the evil designs which the confidants of his son sought to inculcate upon him; he several times obliged him to change his friends, and to dismiss those whom he most loved.1 But these measures, which the continual occupations of Henry II. upon the continent and in Ireland prevented him from following up, angered the young man without correcting him, and gave him a sort of right to call himself persecuted, and to complain of his father.2 Things were in this position when peace was re-established, by the mediation of the pope, between the kings of France and of England. One of the causes of their last quarrel was that king Henry, when crowning his son by the hands of the archbishop of York, had not, at the same time, crowned his son’s wife, Marguerite, the daughter of the king of France.3 This grievance was now remedied; and Marguerite, crowned queen, requested to visit her father at Paris. Henry II., having no reasons to oppose to this demand, allowed the young king to accompany his wife to the court of France; and, on their return, found his son more discontented than ever:4 he complained of being a king without land or treasure, and of not having a house of his own in which to live with his wife;5 he went so far as to ask his father to resign to him, in full sovereignty, the kingdom of England, the duchy of Normandy, or the earldom of Anjou.6 The old king counselled him to remain quiet, and to have patience until the time when the succession to all his territories would fall to him naturally. This answer raised the anger of the young man to the highest point; and from that day forth, say the contemporary historians, he did not address a single word of peace to his father.7

Henry II. entertaining fears as to his conduct, and desiring closely to observe him, made him travel with him in the province of Aquitaine. They held their court at Limoges, where Raymond, count of Toulouse, quitting his alliance with the king of France, came to do homage to the king of England, pursuant to the vacillating policy of the southerns, ever balancing and passing alternately from one to the other of the kings their enemies.1 Count Raymond made a fictitious transfer to his ally of the territory he governed, which was then by a similar legal fiction returned to him to hold in fief, he taking in respect of it the oath taken by a vassal to whom a lord really conceded an estate. He swore to observe to Henry fealty and honour, to give him aid and counsel towards and against all, never to betray his secrets, and to reveal to him, on occasion, the secrets of his enemies.2 When the count of Toulouse came to this last portion of the oath of homage:—“I have to warn you,” he said to the king, “to secure your castles of Poitou and Guienne, and to distrust your wife and son.”3 Henry took no public notice of this information, indicating a plot which the count of Toulouse had been solicited to join; but he availed himself of several large hunting-parties, as they seemed, composed of his most devoted adherents, to visit the fortresses of the country, place them in a state of defence, and assure himself of the men who commanded them.4

On their return from this progress in Aquitaine, the king and his son stopped to sleep at Chinon, and in the night, the son, without notice to his father, quitted him, and proceeded to Alençon. The father pursued, but failed to overtake him; the young man went to Argentan, and thence during the night into the territory of France.5 As soon as the old king heard this, he mounted his horse, and with the utmost possible rapidity visited the whole frontier of Normandy, inspecting the fortresses, and placing them in a state of defence against surprise. He then sent despatches to all his castellans of Anjou, Brittany, Aquitaine, and England, ordering them to repair and guard with redoubled care their fortresses and towns.6 Messengers also repaired to the king of France, to learn what were his intentions, and to claim the fugitive in the name of paternal authority. King Louis received these ambassadors in full court, having at his right hand young Henry, attired in royal robes. When the messengers had presented their despatches, according to the ceremonial of the time: “From whom bring you this message?” asked the king of France. “From Henry, king of England, duke of Normandy, duke of Aquitaine, earl of the Angevins and of the Manceaux.” “That is false,” answered the king, “for here at my side is Henry king of England, who has nothing to say to me through you. But if it be the father of this king, the late king of England, to whom you give these titles, know that he is dead since the day on which his son assumed the crown; and if he still pretends to be king, after having, in the sight of the world resigned the kingdom to his son, it is a matter we shall soon remedy.”1

And, in effect, young Henry was acknowledged sole king of England, in a general assembly of all the barons and bishops of the kingdom of France. King Louis VII. and, after him, all the lords, swore, their hands on the Gospel, to assist the son with all their power to conquer the territories of his father. The king of France had a great seal made with the arms of England, that Henry the Younger might affix this token of legality to his charters and despatches. As a first act of sovereignty, the latter made donations of lands and honours in England and upon the continent to the principal lords of France, and to other enemies of his father. He confirmed to the king of Scotland the conquests which his predecessor had made in Northumberland; and gave to the earl of Flanders the whole county of Kent, with the castles of Dover and Rochester. He gave to the count of Boulogne a vast domain near Lincoln, with the county of Mortain in Normandy; and to the earl of Blois, Amboise, Chateau Reynault, and five hundred pounds of silver from the revenues of Anjou.2 Other donations were made to several barons of England and Normandy, who had promised to declare against the old king; and Henry the Younger3 sent despatches, sealed with his new royal seal, to his own friends, his mother’s friends, and even to the pope, whom he endeavoured to gain over by the offer of greater advantages than the court of Rome then derived from its friendship with Henry II. This last letter was, in some measure, the manifesto of insurrection; for it was to the sovereign pontiff that were then made the appeals which, in our times, are addressed to public opinion.

A singular peculiarity of this manifesto is, that Henry the Younger assumes therein all the titles of his father, except that of duke of Aquitaine, doubtless the better to conciliate the favour of the people of that country, unwilling to acknowledge any right over them but that of the daughter of their last national chief. A still more remarkable circumstance is the origin which the young king attributes to his quarrel with his father, and the manner in which he justifies himself for having violated the commandment of God, which prescribes honour to father and to mother. “I pass over in silence,” says the letter, “my own personal injuries, to come to that which has most powerfully influenced me. The reprobate villains who, even in the very temple, massacred my foster father, the glorious martyr of Christ, Saint Thomas of Canterbury, remain safe and unharmed; they have still deep root in the land; no act of royal justice has pursued them after so frightful a crime. I could not endure this negligence, and this was the first and principal cause of the present discord. The blood of the martyr cried out to me; I could not comply with his demand, I could not give him the vengeance and the honours due to him; but I at least evinced my respect for him by visiting his sepulchre, in the sight and to the astonishment of the whole realm. My father was greatly incensed against me for so doing; but I, certes, heed not the offending a father, when the alternative is offending Christ, for whom we ought to abandon both father and mother. This is the origin of our dissensions; hear me then, most holy father, and judge my cause; for it will be truly just, if it be justified by thy apostolic authority.”1

To appreciate these assertions at their just value, it will be sufficient to recal to mind the proclamations issued by the young king himself, when Thomas Beket came to London. Then, it was by his express command that access to the capital and to all the towns in England, except Canterbury, was forbidden to the archbishop, and that every man who had presented his hand to him, in token of welcome, was declared a public enemy. The remembrance of these notorious facts was still fresh in the memory of the people, and hence, doubtless, the general surprise occasioned by the visit of the persecutor to the tomb of the persecuted, if the visit, indeed, be not altogether fabulous. To this statement, set forth with all the forms of deference that could flatter the pride of the Roman pontiff, the young king added a sort of scheme of the new administration which he proposed to institute throughout his father’s states. Should God grant him permission to conquer them, he intended, he wrote, to reinstate ecclesiastical elections in all their liberty, without the intervention in any way or degree of the royal power; he proposed that the revenues of vacant churches should be reserved for the future incumbent, and no longer be levied for the revenue, not being able to endure that the “property of the cross acquired by the blood of the Crucified, should administer to that luxury and splendour, without which kings cannot live.” That the bishops should have full power to excommunicate and to interdict, to bind and to loose, throughout the kingdom, and that no member of the clergy should ever be cited before lay judges, as Christ before Pilate. Henry the Younger offered further to add to these regulations any which the pope might be pleased to suggest, and lastly, intreated him to write officially to all the clergy of England, “that by the inspiration of God, and the intercession of the new martyr, her king had conferred liberties upon them which would excite their joy and gratitude.”1 Such a declaration would indeed have been of great assistance to the young man, who, looking upon his father as already dead, styled himself Henry the Third. But the court of Rome, too prudent lightly to abandon the certain for the uncertain, was in no haste to answer this despatch, and until fortune should declare herself in a more decisive manner, preferred the alliance of the father to that of the son.

Besides this son, who was commonly called the young king, in the Norman language, li reys Josnes, and lo reis Joves in the dialect of the southern provinces, the king of England had three others: Richard, whom, notwithstanding his youth, his father had created earl of Poitiers, and who was called Richard of Poitiers; Geoffroy, earl of Brittany, and lastly, John, surnamed Sans-terre (Lackland), because he alone, of them all, had neither government nor province.1 The latter was too young to take a part in the quarrel between his father and his eldest brother; but the two others embraced the cause of the latter under the influence of their mother, and secretly urged on by their vassals of Poitou and Brittany.2

It was with the vast portion of Gaul now united under the authority of Henry II., as it had been with the whole of Gaul, in the time of the Frank emperor, Lodewig, commonly called Louis-le-pieux, or le Debonnaire. The populations who dwelt south of the Loire would no more be associated with those who resided north of that river, or with the people of England, than the Gauls and Italians of the empire of Charlemagne with the Germans under the sceptre of a German king. The rebellion of the sons of Henry II. concurring with these national distastes, and associating with them, as formerly that of the children of Louis-le-Debonnaire, could not fail to reproduce, although in a more limited arena, the dark scenes which signalized the discords of the family of the Frank Cæsars.3 The sword once drawn between father and son, neither would be permitted to return it at his pleasure to the scabbard; for connected with the two rival parties in this domestic war there were nations, there were popular interests, which would not turn with the vacillations of paternal indulgence or of filial repentance.

Richard of Poitiers and Geoffroy of Brittany quitted Aquitaine, where they resided with their mother Eleanor, to join their eldest brother at the court of France. Both arrived there in safety; but their mother, on her way to the same court, was arrested, disguised as a man, and thrown into prison by order of the king of England.4 On the arrival of the two young brothers, the king of France made them swear solemnly as their elder brother had done, never to conclude a peace or truce with their father, but through the barons of France. The war then commenced on the frontiers of Normandy.1 As soon as the news of these events spread over England, the whole country was in a state of excitement. Many men of Norman race, and especially the younger men, declared for the son’s party;2 the Saxon population, as a body, remained indifferent to the dispute; individually, the serfs and vassals took the side which their lord adopted. The citizens were enrolled, whether they would or no, in the cause of the earls or viscounts who governed the towns, and armed, either for father or son.

