Chapter 31
Part 31
The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace, a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his later work, the _Roman de Rou_ or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings. It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood, this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and eloquent protest in the preface to his _Historia Anglicana_.[2189] Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the _Brut_ (as Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects, but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought, Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface of the ground, Henry--so the monks afterwards declared--guided by what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin, hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree, was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]
[2189] Will. Newb. proœm. (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 11–18).
[2190] “Hanc [sc. Britanniam] sub jure tuo, sub pace tuâ, teneamus; Jus tibi, pax nobis, totaque terra simul”--
ends Henry’s letter to Arthur in the _Draco Norm._, l. ii. c. 22, vv. 1279, 1280 (Howlett, _Will. Newb._, vol. ii. p. 707). See above, p. 57, note 2{226}. The whole story is extremely curious; but I feel too doubtful about the character of the source from which it comes to venture upon any discussion of its possible significance.
[2191] “Sicut ab historico cantore Britone audierat antiquo,” Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), p. 192. “Ex gestis Britonum et eorum cantoribus historicis,” _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 9 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 49). These pyramids were there in William of Malmesbury’s day, when one of them was already threatening to fall “præ nimiâ vetustate.” They were covered with “antiquitatis nonnulla spectacula, quæ plane possunt legi licet non plane possunt intelligi.” These were pictures of bishops and kings, with old English names written under them; Arthur, however, is not in the list. William thought that the persons represented were buried underneath. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 21 (Hardy, pp. 34, 35).
[2192] See the various accounts of the invention and translation of Arthur in Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. cc. 9, 10 (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 48–51), and _De Instr. Princ._ (Angl. Christ. Soc.), pp. 191, 192; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 36; Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 48, and Ann. Margam, a. 1190 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. pp. 21, 22). Gerald seems to have been present himself. He tells us the “translation” was made by the king’s order; and indeed his account, taken by itself, would leave an impression that the whole thing occurred during King Henry’s lifetime; but R. Coggeshall and Rog. Wend. both distinctly give the date, 1191; the Margam Annals place it only a year earlier; and in both those years the reigning king was far away.
It is easy to see what was, at any rate in Henry’s mind, the political significance of this transaction. When Arthur could be thus publicly exhibited as dead and buried, it was because the long-cherished dreams of Celtic national independence, of which his name had been the symbol and the watchword, were dead and buried too. But the scene thus enacted at Glastonbury in 1191 had also another meaning of which perhaps none of the actors in it could be fully aware. It marked the final “passing of Arthur” out of the sphere of politics into a wholly new sphere of pure intellect and philosophical romance. If Geoffrey of Monmouth corrupted the sources of British history, he atoned for his crime by opening to the poets of the generation succeeding his own a fount of inspiration which is hardly exhausted yet. Their imagination seized upon the romantic side of these old-world legends, and gradually wove them into a poetic cycle which went on developing all through the later middle ages not in England alone, but over the whole of civilized Europe. But in the hands of these more highly-cultured singers the wild products of bardic fancy took a new colour and a new meaning. As usual, it was the Church who first breathed into the hitherto soulless body the breath of spiritual and intellectual life. The earliest of the Arthurian romances, as we possess them now, is a wholly new creation of the religious mysticism of the twelfth century, the story of the Holy Grail--
“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord Drank at the last sad supper with His own. This, from the blessed land of Aromat-- After the day of darkness, when the dead Went wandering o’er Moriah--the good saint, Arimathæan Joseph, journeying brought To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. And there awhile it bode; and if a man Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once, By faith, of all his ills. But then the times Grew to such evil that the holy cup Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear’d.”
As one by one the older legends of Arthur and Merlin, the later stories of Lancelot and Tristan and Gawaine, were moulded into literary form, a link to bind them all together was found in the “quest of the Grail,” vowed by the whole company of Arthur’s knights assembled at the Table Round, achieved only by one, the Galahad whose pure figure has gleamed upon all after-time, as it flashed first upon the corrupt court of the Angevins, the mirror of ideal Christian chivalry.
The greater part--certainly the noblest part--of this vast fabric of romance seems to have been woven by the genius of one man.[2193] Every side of the intellectual movement which throughout the latter half of the twelfth century was working a revolution in English thought and life is reflected in Walter Map. Born on the marches of England and Wales, probably in the early years of the civil war, he studied at Paris under Gerard la Pucelle, and came home again, while Thomas Becket was still chancellor, to occupy some post at court, doubtless that of chaplain to the king. He came of a family which had already done good service to the Crown; but once in personal contact with Henry himself, Walter can have needed no passport to the royal favour save his own versatile genius. At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet, an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most varied capacities--as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179; while in the intervals of these missions he was in close and constant attendance upon the king himself. In addition to his post in the royal household he held several ecclesiastical preferments--a canonry at S. Paul’s, the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, and the precentorship of Lincoln, which he resigned in 1196 to become archdeacon of Oxford.[2194] By that time his literary work was probably for the most part done. The only book now extant which actually bears his name, the treatise _De Nugis Curialium_--“Courtiers’ Triflings”--is a fruit of the busy years spent in attendance upon King Henry from 1182 to 1189. By its title and origin it recalls the _Polycraticus_; and the difference between the two books marks the change which had come over the tone of educated English thought in the quarter of a century that lay between them. Walter Map was, in all likelihood, as ripe a scholar as John of Salisbury; but there is nothing scholastic in his treatment of his subject. His book is far less elaborate in form and methodical in arrangement than John’s; it has, in fact, no visible arrangement at all; it is a collection of miscellaneous notes--scraps of folklore from the Welsh marches, tales brought home by pilgrims and crusaders from Byzantium or Jerusalem, stories from the classics, sayings from the Fathers, fragments of information gleaned from the by-ways of history, personal anecdotes new and old, sketches of contemporary life and manners in the world and the Church, court-news, court-gossip, court-scandal--all, as it seems, picked out at random from the writer’s private commonplace-book and flashed in picturesque confusion before the eyes of the literary public of his day. Yet the purpose of it all is as earnest as that of the _Polycraticus_, though veiled under a shew of carelessness. Walter appeals to a wider circle than John; he writes not for a chosen band of kindred souls, but for all sorts and conditions of men who know Latin enough to read him, for courtiers and men of the world who have neither time nor patience to go through a course of philosophical reasonings and exhortations, but who may be caught at unawares by “truth embodied in a tale,” and are the more likely to be caught by it the more unexpected the shape in which it comes. When Walter stops to point the moral of his stories--for a moral they always have--he does it with the utmost tact; more often he leaves his readers to find the moral for themselves. “I am your huntsman; I bring you the game; dress the dishes for yourselves!” he tells them.[2195] But he strikes down the quarry--if we may venture to borrow his own metaphor--with a far more unsparing hand than his predecessor. King Henry himself, indeed, never was spared in his own court; but it is in the satirist’s attitude towards the Church that we find the most significant sign of the times. The grave tone of righteous indignation, the shame and grief of the Theobaldine reformers at the decay of ecclesiastical purity, has given place to bitter mockery and scathing sarcasm. Where John lifts up his hands in deprecation of Heaven’s wrath against its unworthy ministers, Walter points at them the finger of scorn. John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas--perhaps we should rather say of Theobald--and now sees no way of dealing with the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of public criticism and popular hatred. The mightiest creation of his genius is the “Bishop Goliath” whose gigantic figure embodies all the vice and all the crime which were bringing disgrace upon the clerical order in his day. The “Apocalypse” and “Confession” of this imaginary prelate have been ascribed to Walter Map by a constant tradition whose truth it is impossible to doubt, although it rests upon no direct contemporary authority.[2196] The satire is in fact so daring, so bitter, and withal so appallingly true to life, that the author may well have deemed it wiser to conceal his name. He is the anonymous spokesman of a new criticism which has not yet fully discovered its own power; of a public opinion which is no longer held in check by external authority, but which is beginning to be itself an independent force; which dares to sling its pebble at abuses that have defied king and Pope, and will dare one day to sling it at king and Pope themselves. That day, however, was still far distant. Walter’s ideal of perfection in Church and state is one with John of Salisbury’s, only it is set forth in a different shape. The moral lesson which lies at the heart of the Arthurian romances comes home to us the more forcibly as we remember that the hand which drew Sir Galahad was the same hand which drew Bishop Goliath.