Henry II. was now in Normandy, and well nigh each day witnessed the departure from his palace of one or more of his most trusted courtiers, men who had eaten at his table, and to whom he had, with his own hands, given the belt of knighthood.3 “It was for him,” says a contemporary, “the extreme of grief and despair to see, leaving him for the enemy, one after the other, the guards of his chamber, those to whom he had confided his person and his life; for almost every night some one departed, whose absence was discovered at the morning call.”4 In this deserted condition, and amidst the dangers it presented, the king displayed much apparent tranquillity. He followed the chase more earnestly than ever;5 he was gay and affable to the companions who remained with him, and replied with gentleness to the demands of those who, profiting by his critical position, required exorbitant remuneration for their fidelity.6 His greatest hope was in the assistance of foreigners. He sent to great distances, soliciting the aid of kings who had sons.7 He wrote to Rome, soliciting from the pope the excommunication of his enemies; and in order to obtain in this court an influence superior to that of his adversaries, he made to the apostolic see that admission of vassalage, which William the Conqueror had so haughtily refused.1 His letter to pope Alexander III. contained the following passages: “You, whom God has raised to the sublimity of the pastoral functions, to give to his people the knowledge of salvation, though absent in body, present in mind, I throw myself at your feet. To your jurisdiction appertains the kingdom of England, and I am bound and held to you by all the obligations which the law imposes on feudatories. Let England then experience what the Roman pontiff can effect, and as you do not employ material weapons, defend the patrimony of the blessed Peter with the spiritual sword.”2

The pope met this demand by ratifying the sentences of excommunication which the bishops who remained faithful to the king had hurled against the partisans of his sons.3 He sent, moveover, a special legate, charged to re-establish domestic peace, and to take care that this peace, whatever its conditions in other respects, should be productive of some new advantage to the princes of the Roman church.

Meantime, on one side the king of France and Henry the Younger, and on the other, the earls of Flanders and Brittany, passed in arms the frontier of Normandy. Richard, the second son of the king of England, had repaired to Poitou, and most of the barons of that country rose in his cause, rather from hatred to the father than from love for the sons.4 Those who, in Brittany, some years before, had formed a national league, revived their confederation, and armed apparently for count Geoffroy, but in reality for their own independence.5 Thus attacked at once on several points, the king of England had no troops on whom he could fully rely, but twenty thousand of the mercenaries, then called Brabançons, Cotereaux, or Routiers, bandits in time of peace, soldiers in time of war, serving indifferently every cause; as brave as any other troops of the period, and better disciplined.6 With a portion of this army, Henry II. arrested the progress of the king of France; the other portion he sent against the revolted Bretons, who were defeated in a pitched battle by the military experience of the Brabançons, and compelled to retreat to their castles and to the town of Dol, which the king of England besieged and took in a few days.1

The defeat of the Bretons diminished the ardour, not of the sons of king Henry and their Norman, Angevin, or Aquitan partisans, but of the king of France, who, above all things, desired to carry on the war at the least possible expense. Fearing to be involved in a too great expenditure of men and money, or desirous of essaying other political combinations, he one day said to the rebellious sons, that they would do well to effect a reconciliation with their father. The young princes, constrained by the will of their ally to a sudden return of filial affection, followed him to the place appointed for the conference of peace.2 Not far from Gisors, in a vast plain, there stood a gigantic elm, whose branches had been artificially bent down to the earth, forming a covered circle, under which, from time immemorial, the interviews of the dukes of Normandy and the kings of France had taken place.3 Thither came the two kings, accompanied by their archbishops, bishops, earls, and barons. The sons of Henry II. made their demands, and the father seemed disposed to make them considerable concessions. He offered to the eldest, one half of the royal revenues of England and four good fortresses in that country, if he chose to reside there, or, if he preferred it, three castles in Normandy, one in Maine, one in Anjou, and one in Touraine, with all the revenues of his ancestors the earls of Anjou, and half the revenues of Normandy.4 He offered, in like manner, lands and revenues to Richard and Geoffroy. But this facility on his part, and his earnest desire to remove permanently every source of dissension between his sons and himself, alarmed the king of France,5 who, no longer desiring peace, allowed the partisans of Henry’s sons, who greatly feared it, to create obstacles and intrigues tending to break off the negotiations thus favourably commenced.6 One of these men, Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester, went so far as to insult the king of England to his face, and to lay his hand on his sword.1 He was withheld from actual violence by the surrounding nobles; but the tumult which ensued stayed all accommodation, and hostilities soon recommenced between the father and the sons. Henry the Younger and Geoffroy remained with the king of France; Richard returned to Poitou; and Robert de Beaumont, who had personally menaced the king, went to England to join Hugh Bigot, one of the richest barons of the land, and a zealous partisan of the rebellion.2

Ere earl Robert could reach his town of Leicester, it was attacked by Richard de Lucy, the king’s grand justiciary. The earl’s men-at-arms made a vigorous defence, and compelled the Saxon burgesses to fight for them; but part of the rampart giving way, the Norman soldiers retreated into the castle, leaving the town to its fate.3 The burgesses continued their resistance, unwilling to yield at discretion to men who deemed it a venial sin to kill an insurgent Englishman. Obliged at length to capitulate, they purchased, for three hundred pounds of silver, permission to withdraw from the town, and to proceed wherever they thought fit.4 They sought a refuge upon the lands of the church: some went to Saint Alban’s, and many to Bury Saint Edmund’s, named after a martyr of English race, who, according to the popular notion, was ever ready to protect his countrymen against the tyranny of the foreigners. On their departure, the town was dismantled by the royal troops, who broke down the gates and levelled the walls.5 While the English of Leicester were thus punished because their Norman governor had taken part in the revolt, one of the lieutenants of that governor, Anquetil Malory, having collected a body of earl Robert’s vassals and partisans, attacked Northampton, held by its viscount for the king. The viscount obliged the burgesses to take up arms for his party in the same way that those of Leicester had been compulsorily armed on the other side. A great number were killed and wounded, and two hundred taken prisoners.6 Such was the calamitous part played by the population of English race in the civil war of the sons of their conquerors.

The natural sons of king Henry had remained faithful to their father, and one of them, Geoffroy, bishop of Lincoln, vigorously urged on the war, besieging the castles and fortresses of the barons on the other side.1 Meantime, Richard had been fortifying the towns and castles of Poitou and Angoumois, and it was against him that the king now marched with his faithful Brabançons, leaving Normandy, where he had most friends, to combat the king of France. He laid siege to Saintes, then defended by two castles, one of which bore the name of the Capitol, a reminiscence of old Rome preserved in several cities of southern Gaul.2 After taking the fortresses of Saintes, Henry attacked with his war machines the two towers of the episcopal church, wherein the partisans of Richard had fortified themselves.3 He took it, with the fort of Taillebourg and several other castles, and, on his return to Anjou, devastated all the frontier of Poitou, burning the houses, and uprooting the vines and fruit trees.4 He had scarcely arrived in Normandy, when he learned that his eldest son and the earl of Flanders, having assembled a large naval force, were preparing to make a descent upon England.5 This news decided him upon immediately returning to that country; he took with him, as prisoners, his wife Eleanor, and his daughter-in-law Marguerite, the daughter of the king of France.6

From Southampton, where he landed, the king proceeded to Canterbury, and, as soon as he beheld its cathedral church, at three miles distance, he dismounted from his horse, quitted his silken robes, took off his shoes, and continued his journey barefoot upon the stony and, at that moment, muddy road.7 Arrived at the church which contained the tomb of Thomas Beket, he prostrated himself with his face to the earth, weeping and sobbing, in sight of all the people of the town, attracted thither by the ringing of the bells.1 The bishop of London, the same Gilbert Foliot who had been the greatest enemy of Beket in his lifetime, and who, after his death, had proposed to throw his body upon a dunghill, mounted the pulpit, and, addressing the congregation: “All you here present,” he said, “know that Henry, king of England, invoking, for the salvation of his soul, God and the holy martyr, protests before you that he neither ordered, wished, nor wilfully caused, nor desired in his heart the death of the martyr. But, as it is possible, that the murderers availed themselves of some words imprudently escaping him, he declares that he seeks penitential chastisement of the bishops here assembled, and consents to submit his bare back to the discipline of the rod.”2

And in effect, the king, accompanied by a great number of Norman bishops and abbots, and by all the Norman and Saxon priests of the chapter of Canterbury, proceeded to the subterranean church, where two years before the body of the archbishop had been placed as in a fortress to remove it from the insults of the royal officers.3 Here, kneeling upon the tomb-stone, and stripping off his clothes, he placed himself, with bare back in the posture in which his justiciaries had placed the English who were publicly whipped for having received Thomas on his return from exile, or for having honoured him as a saint. Each of the bishops, the parts being previously arranged, took one of those whips with several lashes, used in the monasteries to inflict ecclesiastical correction, and which, for that reason, were called disciplines. Each struck two or three gentle blows on the king’s shoulders, saying: “As thy Redeemer was scourged for the sins of men, so be thou scourged for thy own sin.”4 From the hands of the bishops, the whips passed into those of the priests, who were in great numbers, and for the most part of English race.5 These sons of the serfs of the conquest impressed the marks of the whip upon the flesh of the grandson of the Conqueror, with a secret satisfaction, revealed by some bitter jests in the contemporary narratives of the affair.1

But neither this joy nor this triumph of a moment, produced any fruit for the English population; on the contrary, that population was duped in this scene of hypocrisy acted before it by the king of Angevin race. Henry II. seeing the greater number of his continental subjects turning against him, recognised the necessity of rendering himself popular with the Saxons in order to gain their support. He thought lightly of a few strokes of a whip, could he at such a price obtain the loyal services which the English populace had rendered to his ancestor, Henry I. In fact, since the murder of Thomas Beket, the love of this new martyr had become the passion, or more accurately, the madness of the English nation. The religious worship with which the memory of the archbishop was surrounded, had weakened, had superseded, well nigh every patriotic reminiscence. No tradition of national independence was more powerful than the deep impression produced by those nine years, during which a primate of Saxon race had been the object of the hopes, the prayers, the conversation of every Saxon. A marked proof of sympathy with this popular sentiment was, then, the most effective attraction by which the king could draw the native English to him, and render them, in the words of an old historian, “manageable in bit and harness.”2 This was the true cause of the pilgrimage of Henry II. to the tomb of him whom he had, at first, loved as the companion of his pleasures, and afterwards mortally hated as his political opponent.