[2193] On these Arthur-romances and Walter Map’s share in them see Sir F. Madden’s introduction to his edition of _Sir Gawayne_ (Bannatyne Club), and that of M. Paulin Paris to the first volume of his _Manuscrits Français de la Bibliothèque du Roi_, summarized in Mr. H. Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i. pp. 562–569.
[2194] For the life of Walter Map see Mr. Wright’s _Biog. Britt. Litt._, vol. ii. pp. 295–298, and his preface to _De Nug. Cur._ (Camden Soc.) pp. i.–viii.
[2195] “Venator vester sum, feras vobis affero, fercula faciatis.” W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. ii. c. 32 (Wright, p. 106).
[2196] They have been edited, under the title of _Latin Poems ascribed to Walter Mapes_, by Mr. T. Wright for the Camden Society.
Side by side with Walter Map, in the foremost rank of this new school of critics and satirists, stands his probably younger contemporary, Gerald de Barri. Gerald was born in 1147 in the castle of Manorbeer, some three miles from Pembroke. He has left us a vivid picture of his childhood’s home--its ramparts and towers crowning a lofty hill-top exposed to all the winds that swept over the stormy Irish Sea, whirled up the creek that ran up from the Bristol Channel to westward of the castle, and ruffled with ceaseless wavelets the surface of the little stream that flowed through the sandy valley on its eastern side;--its splendid fishponds at the northern foot of the hill, the enclosed tract of garden-ground beyond, and at the back of all, the protecting belt of woodland whose precipitous paths and lofty nut-trees were perhaps alike attractive to Gerald and his brothers in their boyish days.[2197] His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer, represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales--a child of his daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke; and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life and in every page of his writings. On both sides he came of a race of fighting-men, and he was certainly not the least pugnacious of his family. The countless battles of his life were, however, to be fought with other weapons than the sword which had won Manorbeer for his paternal ancestors, and which was soon to win for some of his mother’s nearest kinsmen--for her half-brother Robert Fitz-Stephen, her nephews Meiler and Robert and Raymond, her own brother Maurice Fitz-Gerald--a wider heritage and a more lasting fame beyond the Irish Sea. Gerald’s bent towards the clerical profession shewed itself in his earliest years; as a child he was known at Manorbeer as “the little bishop.” At three different periods before he reached the age of twenty-five, he spent some years in study at Paris, where he also lectured upon rhetoric with considerable success. He finally came home in 1172, just as King Henry, having twice passed through South Wales on his way to and from Ireland, was planning out a new scheme for the government of the principality. One part of this scheme was, as we have seen, the delegation of the supreme authority to the young Welsh prince Rees Ap-Griffith. Another part was the revival of the policy begun by the Norman kings of managing the Welsh people through the instrumentality of the Church, and, to this intent, filling the ranks of the clergy in Wales with as many foreign priests as possible. Experience had, however, shewn that men of pure English or Norman blood were not always the fittest instruments for such a purpose. A year after Gerald’s birth a compromise had been tried in the appointment to the bishopric of S. David’s of a prelate who was half Norman and half Welsh:--David, son of Gerald of Pembroke and Nest, brother of Maurice Fitz-Gerald and of Angareth the wife of William de Barri. When Angareth’s son Gerald came home from Paris in 1172, therefore, the influence of her family was at its height. The foremost man in South Wales was her cousin Rees Ap-Griffith; the second was her brother the bishop of S. David’s. It was only natural that Gerald, sharing with his uncle the qualification of mingled Welsh and Norman blood, and already known as a distinguished scholar of the most famous seat of learning in Europe, should be at once selected for employment in the business of reforming his native land. Gerald himself was eager for the work; he had no difficulty in obtaining from Archbishop Richard a commission to act as his legate and representative in the diocese of S. David’s; thus armed, he began a vigorous campaign against the evil doings of clergy and laity alike--forcing the people to pay their tithes of wool and cheese, a duty which the Welsh were always very unwilling to fulfil; compelling the priests to abandon the lax system of discipline which they had inherited from the ancient British Church, and had contrived to retain in spite of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald; excommunicating the sheriff and deposing the archdeacon of Brecknock themselves when they dared to resist his authority, and receiving in 1175, as the reward of his zeal, the appointment to the vacated archdeaconry.
[2197] Gir. Cambr. _Itin. Kambr._, l. i. c. 12 (Dimock, vol. vi. p. 92).
Early in the next year his uncle, Bishop David, died. The young archdeacon had just issued victorious from a sharp struggle in behalf of the see against the bishop of S. Asaph’s, who had attempted to encroach upon its rights; the darling wish of his heart was to see it restored to its ancient metropolitical rank; and he had managed to kindle in his fellow-canons a spark of the same ambition. They saw in him the only man capable of bringing their desire to fulfilment, and made a bold attempt to obtain him for their bishop. By this time, however, both King Henry and Archbishop Richard had learned enough of Gerald’s character to perceive that, however useful he might be as an archdeacon in Wales, he was not at all the man to suit their purposes as bishop of any Welsh see, least of all as bishop of S. David’s. Henry, with a burst of fury, summarily refused the nomination of the chapter; a long wrangle ended in the appointment of Peter de Leia, prior of the Cluniac house of Much Wenlock, to the vacant see. Peter, being a foreigner, a monk, and a man of no great intellectual capacity, was utterly unable either to rule his turbulent Welsh flock or to cope with his self-willed and quick-witted Welsh canons; Gerald undertook to teach him his duties, but found him such an unsatisfactory pupil that he soon gave up the task in disgust, and again betook himself to Paris. There he remained, studying civil and canon law, and lecturing at the same time with great success, till the summer of 1180, when he returned to England, was received by the chapter of Canterbury at a great banquet on Trinity Sunday, and thence proceeded into Wales. He found Bishop Peter at his wits’ end, and the diocese in utter confusion, which he at once set himself to remedy after his own fashion. Thus matters went on till 1184, when Henry on his last hurried visit to England found time to intervene once more in the troubled affairs of South Wales. He called a council on the border, summoned Gerald to meet him there, and employed him to arrange the final submission of his cousin Rees to the English Crown; and then he dexterously removed the over-zealous archdeacon from a sphere where he was likely henceforth to be more dangerous than useful, by making him one of his own chaplains, and sending him next year to Ireland in attendance upon John. John came back in September; Gerald lingered till the following Easter. Two books were the fruit of this visit: a _Topography of Ireland_, published in 1187, and dedicated to the king; and the _Conquest of Ireland_, which came out under the patronage of Count Richard of Poitou in 1188. Towards the close of that year, when Archbishop Baldwin went to preach the Crusade in Wales, Gerald accompanied him half as interpreter, half as guide. An _Itinerary of Wales_ forms the record of this expedition, which was followed by a journey over sea, still in the company of the archbishop, with whom Gerald seems to have remained in more or less close attendance upon Henry’s movements until the final catastrophe in July 1189. He then offered his services to Richard, who sent him home once more to his old task of helping to keep order in South Wales. For a while he found favour with all parties;[2198] William of Longchamp offered him the bishopric of Bangor, John, in his day of power after William’s fall, offered him that of Landaff. Gerald however refused them both, as he had already refused two Irish sees; he cared in fact for no preferment short of the metropolitan chair of S. David. Shut out of Paris by the war between Richard and Philip Augustus, he withdrew to Lincoln and resumed his theological studies under its chancellor William, whom he had known in his earlier college days on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, till in the summer of 1198 he was roused to action once more by the death of Bishop Peter de Leia. The fight began at once; the chapter of S. David’s nominated Gerald for the vacant see; the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, set his face against the nomination; they defied his authority and appealed to king and Pope; Gerald himself fought his own battle and that of the see with indomitable courage, at home and abroad, for nearly four years; but the canons were less resolute than their bishop-elect, he found himself at last fighting alone against the world, and in 1202 he gave up the struggle and withdrew to spend the rest of his life in the quiet pursuit of letters.[2199]
[2198] Gerald himself goes so far as to say, with respect to Richard’s appointment of William of Longchamp as justiciar, “cui archidiaconum adjunxit” (_De Rebus a se gestis_, dist. ii. c. 21, Brewer, vol. i. p. 84). We find however no hint of such a thing elsewhere.
[2199] Gerald’s life may be studied in his own book, _De Rebus a se gestis_, published in the first volume of the Rolls edition of his works; and, more conveniently, in Mr. Brewer’s preface to the same volume.
For nearly thirty years it had been the aim of Gerald’s highest ambition to be the S. Thomas of his native land. He had struggled and suffered for the privileges of S. David’s in the same spirit in which Thomas had struggled and suffered for those of Canterbury, and it is by no means unlikely that had the occasion ever arisen, he would have been found ready to follow his model even unto death.[2200] But, unlike Thomas, he knew when to yield; and instead of dying for a lost cause, was content to live for posterity. Both men have had their fitting reward. Gerald the Welshman--“Giraldus Cambrensis”--still lives in his writings under the title won for him by his ardent patriotism; he lives however for us not as the champion of Welsh ecclesiastical independence, but as what he has been called by a writer of our own day--“the father of our popular literature.”[2201] Gerald’s first essay in authorship was made at the age of twenty; he was still busy with his pen when past his seventieth year;[2202] and all through the intervening half-century, every spare moment of his active, restless career was devoted to literary composition. His last years were spent in revising and embellishing the hasty productions of these earlier and briefer intervals of leisure. Even in their more finished shape, however, they still bear the impress of their origin. They breathe in all its fulness a spirit of which we catch the first faint indications in William of Malmesbury, and which may be described in one word as the spirit of modern journalism. Gerald’s wide range of subjects is only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats them. Whatever he touches--history, archæology, geography, natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day, the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and of the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin empire--is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine-article. His first important work, the _Topography of Ireland_, is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special correspondent in our own day might send from some newly-colonized island in the Pacific to satisfy or to whet the curiosity of his readers at home. The book made no small stir in the contemporary world of letters. Sober, old-fashioned scholars stood aghast at this daring Welshman’s disregard of all classical traditions and literary conventionalities, at the colloquialisms of his style, and still more at the audacity of his stories.[2203] For Gerald, determined to entertain his readers no matter by what means, and secure in their universal ignorance of the country which he professed to be describing, had raked together all the marvellous and horrible tales that could be found in Irish traditionary lore or devised by the inventive genius of his Irish informants; and the more frightful and impossible these stories were, the more greedily did he seize upon them and publish them. Irish scholars, almost from that day to this, have justly declaimed against Gerald for his atrocious libels upon their country and its people; yet the fact remains that, in the words of one of his latest editors, “to his industry we are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of Ireland during the whole of the middle ages.”[2204] His treatise _De Expugnatione Hiberniæ_ is by far the most complete and authentic account which we possess of the English or Norman conquest of Ireland. The _Topographia_, despite its glaring faults, has a special merit of its own; its author “must” (as says the writer already quoted) “take rank with the first who descried the value, and, in some respects, the proper limits of descriptive geography.”[2205]
[2200] That Thomas was Gerald’s chosen model may be seen all through his writings. He harps upon the martyr’s life and death somewhat as Thomas himself harped upon the life of Anselm.
[2201] Green, _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. p. 172.
[2202] Gir. Cambr. _De Jure Menev. Eccles._, dist. vii. (Dimock, vol. iii. pp. 372, 373).
[2203] Gir. Cambr. _Expugn. Hibern._, introit. (Dimock, vol. v. p. 209).
[2204] Brewer, _Gir. Cambr._, vol. i. pref. p. xl.