“After having been thus whipped, of his own free will,” says the contemporary narration, “he persevered in his prayers to the holy martyr, all day and all night, taking no nourishment, leaving the church for no need; as he had come, so he remained, allowing no carpet or similar thing to be placed under his knees. After matins, he made the circuit of the upper church, prayed before all the altars and all the relics, and then returned to the tomb of the saint. On Saturday, when the sun had risen, he heard mass; then, having drunk water blessed by the martyr, and filled a flask with it, he joyously departed from Canterbury.”1

This ostentatious display of contrition had entire success; it was with perfect enthusiasm that the burgesses of the towns, and the serfs of the country, heard it preached in the churches that the king had reconciled himself with the blessed martyr, by penitence and tears.2 It happened, by chance, that at the same time, William, king of Scotland, who had made an hostile incursion upon the English territory, was defeated and made prisoner near Alnwick in Northumberland. The Saxon population, passionately intent upon the honour of Saint Thomas, viewed in this victory a manifest token of the benevolence and protection of the martyr, and from that day forth sided with the old king, whom the saint thus evidently favoured. Acting upon this superstitious impulse, the native English enrolled themselves in crowds under the royal banner, and fought with ardour against the accomplices of revolt. Poor and despised as they were, they formed the great mass of the population, and nothing can resist such a power when it is organized. The enemy were defeated in every county, their castles taken by assault, and numbers of earls and barons made prisoners. “So many were taken,” says a contemporary, “that they could hardly procure cords enough wherewith to bind them, or prisons enough wherein to confine them.”3 This rapid series of victories arrested the project of descent upon England formed by Henry the Younger and the earl of Flanders.4

But on the continent, where the populations subject to the king of England had no national affection for the English Beket, the affairs of Henry II. prospered no better after his visit and his flagellation at the martyr’s tomb than before. On the contrary, the Poitevins and Bretons recovered from their first defeat, and renewed more firmly their patriotic associations. Eudes de Porrhoet, whose daughter the king of England had formerly dishonoured, and whom the same king had subsequently banished, returned from exile, and again rallied in Brittany all who were weary of the Norman domination.1 The malcontents made some daring excursions that gave to Breton temerity celebrity all over the continent. In Aquitaine, Richard’s party also resumed courage, and fresh troops of insurgents assembled in the mountainous parts of Poitou and Perigord, under the same chiefs who, a few years before, had risen in arms at the instigation of the king of France.2 Hatred of the foreign power collected around the lords of the castles the inhabitants of the towns and villages, men free in body and goods; for servitude did not exist south of the Loire, as it did north of that river.3 Barons, castellans, and portionless sons of castellans, also adopted the same side, from a motive less pure, the hope of making a fortune by the war.4 They opened the campaign by attacking the rich abbots and bishops of the country, most of whom, according to the spirit of their order, supported the cause of established power. They pillaged their domains, or, arresting them on the highways, shut them up in their castles till they paid ransom.5 Among these prisoners was the archbishop of Bordeaux, who, according to the papal instructions, had excommunicated the enemies of the elder Henry in Aquitaine, as the archbishop of Rouen excommunicated them in Normandy, Anjou, and Brittany.6

At the head of the insurgents of Guienne figured, less from his fortune and rank, than from his indefatigable ardour, Bertrand de Born, seigneur of Haute-Fort, near Perigueux, a man who combined in the highest degree all the qualities necessary to the fulfilment of a distinguished part in the middle ages.7 He was a warrior and a poet, a man ever under the impulsive influence of an excessive need of action, of emotion; of an activity and an ability which he employed wholly in political affairs. But this agitation, vain and turbulent in appearance, was not without a real object, without a close reference to the welfare of his native land. This extraordinary man appears to have had the profound conviction, that his country, adjoining the states of the kings of France and of England, had no other escape from the dangers which ever threatened it, on one side or the other, but in war between its two enemies. Such seems to have been the idea which, during Bertrand’s life, guided his actions and his conduct. “At all times,” says his Provençal biographer, “he desired that war should be between the king of France and the king of England, and if the kings made peace or truce, he worked and toiled to undo that peace or that truce.”1 With this view, Bertrand employed all his address to develop and envenom the quarrel between the king of England and his sons; he was one of those who, gaining an ascendancy over the mind of young Henry, aroused his ambition and excited him to revolt.2 He gained equal influence over the other sons, and even over their father, ever to their detriment and to the profit of Aquitaine. This is the testimony rendered of him by his ancient biographer, with all the pride of a man of the south, setting forth the moral superiority of one of his countrymen over the kings and princes of the north: “He was master whenever he pleased of king Henry of England and his sons, and always did he desire that they should all of them, the father, the sons and the brothers, be at war with each other.”3

His efforts, crowned with complete success, obtained for him an ill reputation with those who saw in him only a counsellor of domestic discord, a man seeking maliciously, to speak the mystic language of the period, to raise blood against flesh, to divide the head from the members.4 It is for this reason that Dante makes him, in his Inferno, suffer a punishment analogous with the figurative expression by which his offence was designated. “I saw, and still seem to see, a body without a head advancing towards us, carrying its severed head in its hand by the hair, like a lantern. Know that I am Bertrand de Born, he who gave ill counsel to the young king.”1

But Bertrand did something more: he was not content with giving to young Henry that counsel against his father which the poet terms ill counsel; he gave to him similar counsel against his brother Richard, and when the young king was dead, to Richard against the old king; and lastly, when the latter was dead, to Richard against the king of France, and to the king of France against Richard. He never allowed them to remain for an instant upon a good understanding, but constantly animated them one against the other, by the sirventès or satirical songs so greatly in vogue at that time.2

Poetry then played a great part in the politics of the countries south of the Loire. No peace, no war, no revolt, no diplomatic transaction, took place that was not announced, proclaimed, praised or blamed in verse. These verses, often composed by the very men who had taken an active part in the events that formed their subject, were of an energy almost inconceivable to him who regards the ancient idiom of southern Gaul, in the effeminate aspect it has assumed since the French dialect has replaced it as a literary language.3 The songs of the trobadores,4 or Provençal, Toulousan, Dauphinese, Aquitainan, Poitevin, and Limousin poets, rapidly circulated from castle to castle, from town to town, doing in the twelfth century the office of newspapers, in the country comprised between the Vienne, the Isere, the mountains of Auvergne and the two seas. There was not as yet in this country any religious inquisition; men there freely and openly criticised that which the people of the other portions of Gaul scarcely dared to examine. The influence of public opinion and of popular passions, was everywhere felt, in the cloisters of the monks as in the castles of the barons; and, coming to the subject of this history, the dispute between Henry II. and his sons so vividly excited the men of Aquitaine, that we find the impress of these emotions even in the writings, generally characterized by very little animation, of the Latin chroniclers. One of these, an anonymous dweller in an obscure monastery, cannot refrain from interrupting his narrative with a poetical prose version of the war song of the partisans of Richard.

“Rejoice, land of Aquitaine, rejoice, land of Poitou; the sceptre of the northern king recedes. Thanks to the pride of that king, the truce is at length broken between the realms of France and of England; England is desolate, and Normandy mourns. We shall see the king of the south coming to us with his great army, with his bows and his arrows. Woe to the king of the north, who dared raise his lance against the king of the south, his lord; his downfall approaches, and the stranger will devour his land.”

After this outburst of joy and of patriotic hate, the author addresses Eleanor, alone of the family of Henry II. dear to the Aquitans, because she was born among them.

“Thou wert taken from thy native land and carried among strangers. Reared in abundance and delicacy, thou didst enjoy a regal liberty, thou didst live in the bo om of riches, thou wert amused by the sports of thy women, by their songs, sung to the sound of the guitar and of the drum; and now, thou lamentest, thou weepest, thou art consumed with grief; return to thy cities, poor prisoner.

“Where is thy court? where are thy young companions? where thy counsellors? Some, dragged far from their country, have suffered an ignominious death; others have been deprived of their sight; others, banished men, wander over the face of the earth. Thou criest, and none listen to thee, for the northern king keeps thee inclosed like a besieged city: cry out then, cease not to cry out; raise thy voice as a trumpet, that thy sons may hear thee, for the day approaches in which they will deliver thee, and thou shalt again behold thy native land.”1

To these expressions of love for the daughter of the ancient national chiefs, succeeds a malediction upon the cities, which, of choice or necessity, still stood out for the king of foreign race, and warlike exhortations to those of the other side, menaced with an attack of the royal troops.

“Woe to the traitors of Aquitaine! for the day of chastisement is at hand. Rochelle dreads that day; she doubles her walls and her moats; she surrounds herself on every side with the sea, and the sound of this great work is heard beyond the mountains. Flee before Richard, duke of Aquitaine, ye who inhabit that shore; for he will overthrow the proud, he will destroy the chariots and those who guide them; he will annihilate all, from the highest to the lowest, who refuse him admittance to Saintonge. Woe to those who seek aid from the king of the north! Woe to you, rich men of Rochelle, who confide in your riches! the day will come when there will be no escape for you, when flight will not save you; when the bramble, instead of gold, will fill your mansions; and when the nettle will grow on your walls.

“And thou, maritime citadel, whose bastions are high and strong, the sons of the stranger will come to thee; but soon they will all flee to their own country, in disorder and covered with shame. Fear not their threats, raise thy front boldly against the north; stand upon thy guard, place thy foot on thy entrenchments; call thy neighbours, that they may come in strength to thy aid; range in a circle around thee all who inhabit thy bosom and cultivate thy land, from the southern frontier to the gulf wherein the ocean foams.”1

The success of the royal cause in England soon allowed Henry II. to cross the Channel with his faithful Brabançons and a body of Welsh mercenaries, less disciplined than the Brabançons, but more impetuous, and disposed, from the very hatred they bore the king, to wage furious war upon his sons.2 These men, skilled in the art of military ambuscade and of partisan warfare among woods and marshes, were employed in Normandy to intercept the convoys and provisions of the French army, then besieging Rouen.3 They succeeded so well in this by dint of activity and address, that this great army, apprehending famine, suddenly raised the siege and withdrew. Its retreat gave king Henry the opportunity of assuming the offensive. He regained, inch by inch, all the territory that his enemies had occupied during his absence; and the French, once more weary of the enormous expenses they had so fruitlessly undergone, again informed Henry the Younger and his brother Geoffroy that they could no longer assist them, and that if they could not alone maintain the war against their father, they must be reconciled with him.1 The two princes, whose power was limited without foreign aid, were fain to obey. They allowed themselves to be conducted to an interview between the two kings, at which they made, perforce, diplomatic protestations of repentance and filial tenderness.