[2205] _Ibid._
A far better specimen of his work in this direction is his _Welsh Itinerary_, followed some three or four years later by a _Description of Wales_.[2206] Here Gerald is on familiar and congenial ground, dealing with a subject which he thoroughly knows and understands, describing a country which he ardently loves and a people with whom, although by no means blind or indulgent to their faults, he is yet heartily in sympathy, because he is one of themselves. In these treatises therefore we see him at his very best, both as a writer and as a man. In his own opinion the best of all his works was the _Gemma Ecclesiastica_,[2207] or _Jewel of the Church_, a handbook of instructions on the moral and religious duties of the priesthood, compiled for the clergy of his own archdeaconry of Brecknock. To modern readers it is interesting only for the glimpse which it affords of the social, moral and intellectual condition of the South-Welsh clergy in his day. In his _Mirror of the Church_[2208] the general state of religious society and ecclesiastical discipline, at home and abroad, is reflected as unsparingly as in the satires of Walter Map. The remainder of Gerald’s extant works are of the most miscellaneous character--a half-finished autobiography, a book of _Invectives_ against his enemies political and ecclesiastical, a collection of letters, poems and speeches, a treatise on the _Rights of the Church of S. David’s_, some Lives of contemporary bishops, a tract nominally _On the Education of Princes_, but really occupied for the most part with a bitter attack upon the characters of Henry II. and his sons.[2209] All of them are, more or less, polemical pamphlets, coloured throughout by the violent personal antipathies of the writer,[2210] but valuable for the countless side-lights which they cast upon the social life of the period. As we read their bold language, we can scarcely wonder at Archbishop Hubert’s relentless determination to put down their author by every means in his power. But though Gerald the bishop-elect of S. David’s was no match for the primate of all England, Gerald the pamphleteer wielded a force against which the religious authority of the metropolitan and the hostility of the older race of scholars were both alike powerless. He and his colleagues in the new school of literature had at their back the whole strength of the class to which they belonged, a class of men who were rapidly taking the place of the clergy as leaders of the intellectual life and thought of the nation. When old-fashioned critics lifted up their protest against Gerald’s _Irish Topography_, he boldly carried the book down to Oxford, “where the most learned and famous English clerks were then to be found,” and read it out publicly to as many as chose to come and hear it. “And as there were three distinctions or divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town; on the next day all the doctors of the different faculties, and such of their pupils as were of fame and note; on the third day the rest of the scholars, with the knights, townsmen and many burgesses.”[2211] If some of the elder teachers shook their heads, it mattered little to Gerald; their murmurs were lost in the applause of a younger generation which hailed him as one of its own most distinguished representatives.
[2206] Dimock, vol. vi.
[2207] Brewer, vol. ii.
[2208] _Speculum Ecclesiæ_ (Brewer, vol. iv.).
[2209] Gerald’s works have all been edited for the Rolls series by Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock, except the _Vitæ Sex Episcoporum_, which are in Wharton’s _Anglia Sacra_, vol. ii., and _De Instructione Principum_, which has been published by the Anglia Christiana Society.
[2210] It is only fair to note that Gerald at the close of his life published a little book of _Retractations_, printed in first volume of his works (ed. Brewer).
[2211] Gir. Cambr. _De Rebus a se gestis_, l. ii. c. 16 (Brewer, vol. i. pp. 72, 73). I have availed myself of Mr. Brewer’s translation of the passage, in his preface to the same volume, p. xlvii.
The spirit which breathes through the pages of Gerald and Walter is the spirit of the rising universities. The word “university” indeed, as applied to the great seats of learning in the twelfth century, is somewhat of an anachronism; the earliest use of it in the modern sense, in reference to Oxford, occurs under Henry III.;[2212] and the University of Paris appears by that name for the first time in 1215,[2213] the year of our own Great Charter. But although the title was not yet in use, the institution now represented by it was one of the most important creations of the age. The school of Bologna sprang into life under the impulse given by Irnerius, a teacher who opened lectures upon the Roman civil law in 1113.[2214] Nearly forty years later, when Gratian had published his famous book on the Decretals, a school of canon law was instituted in the same city by Pope Eugene III.; and in 1158 the body of teachers who formed what we call the University won a charter of privileges from the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa.[2215] We have already, in the course of our story, had more than one glimpse of the great school of arts and theology which was growing up during the same period in Paris. There, where the study of divinity had long found a congenial home under the shadow of the cathedral church, William of Champeaux in 1109--the year of S. Anselm’s death--opened on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève a school of logic which in a few years became the most frequented in Europe. Under his successors, Abelard and Peter Lombard (the latter of whom was made bishop of Paris in 1159), the schools of Paris became the centre of the intellectual life of Christendom.[2216] Teachers and scholars from every nation met on equal terms, as fellow-citizens of a new and world-wide commonwealth of learning, on the slopes of the “Mount,” and went forth again to carry into the most distant lands the instruction which they had acquired. There a Wiltshire lad could begin a lifelong intimacy with a youth from Champagne;--could pass from the lectures of Abelard to those of a master who, though disguised under the title of “Robert of Melun,” was in reality a fellow-countryman of his own; could enter the _quadrivium_ under the guidance of a German teacher, make acquaintance with Aristotle by the help of another learned Englishman, and complete his theological studies, it may be, under the same Robert Pulein whom we saw lecturing at Oxford some twelve or thirteen years before.[2217] There a scholar from the Welsh marches could sit at the feet of the English master Gerard La Pucelle,[2218] and another from the depths of Pembroke could give lectures on rhetoric and could study theology with William of Blois, who in after-days came at the call of the Burgundian S. Hugh to undertake the direction of a school at Lincoln.[2219] There Ralf de Diceto was a fellow-student with Arnulf of Lisieux;[2220] there, in all likelihood, John of Salisbury met Nicolas Breakspear and Thomas Becket. Thence, we cannot doubt, came through some of these wandering scholars the impulse which called the schools of Oxford into being. The first token of their existence is the appearance of Robert Pulein in 1133. From that time forth the intellectual history of Oxford is again blank till the coming of Vacarius in 1149; and it is not till the reign of Henry II. has all but closed that we begin to discern any lasting result from the visits of these two teachers. Then, however, the words of Gerald would alone suffice to shew that the University was to all intents and purposes full-grown. It had its different “faculties” of teachers, its scholars of various grades; and the little city in the meadows by the Isis, famous already in ecclesiastical legend and in political and military history, had by this time won the character which was henceforth to be its highest and most abiding glory, as the resort of all “the most learned and renowned clerks in England.”
[2212] Anstey, _Munimenta Academica_, vol. i. introd. p. xxxiv.
[2213] Mullinger, _Univ. Cambridge_, p. 71 (from Savigny, _Gesch. des Röm. Rechts_, c. xxi. sec. 127).
[2214] _Ib._ pp. 36, 37, 72.
[2215] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 73.
[2216] _Ib._ pp. 75–77.
[2217] See above, vol. i. pp. 480–483.
[2218] See above, p. 449.
[2219] _Ib._ pp. 453, 456.
[2220] Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 16 (Giles, pp. 100, 101).
On a site less favoured by nature, Oxford’s future rival was more slowly growing up. A lift of slightly higher ground above the left bank of the river Grant--better known to us now as the Cam--on the southern margin of what was then and for five hundred years afterwards a vast tract of flood-drowned fen stretching northward as far as the Wash, there stood at the close of the seventh century--long before Oxford makes its first appearance in history--a “little waste chester”[2221] representing what had once been the Roman city of Camboritum. At the coming of the Normans the place was known as Grantebridge, and contained some three or four hundred houses, twenty-seven of which were pulled down by the Conqueror’s orders to make room for the erection of a castle.[2222] It may be that here, as at Lincoln, the inhabitants thus expelled went to make for themselves a new home beyond the river; and a church of S. Benet which still survives, and whose tower might pass for a twin-sister of Robert D’Oilly’s tower of S. Michael’s at Oxford, may have been the nucleus of a new town which sprang up half a mile to the south-east of the old one, on the right bank of the Cam. Around this new town there gathered in the course of the following century a fringe of religious foundations. The “round church” of the Holy Sepulchre, clearly a work of the time of Henry I., was probably built by some crusader whose imagination had been fired by the sight of its prototype at Jerusalem. A Benedictine nunnery, part of whose beautiful church now serves as the chapel of Jesus College, was established under the invocation of S. Radegund early in the reign of Stephen; an hospital dedicated to S. John the Evangelist was founded at some time between 1133 and 1169 under the patronage of Bishop Nigel of Ely. This hospital, like most institutions of the kind, may have been served by canons regular of the order of S. Augustine. Some years before this, however, the Augustinians had made a more important settlement in the same neighbourhood. As early as 1092 Picot the sheriff of Cambridgeshire had founded within the older town on the left bank of the river a church of S. Giles, to be served by four regular canons. In 1112 this little college was removed to Barnwell, some two miles to the north-eastward, on the opposite side of the river, where it grew into a flourishing Austin priory. Wherever there were Austin canons a school was sure to spring up ere long; so, too, we cannot doubt, it was at Cambridge. Whether the seeds of learning were first sown in the cloisters of S. John’s or of Barnwell, or under the shadow of that old S. Benet’s which seems to have been the original University church[2223]--who it was that played here the part which had been played at Oxford by Robert Pulein--we know not; but we do know that by the middle of the following century the old Grantebridge had sunk into a mere suburb of the new town beyond the river, and the existence of the schools of Cambridge had become an established fact.[2224]
[2221] Bæda, _Hist. Eccles._, l. iv. c. 19.
[2222] Domesday, vol. i. p. 189.
[2223] See Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, p. 299, note 3; and Willis and Clark, _Archit. Hist. Cambr._, vol. i. p. 276 and note 3.
[2224] On the rise of Cambridge--town and university--see Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 332–334. The schools were not formally recognized as an “University” till 1318; _ib._ p. 145. For S. Radegund’s see Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. iv. pp. 215, 216; for Barnwell, _ib._ vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 83–87; for S. John’s Hospital, _ib._ pt. ii. p. 755. The present S. John’s College stands on the site of the hospital.
The student-life of the twelfth century--whether it were the life of scholar or of teacher--had nothing either of the ease or the dignity which we associate with the college life of to-day. Colleges in the modern sense there were indeed none. Students of all ranks and ages, from boys of ten or twelve years to men in full priestly orders, lodged as they could in a sort of dames’-houses or hostels scattered up and down the streets and lanes of the city. The schools were entirely unendowed; there was no University chest, no common fund, no pecuniary aid of any kind for either scholars or teachers. The sole support of both was, at first, the power under whose sheltering wings the school had grown up--the Church. Every book, even, had to be either bought out of their own private purses or borrowed from the library of some religious establishment. We may perhaps gather some idea of what this latter resource was likely to furnish in the great educational centres from a catalogue which has been preserved to us of the library attached to Lincoln minster, at the time when the Lincoln school of theology was at the height of its fame under Gerald’s friend William of Blois and the saintly bishop Hugh. Five-and-thirty years before Hugh’s appointment to the see, the church of Lincoln possessed, in addition to the necessary service-books which were under the care of the treasurer, some thirty or forty books in the chancellor’s keeping. Among these we find, besides a number of Psalters, works of the Latin Fathers, Epistles, Gospels, and a complete Bible in two volumes, the Canons, Statutes and Decretals of the Popes;--the Decretals edited by Ivo of Chartres;--the works of Vergil: a copy of the military treatise of Vegetius, bound up with the Roman History of Eutropius, “which volume Master Gerard gave in exchange for the Consolations of Boëthius, which he lost”;--Priscian’s Grammar:--a “Mappa Mundi”: and a _Book of the Foundation of Lincoln Minster_, with a collection of its charters. Of nine books presented by Bishop Robert de Chesney, who died in 1166, the most noticeable were the works of Josephus and of Eusebius, and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard. Somewhat later, one Warin of Hibaldstow presented to the chapter a “book of Aristotle”--doubtless a Latin version of his treatise on logic or on natural philosophy--and seven volumes, whose contents are not stated, were given by Master “Radulphus Niger” or Ralf the Black, known to us as one of the minor chroniclers of King Henry’s later years. A copy of Gratian’s great book of Decretals was presented about the same time by an archdeacon of Leicester; Gerald de Barri, probably during his residence at Lincoln at the close of Richard’s reign, added another law-book called _Summula super Decreta_, a copy of S. Anselm’s treatise _Cur Deus Homo_, and three of his own works, the _Topographia Hiberniæ_, the _Life of Bishop Remigius_, and the _Gemma Sacerdotalis_ or _Ecclesiastica_; and the list closes with another copy of the _Sentences_, acquired seemingly in the early years of the following century.[2225]
[2225] See the Catalogues of Lincoln cathedral library in the twelfth century, in _Gir. Cambr. Opp._, vol. vii. (Dimock and Freeman), App. C., pp. 165–171.