A truce was agreed upon, which would give the king of England time to go to Poitou, and force his son Richard to submit like the two others. The king of France swore that he would give Richard no more aid, and imposed the same oath on the two brothers, Henry and Geoffroy. Richard was indignant on learning that his brothers and his ally had concluded a truce from which he was excluded. But, incapable of resisting alone the forces of the king of England, he returned to him, implored his pardon, restored the towns he had fortified, and quitting Poitou, followed his father to the frontiers of Anjou and France, where a general congress or parliament was held to settle the peace.2 Here, under the form of a political treaty, was drawn up the act of reconciliation between the king of England and his three sons. Placing their hands in those of their father, they swore to him the oath of liege homage, the ordinary form of every compact of alliance between two men of unequal power, and so solemn in this age as to establish between the contracting parties ties reputed more inviolable than those of blood.3 The historians of the epoch are careful to observe that, if the sons of king Henry II. now declared themselves his men, and swore allegiance to him, it was to remove from his mind every suspicion as to the sincerity of their return.4

This reconciliation of the Angevin princes was a calamitous event for the various populations which had taken part in their quarrels. The three sons, in whose name they had revolted, kept their oath of homage by delivering up these populations to the vengeance of their father, and themselves undertaking to execute it.1 Richard, especially, more imperious and of a more rugged temperament than his brothers, inflicted all the injury he could on his former allies of Poitou; these, reduced to despair, maintained against him the national league at the head of which they had before placed him, and pressed him so closely that the king was obliged to send him powerful succours, and to go in person to his assistance. The excitement of the people of Aquitaine increased with the danger. From one end of that vast country to the other, a war broke out, more truly patriotic than the former, because it was against the whole family of the foreign princes; but for this very reason, the success was necessarily more doubtful, and the difficulties greater.2 During nearly two years the Angevin princes and the barons of Aquitaine fought battle after battle, from Limoges to the foot of the Pyrenees, at Taillebourg, at Angouleme, at Agen, at Dax, and at Bayonne. All the towns which had adopted the party of the king’s sons, were militarily occupied by Richard’s troops, and overwhelmed with taxes, in punishment of their revolt.3

Whether from policy or good feeling, Henry the Younger took no part in this odious and dishonourable war; he even maintained relations of friendship with many of the men who had supported him and his brothers. Thus he lost none of his popularity in the southern provinces, and this circumstance was, for the family of Henry II., a fresh source of discord, which the able and indefatigable Bertrand de Born laboured with all his energies to develop. He attached himself more than ever to the young king, over whom he resumed all the ascendancy of a man of strong mind and resolute determination. Out of this connexion arose a second league, formed against Richard by the viscounts of Ventadour, Limoges, and Turenne, the count of Perigord, the seigneurs de Montfort and de Gordon, and the burgesses of the country, under the auspices of Henry the Younger and the king of France.1 Consistently with his usual policy, this king entered into only vague engagements with the confederates, but Henry the Younger made them positive promises; and Bertrand de Born, the soul of the confederation, proclaimed it in a poem designed, says his biographer, to confirm his friends in their common resolution.2

Thus war recommenced in Poitou between Henry and earl Richard. But, at the very outset, Henry the Younger breaking his word, listened to propositions of accommodation with his brother, and, for a sum of money and an annual pension, consented to quit the country and desert the insurgents.3 Without thinking any more of them or their fate, he visited foreign courts, those of France, Provence, and Lombardy, spending the price of his treachery, and acquiring wherever he went high renown for magnificence and chivalry; conspicuous in warlike jousts, which were just coming into fashion, tourneying, resting, sleeping, solacing himself, as an ancient historian relates.4

In this way he passed more than two years, during which the barons of Poitou, Angoumois, and Perigord, who had confederated under his auspices, had to sustain a fierce war at the hands of the earl of Poitiers. Their towns and their castles were besieged, and their lands laid waste by fire.5 Among the towns attacked, Taillebourg was the last to surrender, and when all the barons had submitted to Richard, Bertrand de Born alone still resisted in his castle of Haute-Fort.6 Amidst the fatigues and anxieties attending this desperate struggle, he retained sufficient freedom of thought to compose verses on his own position, and satires on the cowardice of the prince who passed in amusements the days which his old friends were passing in war and in suffering.

“Since the lord Henry has no land, and seeks not to have any, let him be named the king of cowards.

“For cowardly is he who lives on the wages and wears the livery of another. The crowned king who takes the pay of another, resembles not the gallant knight of former days; since he has deceived the Poitevins, and lied to them, let him no longer hope to be loved by them.”1

Henry the Younger felt these reproaches when, satiated with the pleasure of being cited as a spendthrift and chevalereux, he again turned his attention to the more solid advantages of power and territorial wealth. He then returned to his father, and pleaded with him the cause of the people of Poitou, whom Richard was overwhelming, he said, with unjust vexations and tyrannical domination.2 He went so far as to censure the king for not protecting them as he ought, he who was their natural defender.3 He accompanied these complaints with personal demands, again asking for Normandy or some other territory, where he might live in a manner worthy of his rank, with his wife, and out of whose revenues he could pay the wages of his knights and sergeants. Henry II. at first firmly objected to this demand, and even constrained the young man to swear that for the future he would claim no more than one hundred Angevin livres a day for his expenses, and ten livres of the same money for his wife. But things did not long remain in this position; Henry the Younger renewed his complaints, and the king, now yielding, ordered his two other sons to swear to their eldest brother the oath of homage for the provinces of Poitou and Brittany. Geoffroy consented; but Richard refused point-blank, and, in indication of his firm intention to resist the order, placed all his towns and castles in a state of defence.4

Henry the Younger and Geoffroy, his vassal, then marched against him, with their father’s consent; and, on their entering Aquitaine, the country once more rose against Richard. The confederacy of the towns and barons was renewed, and the king of France declared himself the ally of the young king and of the Aquitans.1 Henry II., alarmed at the serious turn which this family quarrel thus suddenly assumed, recalled his two sons, but they disobeyed the order, and persisted in warring upon the third. Obliged to take a decisive part, unless he chose to witness the triumph of the independence of Poitou and of the ambitious aims of the king of France, he joined his forces to those of Richard, and went in person to besiege Limoges, which had opened its gates to young Henry and Geoffroy.2 Thus the domestic war recommenced under a new aspect. It was no longer the three sons leagued together against the father, but the eldest and the youngest fighting against the other son and the father.

The historians of the south, eye-witnesses of these events, seem to have comprehended the active part taken in them by the populations, whose country was their theatre, and the national interests involved in these rivalries which appeared wholly personal. The historians of the north, on the contrary, only view in them the unnatural war of the father against the sons, and of the brothers among themselves, under the influence of an evil destiny hanging over the race of Plantagenet, in expiation of some great crime. Several sinister tales as to the origin of this family passed from mouth to mouth. It was said that Eleanor of Aquitaine had, at the court of France, a love affair with Geoffroy of Anjou, her husband’s father; and that this same Geoffroy had married the daughter of Henry I. during the life of the emperor her husband; a circumstance which, in the opinion of the period, amounted to a kind of sacrilege.3 Lastly, it was rumoured of a former countess of Anjou, grandmother of the father of Henry II., that her husband having remarked with terror that she went rarely to church, and always left it before the mass, resolved to retain her forcibly, by four squires, during that celebration; but at the moment of the consecration, the countess, throwing off the mantle by which they held her, flew out at a window and was never after seen Richard of Poitiers, according to a contemporary, used to relate this adventure, and to observe: “Is it to be wondered at, that, coming from such a source, we live ill one with the other? What comes from the devil, must return to the devil!”1

A month after the renewal of hostilities, Henry the Younger, whether from apprehension of the results of the unequal struggle in which he had engaged against his father and the most powerful of his brothers, or from a revival of filial tenderness, once more abandoned the Poitevins. He went to the camp of Henry II., revealed to him all the secrets of the confederation formed against Richard, and intreated him to interpose as mediator between his brother and himself.2 His hand on the Gospel, he swore solemnly that never again would he separate from Henry, king of England, but would be faithful to him, as to his father and his lord. This sudden change of conduct was not imitated by Geoffroy, who, more pertinacious and more loyal towards the revolted Aquitans, remained with them and continued the war.3 Messengers then came to him from the old king, urging him to terminate a quarrel, which was advantageous only to the common enemies of his family. Among other envoys was a Norman priest, who, holding a cross in his hand, intreated earl Geoffroy to spare the blood of the Christians, and not to imitate the crime of Absalom. “What! thou wouldst have me relinquish my birthright?” said the young man. “God forbid, monseigneur,” answered the priest; “I seek nothing to your detriment.” “Thou dost not understand my words,” rejoined the earl of Brittany; “it is the destiny of our family not to love each other. That is our heritage, and none of us will ever renounce it.”4

Notwithstanding his reiterated treachery to the barons of Aquitaine, the young Henry, a man of wavering mind, and incapable of a firm decision, still maintained personal relations with several of the conspirators, and especially with Bertrand de Born. He undertook to play the part of mediator between them and his brother Richard, flattering himself with the chimerical hope of arranging the national quarrel at the same time with the family quarrel.1 To this end he made several advances to the chiefs of the league of Poitou, but he received from them nothing but haughty and hostile replies.2 As a last attempt, he proposed to them a conference at Limoges, offering to repair thither himself, with his father, and but a small train, to remove all distrust.3 The town of Limoges was at this time under siege by the king of England; it is not known whether the confederates formally consented to allow their enemy to enter, or whether the young man, eager to make himself of importance, promised more in their name than he was warranted in doing. However this may have been, when Henry II. arrived before the gates of the town, he found them closed, and he received from the ramparts a flight of arrows, one of which penetrated his doublet, and another wounded one of his knights who rode beside him. This affair passed as a mistake, and, after a fresh explanation with the insurgent chiefs, it was agreed that the king should freely enter Limoges, to confer with his son Geoffroy. They met in the great market-place; but during the interview, the Aquitans who formed the garrison of the castle, and who could not calmly witness the commencement of negotiations which would ruin all their projects of independence, shot at the old king, whom they recognised by his dress and the banner carried beside him; the bolt of a crossbow aimed at him from the ramparts of the citadel, pierced his horse’s ear. The tears came into his eyes; he had the arrow picked up, and presenting it to Geoffroy: “Say, my son,” he exclaimed, “what has thy unhappy father done to thee to deserve that thou should render him a mark for thy archers?”4