The head of the scholastic body was the chancellor, who was an officer of the diocesan bishop--in the case of Oxford, the bishop of Lincoln. From him those who had reached a certain degree of proficiency in the schools received their license to become teachers in their turn; and it was an established rule that all who had attained the rank of Master or Doctor should devote themselves for a certain time to the work of instructing others. They gave their lectures how and where they could, in cloister or church-porch, or in their own wretched lodgings, their pupils sitting literally at their feet, huddled all together on the bare ground; their living depended solely on their school-fees, and these were often received with one hand only to be paid away again with the other, for many an ardent young teacher of logic or rhetoric was, like John of Salisbury and Gerald de Barri, at one and the same time giving lectures in these arts to less advanced scholars and pursuing his own studies under some great doctor of theology. The course of study was much the same everywhere. From the fifth century downwards it had consisted of two divisions, _trivium_ and _quadrivium_. Under the former head were comprised Grammar, defined by an early teacher as the art of “writing and reading learnedly, understanding and judging skilfully;”[2226] Dialectics, including logic and metaphysics; and Rhetoric, by which were meant the rules and figures of the art, chiefly derived from Cicero. The Quadrivium included Geometry, not so much the science now known by that name as what we call geography; Arithmetic, which in the middle ages meant the science of mystical numbers; Music, in other words metre and harmony; and Astronomy, of course on the Ptolemaic system, although as early as the fifth century a theory had been put forth which is said to have given in after-days the clue to Copernicus.[2227] There was a separate faculty of Theology, and another of Law. Between these different faculties there seems to have been a good deal of jealousy. The highest authorities of the Western Church, while encouraging by every means in their power the study of the canon law, set their faces steadily against the civil law of imperial Rome; the “religious” were over and over again forbidden to have anything to do with it: and on the continent the two branches of the legal profession were followed by different persons. As, however, the procedure of the canon law was founded upon that of the Theodosian code, the English clerical lawyers in Stephen’s time and in Henry’s early years found their account in combining the two studies; by degrees both together passed out of the hands of the clergy into those of a new class of lay lawyers; and in later days, while on the continent the canon law fell into neglect with its exclusively clerical professors, in England it was preserved by being linked with the civil law under the care of lay _doctores utriusque juris_.[2228]
[2226] “Docte scribere legereque, erudite intelligere probareque.” Martianus Capella, quoted by Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24, 25.
[2227] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 24–26.
[2228] _Ib._ pp. 37–39.
Theology had, however, a yet more formidable rival in the schools of logic. The text-book commonly used in these schools was a Latin translation, made by Boëthius in the sixth century, of part of Aristotle’s treatise upon logic. Early in the twelfth century the natural philosophy of Aristotle was in some measure rendered accessible to western students through translations made by travelled scholars such as Adelard of Bath from Arabic versions which they had picked up in the schools of Salerno or of the remoter East. Of the “Ethics” nothing was known save a few fragments imbedded in the works of Latin writers, until a hundred years later, when they found their way back to Europe, probably in the train of the returning crusaders, and certainly in a very strange shape--that of a Latin translation from a Hebrew version of what was, after all, nothing more than an Arabic commentary founded upon a Syriac version of the original Greek text.[2229] Garbled as it was, however, this new Aristotelian lore revolutionized the schools of western Christendom by laying open to them wholly new fields of criticism and speculation. The spirit of free inquiry in which Adelard had begun to deal with physical science invaded every region of intellectual thought and knowledge, while the spread of legal studies helped to the invention of new methods of argument and disputation. In vain did Peter Lombard, in the famous book which gained for him his title of “Master of the Sentences,” strive to stem the rising tide and counterwork the influence of the rationalizing dialecticians by applying to the purposes of theology the methods of their own favourite science. The “Sentences” remained the accepted text-book of theology down to the cataclysm in the sixteenth century; but their effect was precisely the opposite to that which their author had desired.[2230] The endless “doubtful disputations,” the hair-splittings, the “systems of impossibilities,” which had already taken possession of the logic-schools in John of Salisbury’s day, were even more irritating to the practical mind and impetuous temper of Gerald de Barri. They were in fact ruining both theology and letters. “Our scholars,” Gerald complains, “for the sake of making a shew, have betaken themselves to subjects which rather savour of the quadrivium:--questions of single and compound, shadow and motion, points and lines, acute and obtuse angles--that they may display a smattering of learning in the quadrivium, whereof the studies flourish more in the East than in the West; and thence they have proceeded to the maintaining of false positions, the propounding of insoluble problems, the spinning of frivolous and long-winded discourses, not in the best of Latin, hereby holding up in their own disputations a warning of the consequences ensuing from their abandonment of the study of letters.”[2231] Yet it was from those very schools that Gerald himself, and men like him, had caught the fearless temper, the outspoken, unrestrained tone, in which they exposed and criticized not only every conspicuous individual, but every institution and every system, alike in the world and in the Church of their day. The democratic spirit of independence which had characterized the strictly clerical reformers of an earlier day had passed from the ranks of the priesthood into those of the universities, and had taken a mightier developement there. It was mainly through them that the nation at large entered in some degree into the labours of Theobald and his fellow-workers; it was they themselves who entered into the labours of Thomas Becket. A large proportion of both students and teachers--a proportion which grew larger and larger as time went on--were laymen; but an inveterate legal fiction still counted them all as “clerks.” The schools had grown up under the wings of the Church, and when they reached their full stature, they were strong enough both to free themselves from the control of the ecclesiastical authorities and to keep the privileges for which the clergy had fought. A priest of the English Church in our own day is as completely subject to the ordinary law of the land as any of his flock; but the chancellor’s court of the University of Oxford still possesses sole cognizance over all causes whatsoever, in all parts of the realm, which concern any resident member of the University.[2232]
[2229] Mullinger, _Univ. Camb._, pp. 94–96 and notes.
[2230] _Ib._ pp. 58–62.
[2231] Gir. Cambr. _Gemma Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 37 (Brewer, vol. ii. p. 355). Cf. _ib._ pp. 350, 351, and _Spec. Eccles._, dist. i. proœm. (vol. iv. pp. 4–9).
[2232] This privilege was secured by a charter of Edward III.; it was successfully asserted as lately as January 1886.
Not the universities, however, but the towns, were the true strongholds of English freedom. The struggle of the English towns for municipal liberty which we have seen beginning under Henry I. was renewed under Henry II. and Richard with increased vigour and success. Henry Fitz-Empress was far too clear-sighted a statesman to undervalue the growing importance of this element in English social and political life. Most of his town-charters, however, date from the earlier years of his reign, and scarcely any of them contain anything more than a confirmation of the liberties enjoyed in his grandfather’s time, with the addition in some cases of a few new privileges, carefully defined and strictly limited.[2233] In the great commercial cities, where the municipal movement had probably received a fresh impulse from the extension of trade and intercourse with the continent which was a natural consequence of Henry’s accession to the crown, the merchant-gilds soon began openly to aim at gathering into their own hands the whole powers of local government and administration, and acquiring the position of a French “commune.” The French kings encouraged the growth of the communal principle as a possible counterpoise to the power of the feudal nobles; Henry, who had little need of it for such a purpose, saw the dangers which it threatened to his system of government and held it steadily in check. In 1170 Aylwine the Mercer, Henry Hund and “the other men of the town” paid a heavy fine to the treasury for an attempt to set up a commune at Gloucester;[2234] six years later one Thomas “From-beyond-the-Ouse” paid twenty marks for a like offence at York.[2235] Owing to the close connexion between the organization of the commune and that of the gilds, every developement of this latter institution also was watched by the Crown with jealous care; in 1164 the burghers of Totnes, those of Lidford and those of Bodmin were all fined for setting up gilds without warrant from the king;[2236] and in 1180 no less than eighteen “adulterine gilds” in London met with a similar punishment.[2237] Once established, however, they seem to have been permitted to retain their existence, for in the first Pipe Roll of Richard we find them again paying their fines “as they are set down in the twenty-sixth Roll of King Henry II.”[2238] A bakers’ gild in London, a weavers’ gild at Nottingham, one of the same craft and another of fullers at Winchester, make their appearance as authorized bodies at the opening of Henry’s reign;[2239] among the “adulterine gilds” of London were those of the butchers, goldsmiths, grocers, clothiers and pilgrims.[2240] The golden days of English borough-life, however, began with the crowning of Henry’s successor. “When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of Englishmen”--as he who wrote these words has told it--“it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition of municipal life.”[2241] In his first seven years alone, we find him granting charters to Winchester, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Doncaster, Carlisle, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Some of these towns were only beginning their career of independence, and were content with the first step of all, the purchase of the _firma burgi_; some bought a confirmation of privileges already acquired; Lincoln in 1194 had got so far as to win from the king a formal recognition of its right to complete self-government in a clause empowering its citizens to elect their own reeve every year.[2242] King of knights-errant and troubadours as he seemed, Richard, it is plain, could read the signs of the times as clearly and act upon their warnings as promptly and as wisely as any of his race; and we may be very sure that this bold advance upon his father’s cautious policy towards the towns was dictated by a sound political instinct far more than by the mere greed of gain. John went still further in the same direction; the first fifteen years of his reign afford examples of town-charters of every type, from the elementary grant of the _firma burgi_ and the freedom of the merchant-gild to the little Cornish borough of Helston[2243] up to the crowning privilege bestowed upon the “barons of our city of London” in 1215, of electing their own mayor every year.[2244]
[2233] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 165–168.
[2234] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 563, from Pipe Roll 16 Hen. II.
[2235] Madox, _Firma Burgi_, p. 35, from Pipe Roll 22 Hen. II.
[2236] Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 562, 563.
[2237] _Ib._ p. 562, from Pipe Roll 26 Hen. II.
[2238] Pipe Roll 1 Ric. I. (Hunter), p. 226.
[2239] Pipe Roll 2 Hen. II. (Hunter), pp. 4, 39, 52.
[2240] “Aurifabrorum,” “Bocheiorum,” “Piperariorum,” “Parariorum,” “Peregrinorum.” There are four gilds “de Ponte”; one “de S. Lazaro”; one “de Haliwell”; the rest are described simply as “the gild whereof So-and-so is alderman.” Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. p. 562, note _z_.
[2241] Green, _Stray Studies_, p. 216.
[2242] Northampton bought the _firma burgi_ in 1191, Norwich in 1192, Ipswich and Doncaster in 1194 (Madox as above, pp. 399, 400, from Pipe Rolls); Winchester bought a confirmation of its liberties in 1190 (Stubbs, _Select Chart._, pp. 265, 266), Carlisle in 1194, York and Scarborough in 1195 (Madox as above). The Lincoln charter is given by Bishop Stubbs, as above, pp. 266, 267; for its date see Pipe Roll 6 Ric. I., quoted by Madox, as above, p. 400.
[2243] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 313, 314.
[2244] _Ib._ pp. 314, 315. John’s town-charters are all in the _Rotuli Chartarum_, edited by Sir T. D. Hardy for the Record Commission. See also extracts from Pipe Rolls in Madox, _Hist. Exch._, vol. i. pp. 400 _et seq._
From the charter of Henry I. to the establishment of the commune under Richard the constitutional history of London is shrouded in obscurity. The charter granted by Henry II. to the citizens, some time before the end of 1158, is simply a confirmation of his grandfather’s.[2245] During the first fifteen years of his reign two sheriffs of London appear annually in the Pipe Rolls; in 1171 there were four, as there had been in the thirty-first year of Henry I.; but in the twentieth year of Henry II., 1171, we find that their number was again reduced to two; and from 1182 onwards there seems to have been only one, till at Michaelmas 1189 the accounts were rendered by Richard Fitz-Reiner and Henry of Cornhill, both of whom continued in office till 1191.[2246] In that year, as we have seen, the commune won its legal recognition from John and Archbishop Walter of Rouen as representatives of the absent king;[2247] and although the charter which Richard issued to the citizens of London, shortly before his final departure from England in 1194, is a mere echo of his father’s,[2248] yet the existence of the new corporation is thenceforth a recognized fact. John’s first charter to London was issued from Normandy six weeks after his crowning. It renewed the old grant of the sheriffdom of London and Middlesex, with all rights and customs thereunto belonging, to the citizens and their heirs, to have and to hold of the king and his heirs for ever. They were to appoint as sheriffs any of their own number whom they might choose, and to remove them at their pleasure; and for this privilege they were to pay, through the said sheriffs, three hundred pounds a year to the Treasury.[2249] The establishment of the commune had reduced the sheriffs to the rank of mere financial officers, and the real head of the civic administration was the mayor. The first mayor of London, Henry Fitz-Aylwine, retained his office for life; and his life extended beyond the limits of our present story. Yet the true significance of that story is strikingly illustrated by the next step in the history of London, a step which followed two years after Fitz-Aylwine’s death. On May 9, 1215, John granted to the “barons of the city of London” the right of annually electing their mayor.[2250] Five weeks later the barons of England compelled him to sign, in the meadows of Runnymede, the Great Charter which secured the liberties not of one city only but of the whole English people; and among the five-and-twenty men whom they chose from among themselves to enforce its execution was Serlo the Mercer, mayor of London.[2251]
[2245] Charter in Riley’s _Munimenta Gildhallæ_, vol. ii. part i. pp. 31, 32. It is witnessed by “archiepiscopo Cantuariæ” and “Ricardo episcopo Londoniarum”; _i.e._ Richard of London who died in May 1162, and Theobald who died in April 1161. As it is certain that neither of these two prelates ever crossed the sea after Henry’s accession, the charter must have been issued in England, and therefore before Henry went abroad in August 1158.
[2246] Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. p. 629.
[2247] Above, p. 301.
[2248] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 248, 249. Date, Winchester, April 23, 1194.
[2249] Riley, _Munim. Gildh._, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 249–251. Date, Bonneville, July 5, 1199.
[2250] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 314, 315.
[2251] Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 605.