Whatever the faults of Geoffroy towards his father, he was not to blame in this matter; for the archers who had aimed at the king of England were not soldiers in his pay, but his independent allies. The northern writers reproach him for not having sought out and punished them; but he had no such authority over them, and since he had bound up his cause with their national hostility, he had, whether he would or no, to undergo all the consequences. Henry the Younger, piqued at finding his efforts defeated by the obstinacy of the Aquitans, declared them all incurable rebels, and that he would never make peace or truce with them, but would be faithful to his father at all times and in all places. In token of this submission, he gave his horse and arms into the king’s keeping, and remained several days with him, under every appearance of the warmest friendship.1

But by a sort of fatality in the life of king Henry’s eldest son, it was ever at the moment when he was making to one party the strongest protestations of devotion, that he was most immediately about to separate from it, and to engage with the opposite party. After having, in the words of an historian of the time, eaten at the same table with his father, and placed his hand in the same dish, he suddenly quitted him, leagued again with his adversaries, and proceeded to Le Dorat, a town on the frontiers of Poitou, which the insurgents had made their head-quarters. He ate with them at the same table, as he had done with the king, swore loyalty to them towards and against all, and a few days after abandoned them to return to the other camp. Fresh scenes of tenderness took place between the father and the son, and the latter thought he acquitted his conscience in intreating the king to be merciful to the rebels. He rashly promised, in their name, the surrender of the castle of Limoges, and announced that it would suffice to send messengers to the garrison to receive its oaths and hostages. But it was not so, and those who went on this mission from the king of England were nearly all put to death by the Aquitans. Others, who were sent at the same time to Geoffroy to negotiate with him, were attacked in his presence; two were killed, a third seriously wounded, and the fourth thrown into the river from the bridge.2 It was thus that the national spirit, severely, cruelly inflexible, mocked the hopes of the princes and their projects of reconciliation.

Shortly after these events, Henry II. received a message announcing to him that his eldest son, having fallen dangerously ill at Chateau-Martel, near Limoges, asked to see him.3 The king, whose mind was full of that which had just happened to his people, and of what had happened to himself in the two conferences at Limoges, suspected some snare on the part of the insurgents: he feared, says a contemporary author, the wickedness of these conspirators,1 and notwithstanding the assurances of the messenger, he did not go to Chateau-Martel. A second messenger soon came to inform him that his son Henry had died on the 11th of June, in his twenty-seventh year.2 The young man, in his last moments, had manifested great signs of contrition and repentance: he had insisted on being drawn from his bed by a cord, and placed on a heap of ashes.3 This unexpected loss occasioned the king great affliction, and augmented his anger against the Aquitans, to whose perfidy he attributed the feeling of timidity that had kept him away from his dying son.4 Geoffroy himself, touched with his father’s grief, returned to him, and abandoned his allies, who then found themselves alone in presence of the family whose dissensions had constituted their strength.5 The day after the funeral of Henry the Younger, the king of England vigorously attacked the town and fortress of Limoges by assault, and took them, with the castles of several of the confederates, which he completely demolished.6 He pursued Bertrand de Born with even greater inveteracy than all the others; “for he believed,” says an ancient narrative, “that Bertrand had been the cause of all the wars that the young king, his son, had made against him; and for this he came to Haute-Fort to take and destroy it.”7

The castle of Haute-Fort did not long hold out against all the king’s forces, united with those of his two sons, Richard and Geoffroy of Brittany. Forced to surrender at discretion, Bertrand de Born was led to his enemy’s tent, who, before pronouncing the sentence of a conqueror on the conquered, desired to enjoy, for a space, the pleasure of revenge, in treating with derision the man who had inspired him with fear, and who had boasted that he felt no fear on his own part. “Bertrand,” said he, “you who once said that you never needed more than half your sense, know that this is an occasion upon which the whole would do you no harm.” “My lord,” answered the man of the south, with that habitual assurance which the feeling of his intellectual superiority gave him, “it is true I said so, and I said the truth.” “And I,” rejoined the king, “think that you have lost your sense.” “Yes, sire,” answered Bertrand, gravely, “I lost it on the day when the valiant young king, your son, died; on that day I lost both my sense and my reason.” At the name of his son, which he did not expect to hear pronounced, the king of England burst into tears, and fainted. When he came to himself, he was changed; his projects of revenge had disappeared, and he now saw in the man before him only the former friend of the son whom he lamented. Instead of the bitter reproaches and the sentence of death which Bertrand might have expected: “Sire Bertrand, sire Bertrand,” he said to him, “well may you have lost your senses for my son; for he loved you more than he loved any man in the world; and I, for the love of him, restore to you your life, your possessions, and your castle. I give you my friendship and my favour, and I grant you five hundred silver marks for the damage you have sustained.”1

The misfortune which had struck the family of Henry II. reconciled not only the sons and the father, but also the father and the mother, a far more difficult thing, from the nature of the enmity existing between them.2 Common tradition accuses Eleanor of having poisoned one of her husband’s mistresses, the daughter of an Anglo-Norman baron, named Rosamonde or Rosemonde. A good understanding, however, was now effected between them, and the queen of England, after an imprisonment of ten years, was restored to liberty. In her presence the family peace was solemnly sworn and confirmed by writing and by oath, as an historian of the time expresses it, between king Henry and his sons, Richard, Geoffroy, and John, the latter of whom hitherto had been too young to take a part in his brothers’ intrigues.3 The continual affliction which the revolts of the others had occasioned the king, had led him to place the greatest affection upon John; and this preference itself had contributed to embitter the minds of the elder brothers, and to make the period of concord very brief.1 After a few months of union, the peace was again disturbed by the ambition of Geoffroy. He demanded the earldom of Anjou, in addition to his duchy of Brittany, and on the rejection of his application, passed into France, where, awaiting an occasion to recommence the war, he occupied himself with the amusements of the court.2 Thrown from his horse in a tournament, he was trodden under foot by the horses, and died of his wounds.3 After his death, it was earl Richard’s turn to unite in friendship with the king of France against the will of his father.4

The crown of France had just fallen to Philip, second of that name, a young man, who affected towards Richard still more friendship than his father, Louis VII., had manifested to Henry the Younger. “Every day,” says a contemporary historian, “they ate at the same table and from the same dish, and at night they slept in the same bed.” This vast friendship gave umbrage to the king of England, and much uneasiness as to the future. He sent repeated messages to France, summoning his son home; Richard regularly replied that he was coming, but he did not come. At length he departed, as if for his father’s court; but passing by Chinon, where a portion of the royal treasure was deposited, he carried off the greatest part of it, despite the resistance of the keepers.5 With this money he proceeded to Poitou, and fortified, garrisoned, and provisioned several castles. Recent events had substituted for the former effervescence of the Aquitans an entire apathy, and the hatred which Richard had excited by his want of faith and his cruelties was still too vivid to allow men, however discontented with the Angevin government, to repose confidence in him. He remained therefore alone, and, unable to commence operations without the concurrence of the barons of the country, he made up his mind to return to his father, and implore his pardon, rather from necessity than from goodwill. The old king, who had gone through every solemn form of reconciliation between himself and his sons, essayed, on this occasion, to bind Richard by an oath on the Gospel, which he made him take in presence of a great assemblage of clergy and laymen.1

The late attempt of the earl of Poitiers remaining without effect, produced no rupture of peace between the kings of France and England. The two kings had long since agreed to hold a conference, at which permanently to regulate those points of contending interests which might, if not settled, produce renewed misunderstanding. They met, in January 1187, between Trie and Gisors, at the Great Elm already referred to. The Christian conquerors of Syria and Palestine were at this time undergoing great reverses; Jerusalem and the wood of the true cross had just fallen once more into the power of the Mohammedans, under the command of Salah-Eddin, popularly called Saladin.2 The loss of this precious relic renewed that public enthusiasm for the crusades which had somewhat cooled in the past half century. The pope overwhelmed the princes of Christendom with messages, urging them to make peace among themselves and combined war upon the infidels. The cardinals promised to renounce riches and pleasures, to receive no present, and not to mount a horse until the Holy Land should be reconquered; they promised, further, to be the first to take the cross, and to march at the head of the new pilgrims, begging alms.3 Preachers and missionaries repaired to all the courts, to all the assemblies of the great and the rich; several came to the interview of the kings of France and England; and, among others, William, archbishop of Tyre, one of the most celebrated men of the time for learning and eloquence.

This prelate had the ability to induce the two kings, who could not agree about their own affairs, to concur in making war on the Saracens, setting aside the while their own personal differences.4 They confederated together as brothers-in-arms, in what was termed the cause of God, and, in token of their engagement, received from the hands of the archbishops a cross of cloth, which they attached to their attire; that of the king of France was red, that of the king of England white.5 In receiving them, they signed themselves on the forehead, the mouth, and the breast, and swore not to lay aside the cross of the Lord on land or sea, in country or in town, until they returned from the great passage.1 Many lords of both kingdoms took the same oath, influenced by the example of the kings, by the desire to obtain the remission of all their sins, by the constant inculcation of the subject from every pulpit, and even by the popular songs which in every street glorified all who should fight in the Holy Land against the Paynim foe.2 One of these, composed by a priest of Orleans, reached as far as England, and there excited, says a contemporary writer, many men to take up the cross;3 although written in a learned language, this poem bears a sufficient impress of the ideas and style of the epoch to merit translation:—

“The wood of the cross is the standard that the army will follow, it has never given way; it has gone onward by the power of the Holy Spirit.4

“Let us go to Tyre, ’tis the meeting-place of the brave: ’tis there should go they who, in European courts, so arduously labour, without good fruit, to acquire the renown of chivalry.5

“The wood of the cross is the standard that the army will follow.

“But, for this war, there needs robust combatants, and not effeminate men; they who are too assiduous as to their persons gain not God by prayers.6

“The wood of the cross, etc.

“He who has no money, if he be faithful, sincere faith will suffice for him: the body of the Lord is provision enough on the way for him who defends the cross.7

“The wood of the cross, etc.

“Christ, in giving his body to the executioner, lent to the sinner; sinner, if thou wilt not die for Him who died for thee, thou returnest not that which God has lent thee.8

“The wood of the cross, etc.

“Listen, then, to my counsel; take up the cross, and say, in making thy vow, I recommend myself to Him who died for me, who gave for me His body and His life.1

“The wood of the cross is the standard that the army will follow.”

The king of England, wearing the white cross on his shoulder, proceeded to Mans, where he assembled his council to discuss the means of defraying the expenses of the holy war in which he had just engaged.2 It was decided that, in all the countries subject to the Angevin sway, every man should be made to pay the tenth part of his yearly revenue and of his personal property; but, from this universal decimation, were excepted, the arms, horses, and vestments of the knights, the horses, books, vestments, and ornaments of the priests, and jewels and precious stones, both of laymen and of priests. It was also ordered that the priests, knights, and sergeants-at-arms, who should take up the cross, should pay nothing; but that the burgesses and peasants who should join the army, without the express consent of their lords, should not the less pay their tithe.3

The subsidy, decreed at Mans for the new crusade, was levied without much violence in Anjou, Normandy, and Aquitaine. The only minatory measure employed in these various countries, where the authority of Henry II. was modified by traditions of national administration, was a sentence of excommunication, pronounced by the archbishops and bishops, against all who should not faithfully pay their quota to the persons charged with collecting the tax.4 The collection was made in each parish by a commission formed of the officiating priest, a templar, a hospitaller, a royal officer, a clerk of the king’s chapel, and an officer and chaplain of the seigneur of the place. The composition of this council, in which men of the locality had a place, offered to the inhabitants some guarantee of impartiality and justice. Moreover, if a dispute arose as to the proportion of the sum demanded, four or six notables of the parish were to be assembled to declare, upon oath, the value of the personalty of the appellant, whom their testimony condemned or absolved. These precautions, employed, even in the middle ages, in countries where the public administration was not properly a government of conquest, were probably practised also in England with reference to the earls, barons, knights, bishops, in a word, to all the men of Norman race; but they were wholly omitted with regard to the Saxon burgesses, and replaced by a more expeditious and entirely different process, which deserves mention.1

King Henry crossed the Channel, and while his officers, lay and clerical, were collecting, in the terms of his ordinances, the tax from the landholders, he had a list drawn up of the richest citizens in all the towns, whom he summoned to personally appear before him at a fixed day and place. The honour of being admitted into the presence of the descendant of the Conqueror was in this way granted to two hundred citizens of London, to an hundred of York, and to a proportionate number of the inhabitants of other cities and towns. The letters of summons admitted no excuse or delay. The citizens did not all meet on the same day; for king Henry liked great assemblies of the English no better than his ancestors liked them. They were received in parties, on different days and in different places. On their introduction to the royal presence, the sum required from them was signified to them by an interpreter, “and thus,” says a contemporary, “the king took from them the tenth of all their property, according to the estimate of the notables who were acquainted with their means. The refractory he imprisoned until they had paid the last farthing. In like manner he acted towards the Jews of England; which procured him incalculable sums.”2 This assimilation of the men of English race with the Jews affords the exact estimate of their political state at the commencement of the second century after the conquest. It should be observed also that the convocation of the inhabitants of the towns by the king, far from being a sign of civil liberty, was, on the contrary, in this and in many similar cases, a mark of servitude and a means of vexation applied especially to men of inferior condition.

Notwithstanding the treaty and the oath of the two kings, it was to anything but the recovery of Jerusalem that the money raised from the Saxons and Jews of England, and the contributions of the nobles of that country and of the continental provinces, were applied. The enemy of old did not sleep, say the historians of the time, and his malice soon rekindled the flame of war between those who had just sworn not to bear arms against Christians until their return from the Holy Land.1 The occasion of this rupture was a difference of interests between Richard of Poitiers and the count of Toulouse, Raymond de Saint Gilles. The Aquitans and the Poitevins, who had regained strength and energy since their last defeat, availed themselves of the confusion occasioned by this quarrel to form new plots and new leagues against the Anglo-Norman power. On his side, the king of France, pursuant to the policy of his ancestors, could not abstain from siding with the party opposed to the Normans, and from attacking in Berri the fortresses belonging to the king of England.2 The war soon extended along the whole frontier of the countries governed by the two kings. On both sides many towns were taken and retaken, farms burned, vineyards devastated; at length, the rival powers, weary of fruitlessly damaging each other, resolved to treat for peace. The kings Henry and Philip met under the Great Elm, but they separated without having come to an accommodation upon any point. The youngest of them, irritated at the failure of the conference, vented his anger upon the tree under which it had been held, and had it cut down, swearing by the saints of France, his favourite oath, that no parliament should ever again be held on that spot.3

During this war, Richard, against whom, ostensibly at least, king Philip had commenced it, manifested a tendency to go over to this monarch, a circumstance that greatly alarmed his father. He went so far as a proposal to refer to the judgment of the barons of France, the quarrel between him and count Raymond de Saint Gilles. Henry II. would not consent to this, and distrusting his son, refused to treat for peace, except in a personal interview with Philip.4 At this conference, which took place near Bonmoulins, in Normandy, the king of France made propositions in which Richard’s interests were so closely bound up with his own, that they seemed the result of some secret compact previously concluded between them.

At one of the truces formerly sworn between Henry II. and Louis, the father of Philip, it had been agreed that Richard should marry Alix or Aliz, daughter of the king of France, and receive with her, as a marriage portion, the county of Vexin, hitherto a constant subject of contest between the two crowns. As a guarantee for the faithful execution of this treaty, Aliz, still a child, was placed in the hands of the king of England, that he might have the custody of her, until she was old enough to marry.1 But war having soon afterwards again broken out, and the sons of the king of England having leagued with the king of France, the marriage was deferred, Henry still retaining the young girl who had been confided to him. He affected only to keep her as an hostage; but it was generally believed that political reasons did not influence him in detaining her a captive in an English castle, but that he had conceived a violent passion for her, which he even satisfied, say several historians, after the death of his mistress, Rosamond. Some writers assure us that during the wars against his sons he had resolved to take Aliz for his wife, repudiating Eleanor, so as to obtain for himself the aid which the king of France gave to his adversaries. But it was in vain that he solicited a divorce of the court of Rome, and, to obtain it, loaded the pontifical legates with presents.2

In the conferences he had previously held with the king of England, Philip had repeatedly demanded the solemnization of the marriage of his sister Aliz with the earl of Poitiers, and this was the first condition that he put forward at the congress of Bonmoulins. He further demanded that his future brother-in-law should be forthwith declared heir to all the states of king Henry, and in this character receive the oath of homage of the barons of England and of the continent. But Henry II. would not consent to this, apprehending a recurrence of the vexations that had formerly resulted from the premature elevation of his eldest son. On this refusal, Richard, furious with passion, again did that which he had already so often done: in the very presence of his father, turning to the king of France, and placing his joined hands in those of that monarch, he declared himself his vassal, and did homage to him for the duchies of Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine, and for the earldoms of Poitou, Anjou, and Maine. In return for this oath of fealty and homage, Philip gave him in fief the towns of Chateauroux and Issoudun.1

This usurpation of all Henry’s rights on the continent was the hardest blow that Richard had yet struck at his father; it was the commencement of a new domestic quarrel, as violent as that first dispute which, as we have seen, arose out of the attempts at usurpation made by Henry the Younger. The discontented populations appreciated the importance for them of the occasion, and were at once agitated with a movement of revolt. The barons, who for more than two years had remained quiet, the men of Poitou, late the sworn enemies of Richard, declared for him the moment they thought him at mortal enmity with the king.2 Henry II. came to Saumur to make his preparations for war; meanwhile his barons and knights quitted him in crowds to follow his son, whose party, supported by the king of France and by all the southern provinces, seemed likely to be the most powerful. The king of England had with him the majority of the Normans, of the Angevins, and of those who feared the sentences of excommunication, the aid of which the pope’s legate lent him. But while the priests of Anjou were pronouncing these ecclesiastical sentences in their churches, the Bretons, entering in arms, devastated the country, and attacked the king’s fortresses and castles. Overwhelmed by the ill fortune which had so long pursued him, almost without cessation, Henry fell ill with grief, and taking no military measures, left his defence wholly to the legates and archbishops. They multiplied their decrees of excommunication and interdict, and sent message after message to Richard and to the king of France, in turns conciliatory and menacing. These had little influence on the mind of Richard, but more on that of Philip, ever as disposed for peace as for war, provided he could gain as much by the one as by the other.

The king of France consented to hold a conference with the other king, which Richard was fain to attend, and whither came the cardinal John of Anagni, the pope’s legate, and the archbishops of Reims, Bourges, Rouen, and Canterbury. Philip proposed to the king of England much the same conditions as at the interview of Bonmoulins—namely, the marriage of Aliz with Richard, and the nomination of the latter as heir to all his father’s territories, under the guarantee of the oath of homage of all the barons of England and the continent. But Henry II., who had now, even more than at the former conference, reason to distrust Richard, again rejected these demands, and proposed to marry Aliz to John, his other son, who hitherto had always shown himself obedient and affectionate towards him. He said that if this marriage were adopted, he should have no objection to declare John heir to all his continental provinces. This proposition involved Richard’s ruin; and either from a scruple of honour, or from a want of confidence in Henry’s youngest son, the king of France refused to sanction it and to abandon his ally. Cardinal John then interposed, and declared that, pursuant to his express mission, he should lay France under interdict. “Lord legate,” said Philip, “pronounce thy decree, if thou so please; I fear it not. The Roman church has no right to proceed against France, either by interdict or otherwise, when her king thinks fit to arm against rebellious vassals in vindication of his own injuries and the honour of his crown; I see thou hast touched the king of England’s sterlings.” Richard, whose interests were far more deeply involved, did not content himself with rallying the pontifical envoy; he drew his sword, and would have proceeded to some act of violence, had not those present restrained him.1

The old king, compelled to fight, assembled his army; but his best soldiers had abandoned him to join his son. In a few months he lost the towns of Mans and Tours, with all their territory; and while the king of France was attacking him in Anjou by the northern frontiers, the Bretons advanced by the west, and the Poitevins by the south.2 Without any means of defence, and without authority, enfeebled in body and in mind, he resolved to seek peace in assenting to all the other party’s demands.3 The conference between the two kings (for Richard did not attend, awaiting elsewhere the result of the negotiations) was held in a plain between Tours and Azay-sur-Cher. Philip’s demands were, that the king of England should expressly acknowledge himself his liegeman, and place himself at his mercy and discretion;1 that Aliz should be confided to the care of five persons, chosen by Richard, until the return of the latter from the crusades, for which he was to depart with the king of France at mid-Lent;2 that the king of England should renounce all right of suzerainty over the towns of Berri, formerly dependent on the dukes of Aquitaine, and that he should pay to the king of France twenty thousand silver marks, as ransom for that monarch’s conquests;3 that all those who had attached themselves to the party of the son against the father should remain vassals of the son, and not of the father, unless of their own motion they returned to the latter;4 lastly, that the king should receive his son into his grace by the kiss of peace, and should sincerely and in good faith abjure all rancour and all animosity against him.5

The old king had no means or hope of obtaining gentler conditions; he armed himself, therefore, with patience, as well as he could, and conversed with king Philip, listening to him with a docile air, as one man receiving the law from another. Both were on horseback in the middle of the plain, and whilst they conversed together, says a contemporary, it suddenly thundered, though the sky was cloudless, and a fierce flash of lightning fell between them, without doing them any harm.6 They immediately separated, both greatly terrified, and, after a short interval, rejoined each other; but a second clap of thunder, louder and more terrible than the first, burst forth almost at the same moment. The king of England, whom the distressed position to which he was reduced, mental grief and physical malady, rendered more susceptible of excited emotions, perhaps connecting this natural incident with his own destiny, was so agitated, that he abandoned the reins of his horse, fell forward on his saddle, and would have fallen to the ground, had not his attendants supported him.1 The conference was suspended, and as Henry II. was too ill to attend a second interview, the articles of peace, drawn up in writing, were taken to his chamber for his formal consent.2

The messengers of the French king found him in bed. They read to him the treaty of peace, article by article. When they came to that which related to the persons, secretly or openly, of Richard’s party, the king asked their names, that he might know how many men there were whose fealty he had to renounce.3 The first person named to him was John, his youngest son. On hearing this name pronounced, the king, with an almost convulsive movement, rose on his seat, and, casting fearful glances around with his haggard eyes, exclaimed: “Is it true, indeed, that John, my heart, my favourite son, he whom I cherished more than all the rest; he, my love for whom has brought upon me all my misfortunes, is it indeed true that he has abandoned me?” He was answered that it was so. “Well, then,” he murmured, falling back on his bed, and turning his face to the wall, “let all things go as they will; I care no longer for myself or for the world.” A few moments after, Richard approached the bed, and demanded the kiss of peace from his father, in execution of the treaty. The king gave it him with apparent calmness; but, as Richard withdrew, he heard his father mutter to himself: “If God would only spare my life till I were revenged on thee!” On his arrival at the French camp, the earl of Poitiers repeated this to king Philip and his courtiers, who all shouted with laughter, and jested upon the fine peace thus concluded between father and son.4

The king of England, feeling his malady increase, had himself removed to Chinon, where, in a few days, he was reduced to the point of death. In his last moments he was heard to utter these broken sentences, in reference to his misfortunes and to the conduct of his sons: “Shame!” he exclaimed; “shame to a conquered king! Cursed be the day on which I was born, and cursed of God be the sons whom I leave behind me.”1 The bishops and clergy around him sought by every effort to induce him to recal this malediction on his children, but he persisted in it to his last breath.2 After his death, his body was treated by his servants as that of William the Conqueror had been; all abandoned him, after having stripped him of his clothes and seized upon every valuable in the room and in the house.3 King Henry had desired to be buried at Fontevrault, a celebrated nunnery, a few leagues south of Chinon; scarcely could men be found to envelop the body in a shroud, or horses to convey it.4 The corpse was already deposited in the great church of the abbey, awaiting the day of sepulture, when earl Richard learned, from public report, his father’s death.5 He came to the church, and found the king lying in a coffin, his face uncovered, and still exhibiting, by the contraction of his features, the signs of an agonized death. This sight occasioned the earl of Poitiers an involuntary shudder. He knelt and prayed before the altar; but he rose in a few moments, after the interval of a paternoster, say the historians of the period, and quitted the church, never to return to it. The same contemporary writers assure us that, from the moment Richard entered the church until he left it, the blood incessantly flowed in abundance from the nostrils of the deceased. Next day the funeral took place. The officiating priests wished to decorate the corpse with some insignia of royalty; but the keepers of the treasury of Chinon would supply none, and after infinite intreaties only sent an old sceptre and a ring of no value. In default of a crown, the head was encircled with a sort of diadem, made with some gold fringe from a woman’s dress; and thus singularly attired did Henry, son of Geoffroy Plantagenest, king of England, duke of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Brittany, earl of Anjou and Maine, lord of Tours and Amboise, descend to his last abode.6

A contemporary author views in the misfortunes of Henry II. a sign of Divine vengeance upon the Normans, the tyrants of invaded England. He connects this miserable death with those of William Rufus, of the sons of Henry I., of the brothers of Henry II., and of his two eldest sons, who all died a violent death in the flower of their age: “Such,” said he, “was the punishment of their unlawful reign.”1 Without adopting this superstitious view, it is certain that the calamities of king Henry were a result of the events which placed the southern provinces of Gaul under his domination. He had rejoiced infinitely in this augmentation of power; he had given his sons the territories of others in appanage, glorying to see his family reign over many nations of different race and of different manners, and to reunite, under the same sceptre, that which nature had divided. But nature did not lose her rights; and at the first movement made by the peoples to regain their independence, division entered the family of the foreign king, who saw his own children serve his own subjects as instruments against him, and who, whirled to and fro, up to his last hour, by domestic feuds, experienced on his death-bed the bitterest feeling a man can carry with him to the tomb, that of dying by a parricide.

[1 ] In the Greek and Latin languages, Iierne, Ierna, Invernia, Ouernia, Ibernia. The Saxons spelt it Iraland.

[2 ] Quid Hiberniam memorem, contempto pelagi discrimine, pene totam cum grege philosophorum ad littora nostra migrantem? quorum quisquis peritior est, ultio sibi indicit exilium. (Epist. Herici monachi ad Carolum calvum, apud Script. rer. Gallic et Francic., vii. 563.)

[3 ] See in Le Catholique, xiv. No. 42, a dissertation by the Baron d’Eckstein on the origin of the Irish nation.

[1 ] Every Irish tribe or clan had a family name common to all its members.

[2 ] Rex Hiberniæ, maximus rex; in Irish, ardriagh.

[3 ] Montana colloquia. (Harris, Hibernica.)

[4 ] Ib. Spenser’s State of Ireland.

[1 ] There were not even tithes; the Irish clergy subsisted on voluntary gifts and offerings.

[2 ] Willelm. Malmesb. Vitæ pontific.

[3 ] Girald. Cambrens. Topographia Hiberniæ; Camden, Anglica, Hibernica, &c. p. 742.

[1 ] Matth. Paris, i. 95.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 121.

[3 ] Tanquam de pulvere elevatus sit, ut sederet in medio principum. (Ib. p. 120.)

[1 ] Rymer. Fædera. vol. i. pars. i. p. 19.

[1 ] Armatura Gallica. (Girald. Cambrensis, De illaudibilibus Walliæ.)

[2 ] Nudi et mermes ad bella procedunt. (Giraldus Cambrensis, Topog. Hiberniæ, p. 738.). Inermes corpore pugnant. (Joh. Bromton, p. 1075.)

[1 ] Girald. Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata; Camden, Anglica, &c., p. 760. Hemingford, Chron., apud Rer. Angl. Script., (Gale) ii. 498.

[2 ] Spe lucri profusioris. (Hemingford, loc. sup. cit.)

[3 ] Girald. Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnatas, p. 761.

[4 ] Id. p. 762.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ] Id. Topographia Hiberniæ. Spenser, State of Ireland. These long tresses were called in Irish, glibs.

[2 ] Hemingford, loc. sup. cit.

[3 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata, p. 762.

[4 ] Hemingford, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ]Poure, according to the old French orthography. Poer, or Power, is still the name of a noble Irish family.

[2 ] Et quia nondum habebat proprium principem, nec pro voto pastorem.. (Hemingford, ut sup.)

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ]Ib.—Giraldns Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata, p. 769.

[1 ] Hemingford, loc. cit.

[2 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata.

[3 ] Hemingford, loc. cit.

[4 ] Fama de magnis semper majora vulgante. (Girald. Camb., ut sup.) Hemingford, loc. cit.

[1 ] Iidem, ib.

[2 ] Iidem, ib.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Matthew Paris, i. 126.

[3 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, ut sup. p. 776.

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1070.

[1 ] Matth. Paris, ubi sup.

[2 ] Giraldus Camb., loc. sup. cit.

[3 ] Roger de Hoveden, p. 582.

[4 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, loc. sup. cit.

[5 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1070.

[6 ]Ib.

[1 ] Girald. Cambrensis, loc. sup. cit.

[2 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron. ut sup. col. 1419.

[1 ] Pratum proditorum. (Vita B Thomæ quadrip., lib. iii. cap. i. p. 107.)

[2 ] Epist. Ludovici regis ad Alexandrum III. papam, apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi. 466.

[3 ] Epist. Theobaldi ad Alexand. III. papam, ib. p. 469.

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ] Epist. Willelm. Senonens. archiep. ad Alex. III. papam, ib. p. 467 and 475.

[1 ] Epist. Alexandrum III. papæ ad Rothomag. archiep., ib. p. 409.

[2 ] Epist. Rotrodi Rothomag. archiep., ib. p. 477.

[3 ] Epist. Anonymi ad Richardum Pictav., archidiac., ib. 478, 479.

[4 ] Epist. Guill. de Trahinac ad Henricum; ib. p. 471.

[1 ] Epist. Arnulphi lexov. episcop. ad Alexand. III. papam, ib. p. 469.

[2 ]Ib.

[1 ] For this letter and other documents connected with the history of Beket, see Appendix, Nos. III.—XVII.

[2 ] Epist. Henrici regis ad Alexand III. papam, ib. xvi. 470.

[3 ] Epist. Richardi abbatis ad Henricum, ib. p. 477.

[4 ] Epist. Anonymi ad Richardum Pictav. archidiac., ib. p. 479.

[5 ] Radulf. de Diceto, Imag. Histor., apud Hist. Angl. Script., (Selden) col. 557.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 528. Giraldus Camb., Hibernia expugnata, p. 778.

[2 ] Epist. Anonymi, ut sup. p. 479.

[3 ] Script rer. Gallic. et Francic., xiii. 749.

[4 ] Epist. Anonymi, p. 484.

[1 ] Alberti et Theodwini cardinal. epist., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi. 486.

[2 ] Epist. Anonymi, ubi sup.

[3 ]Ib. p. 485.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 529.

[5 ] Epist. Anonymi, p. 486.

[6 ] Alberti et Theodwini ep., ut sup.

[1 ] Epist. Henrici Angliæ regis ad Bartholomeum exonensis episcop., ib. p. 487.

[2 ] Matthew Paris, i. 127.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Radulf de Diceto, p. 127.

[1 ] Radulf de Diceto, col. 560.

[2 ] Girald. Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata.

[1 ] Rymer, Fædera, (London, 1816) vol. i. pars. i. p. 45. Joh. Bromton, col. 1071.

[2 ] Matthew Paris, i. 125.

[3 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1064.

[1 ] Matthew Paris, i. 128.

[2 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1371.

[3 ] Script rer. Gallic. et Francic., xiii. 749. Matth. Paris, i. 126.

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ]Ib.—Guillelm. Neubrig., p. 197.

[1 ] Robert. de Monte, ubi sup. p. 316.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Benedict. Petroburg., ib. p. 150.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 531.

[5 ] Benedict. Petrob., ut sup.

[6 ]Ib.—Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[7 ] Benedict. Petrob., loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Gaufredus Vosiensis, Chron., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francie., xii. 443.

[2 ] Formulæ homagii et ligantiæ; Ducange, Glossar. ad Script. mediæ et infimæ lat.

[3 ] Gaufredus, loco sup. cit.

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ] Radulf de Diceto, col. 561.

[6 ] Benedict. Petrob., loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., De reb. Anglic., p. 197.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 533.

[3 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xiii. passim.

[1 ] Henrici, filii Henrici II. ad Alexandrum papam epist., ib. xvi. 644.

[1 ]Ib. p. 646—648.

[1 ] Gislebertus Montensis Hannon., Chron., apud Script rer. Gallic. et Francic., xiii. 565.

[2 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi. 644, in notis.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1424.

[1 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1424.

[2 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi. 749.

[3 ] Gervas. Cantuar., loc sup. cit.

[4 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata, p. 782.

[5 ] Matth. Paris, i. 128.

[6 ] Roger. de Hoveden, ut sup. p. 534.

[7 ] Ne ipsi exaltent filios suos supra id quod debent. (Ib.)

[1 ] See ante, Book VI.

[2 ] Henrici II. ad Alexandrum III. papam epist., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi. 650.

[3 ] Rotrodi ad Alienoram epist., ib. p. 629.

[4 ] Chron. S. Albini, ib. xii. 483.

[5 ]Ib.—Roger. de Hoveden, p. 534.

[6 ] Benedict. Petroburg., ut sup. p. 155. Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit. Coterelli, rutarii; route, in old French, signified band.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 204.

[2 ] Radulf. de Diceto, col. 582.

[3 ] Ulmus erat visa gratissima, gratior usu...(Gull. Britonis, Philippid., lib. iii., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvii. 148.)—Roger. de Hoveden, p. 645.

[4 ] Benedict. Petroburg., p. 156.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ]Ib.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 536.

[2 ]Ib.—Joh. Bromton, col. 1095.

[3 ] Matth. Paris, i. 128.

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ] Joh. Bromton. col. 1093.

[1 ]Ib.—Chron. S. Albini, p. 483.

[2 ] Capitellum, præsidum majus. (Rad. de Diceto, col. 575.)

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Benedict. Petroburg., p. 158.

[5 ] Chron. S. Albini, p. 484.

[6 ] ..et Braibancenos. (Benedict Petroburg., p. 159.)

[7 ] Vita B. Thomæ quadrip., lib. iv. cap. v. p. 150. Matth. Paris, i. 129, 130.

[1 ] Robert. de Monte, p. 318.

[2 ] Matth. Paris, i. 130.

[3 ] Gervas Cantuar., Chron., col. 1427.

[4 ] Matth. Paris., loc. sup. cit. Robert. de Monte, p. 318.

[5 ] Matth. Paris, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Disciplinales percussiones singulas, velut quasdam secundas quadragenas apostolicas, immo regias annonas et usque tunc inauditas, accepit. Consuetudines etiam illas, quæ inter martyrem et ipsum fuerunt totius dissensionis materia—abdicavit malas et iniquas. (Vita B. Thomæ quadrip., ut sup.)

[2 ] En populo phaleras! (Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xvi.)

[1 ] Gervas. Cantuar., Chron., col. 1427.

[2 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia expugnata, p. 782.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Chron. Albini. p. 483.

[1 ]Ib. p. 565.

[2 ] Acheri Spicilegium, iii. 565.

[3 ] Chron. Albini, loc. sup. cit.

[4 ] Gaufredus Vosiensis, Chron., ubi sup. p. 216.

[5 ] Addenda Chronic. Richardi Pictav., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xii. 419.

[6 ]Ib.

[7 ] Raynouard, Choix des poesies originales des Troubandours, v. 76.

[1 ] E s’il avian patz ni treva, ades se penava e s’percassava ab sos sirventes de desfaz patz. (Id. ib.)

[2 ] Id. ib.

[3 ] Seingner era, totas ves quan se volia, del rei Enric d’Englaterra et del fils de lui; mas totz temps volia que ill aguesson guerra ensems, lo paire et lo fils, e’l fraire l’un ab l’autre. (Ib.)

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 534.

[2 ] Every poetical composition among the Provençals which treated of any other subject than love, was called Sirventès, in old French Servantois, as being of a class inferior to amorous or chevaleresque poetry.

[3 ] Raynouard, ut sup. passim.

[4 ]Trobaire, in the oblique cases trobador, trouveur, inventor. The population of Outre-Loire, according to its system of grammar and pronunciation, used the word trouvère in every case.

[1 ] Addenda Chron. Richardi Pictav., ubi sup. p. 420.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 540.

[3 ] Benedict. Petroburg., p. 160.

[1 ]Ib.—Matth. Paris, i. 131.

[2 ] Benedict. Petroburg., loc. sup. cit.

[3 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 227.

[4 ] Radulf. de Diceto, p. 585.

[1 ] Et multa gravamina eis intulit. (Benedict. Petroburg., p. 163.) Castella vero—multorum—passim eversa sunt. (Matth. Paris, i. 131.) Ricardus—castella Pictaviæ—in nihilum redegit..similiter Gaufridus, comes Britanniæ, castella Britanniæ sulvertit; et mala multa intulit hominibus patriæ illius, qui contra patrem suum tenuerunt tempore guerræ (Benedict. Petrob., p. 163.)

[2 ] Benedict. Petroburg., p. 164.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 560—582. Benedict. Petroburg., loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Raynouard, ut sup. v. 83.

[2 ] Id. ib.

[3 ] Id. ib. p. 85. Matth. Paris, i. 136.

[4 ] Si sojournava, torniava, e dormia, e solasava. (Id. ib. p. 86)

[5 ]Ib. p. 87.—Matth. Paris, loc. sup. cit. Radulf. de Diceto, col. 603.

[6 ] Radulf. de Diceto, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Raynouard, ubi sup. iv. 148.

[2 ] De origine comit. Andegav., apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xii. 538.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 616. Matt. Paris, i. 141.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit., p. 618.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1044, 1045.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Joh. Bromt., loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 619.

[2 ] Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xiii.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit.

[4 ]Ib.—Chron. Anonymi Laudunensis, apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xviii. 704.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoveden, loc. sup. cit.

[2 ] Id. p. 620.

[3 ]Ib.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 278.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 620—623.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Guill. Neubrig., loc. sup. cit.

[5 ]Ib. p. 279.

[6 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 621.

[7 ] Raynouard, ut sup. v. 86.

[1 ] Id. ib.

[2 ] Annales Waverleienses, apud rerum Anglic. Script. (Gale), ii. 161.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 623.

[1 ] Benedict. Petroburg., p. 150.

[2 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 279.

[3 ]Ib.—Roger. de Hoveden, p. 631.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 634.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ]Ib.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ] Fleury, Hist. Ecclesiastique, xv. 498.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 641.

[5 ]Ib.

[1 ] Script. rer. Gallicarum et Francic., xii. 556, in notâ a, ad calc. pag.

[2 ] Roger de Hoved., p. 641.

[3 ]Ib. 639.

[1 ] Crucem tollas, et vovendo dicas: Illi me commendo, qui . . (Ib. 639.)

[2 ]Ib.—Script. rer. Gallicarum et Francic., xvi. 163.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 641.

[4 ]Ib. 642.

[1 ]Ib. 641, 642.

[2 ]Ib.

[1 ] Guill. Neubrig., p. 333.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 644.

[3 ]Ib. 645.—Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., De rege Philippo Augusto; passim.

[4 ] Roger. de Hoved., 646, 649.

[1 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1151.

[2 ]Ib.

[1 ] Joh. Bromton, col. 1151.

[2 ]Ib. 652.

[1 ] Matt. Paris, i. 149.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoveden, p. 653.

[3 ]Ib.

[1 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, De instructione principis, apud Script. rer. Gallic. et Francic., xviii. 154. Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit.

[2 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 653.

[3 ]Ib.

[4 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, loc. sup. cit.

[5 ]Ib.

[6 ] Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit.

[1 ] Roger. de Hoved., p. 654.

[2 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, loc. sup. cit.

[3 ] Roger. de Hoved., loc. sup. cit.

[4 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, loc. sup. cit.

[1 ]Ib.—Roger. de Hoved., p. 654.

[2 ]Ib.

[3 ]Ib.—Corpus nudum absque amictu quolibet. (Giraldus Cambrensis, ut sup. p. 157.)

[4 ]Ib.

[5 ] Giraldus Cambrensis, loco sup. cit.

[6 ]Ib.—Chron. anonymi Laudunensis, ubi sup. p. 707.

[1 ] Propter quod pauci eorum . . fine laudabili decesserunt, non dimidiantes dies suos miserabiliter interierunt . . nec naturaliter, nec legitime, sed quasi per hysteron proteron, in insula occupata regnaverunt. (Girald. Camb., loc. sup. cit.)