Little, indeed, as the burghers themselves may have dreamed of any such thing, the highest importance of their struggle for municipal liberty lies in this, that its fruits were to be reaped by a far larger community than was inclosed within the town-walls. It was from the burghers that their brethren in the rural districts caught once more the spirit of freedom which ages of oppression had well-nigh crushed out of their hearts. “‘Ketel’s case’” at Bury S. Edmund’s--the case of a tenant of the abbey who, dwelling “outside the gate,” was hanged for a theft of which he had been found guilty by the Norman process of the judicial duel usual in the manor-courts, and over whose fate the townsmen, rejoicing in the Old-English right of compurgation which they still retained, grew so bitterly sarcastic that the abbot and the “saner part of the convent” were driven by terror of a peasant revolt to admit their rural tenants to a share in the judicial franchise of the town[2252]--was in all probability only one out of many. The history of this same abbey of S. Edmund’s shews us how even the villeins were rising into a position more like that of their free brethren, how the old badges of serfdom, the heavy labour-rents, the hard customs, were vanishing one by one, and how in this process of enfranchisement the boroughs led the way.[2253] “The ancient customs belonging to the cellarer’s office, as we have seen them”--that is, as Jocelyn of Brakelond, who was a monk of S. Edmund’s from 1172 to 1211, had seen them in the old custom-roll of the house--“were these: The cellarer had his messuage and barn by the well of Scurun, where he solemnly held his court for the trial of thieves and of all pleas and quarrels; and there he received the pledges of his men, and enrolled them, and renewed them every year, and got gain by it, as the reeve did in the portmannimot. This messuage was the homestead of Beodric, who of old time was lord of this township, whence it was called Beodricesworth; whose demesne lands are now in the demesne of the cellarer; and what is now called the _aver-land_ was the land of his rustics. Now the sum of his tenements and those of his men was three hundred and thirty acres, which are lands still belonging to the township, whereof the services, when the town was made free, were divided into two parts; so that the sacristan or the reeve should receive the quit-rent, that is, twopence on every acre; and the cellarer should have the ploughings and other services, that is, the ploughing of one rood for every acre, without food (which custom is observed still); he was also to have the folds wherein all the men of the township (except the seneschal, who has his own fold) were bound to put their sheep (this custom, too, is observed still). He was also to have the _aver-penny_,[2254] that is twopence for every thirty acres; this custom was changed before the death of Abbot Hugh (1180). For the men of the township had to go at the cellarer’s bidding to Lakenheath, to fetch a load of eels from Southrey, and often they came back with their carts empty, and so they had their trouble without any benefit to the cellarer; wherefore it was agreed between them that every thirty acres should pay a penny a year, and the men should stay at home. At the present time, however, these lands are so cut up that scarcely anybody knows from whom the payment is due; so that whereas I have seen the cellarer receive twenty-seven pence in a year, now he can hardly get tenpence farthing. Moreover, the cellarer used to have control over the roads outside the township, so that no one might dig chalk or clay without his leave. He was also wont to summon the fullers of the township to lend cloths for carrying his salt; otherwise he would forbid them the use of the waters, and seize whatever cloths he found there; which customs are observed unto this day.” “Moreover the cellarer alone ought, or used, to have one bull free in the fields of this township; but now several persons have them.” “Moreover the cellarer used to warrant those who owed service to his court, so that they were exempt from scot and tallage; but now it is not so, because the burghers say that those who do service at the court ought to be exempt for their service, but not for the burgage which they hold in the town, and forasmuch as they and their wives do publicly buy and sell in the market.”[2255] After the affair of Ketel, in fact, the cellarer’s court was merged in that of the town; “it was decreed that his men should come to the toll-house with the others, and there renew their pledges, and be written in the reeve’s roll, and there give to the reeve the penny which is called _borth-silver_, and the cellarer should have half of it (but he gets nothing at all of it now); and all this was done, that all might enjoy equal liberty.”[2256]
[2252] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), p. 74. See Mr. Green’s _Stray Studies_, pp. 222–224, and _Hist. Eng. People_, vol. i. pp. 219, 220.
[2253] On all this see Mr. Green’s _Abbot and Town_, in _Stray Studies_, pp. 213–229.
[2254] “The money paid by the tenant in commutation of the service (_avera_) of performing any work for his lord by horse or ox, or by carriage with either.” Greenwell, Glossary to _Boldon Buke_ (Surtees Soc.)
[2255] Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode), pp. 75, 76.
[2256] _Ib._ p. 74.
“That all might enjoy equal liberty”--Jocelyn’s words had a significance wider and deeper than he himself could know, wider and deeper than could be known perhaps even to his abbot from whom they were probably echoed; although it is clear from almost every page of Jocelyn’s story that Abbot Sampson of S. Edmund’s was a far more enlightened and far-seeing statesman than most of the great landowners of his day, whether secular or tonsured. The rural tenants of S. Edmund in his time had evidently made a good deal more progress towards enfranchisement than those of some other great houses, such as, for example, the abbey of Abingdon. In 1185, on the death of Abbot Roger of Abingdon, a dispute between the “obedientiaries,” or officers of the convent to whose support various portions of its revenues were assigned, and the steward appointed by the king to take charge of the abbot’s property during the vacancy of his office, led to the drawing-up of a consuetudinary,[2257] which it would be interesting to compare with the earlier “Black Book” of Peterborough. A large proportion of the tenants’ dues were paid in money; but there were still considerable remnants of the older system. The chamberlain of the abbey, for instance, had an acre of land at Culham, which the men of that township were bound to reap and carry to make beds for the monks. The hay to be laid “under the monks’ feet when they bathed” was supplied in like manner from a meadow at Stockgrave. A tenant named Daniel of Colebrook was bound, besides paying a rent of five shillings, to furnish the chamberlain whenever he went to London with hay for his horses, with wood and salt, and with straw for his bed. At Welsford, near Newbury, there were twenty-two “cotset-lands,” whose tenants held them by their services as swineherds, bedels (or messengers of the chamberlain’s court), shepherds, hedgewards and such like. Of eleven rent-paying tenants in the same township, one owed, besides his rent of twenty-seven pence, his personal service for getting in hay and stacking corn in August. As the whole township was in demesne, its inhabitants paid a tribute to the lord--in this case the chamberlain of the abbey--for the pannage of their pigs; they had also to furnish the services of one man for harvesting in August, and to lend their ploughs for bene-work. The men of Boxhole, Benham, Easton and Weston did the like. At Boxhole, out of twelve tenants, eight were bound, besides paying their rent, to plough an acre of the demesne and sow it with their own seed; and seven of these had moreover to carry hay and corn. One Berner and his sons held a “cotset-land” by a rent of six sextaries of honey to the cellarer and thirty-one pence to the chamberlain.[2258] There were twenty-six tenants withdrawn from demesne, of whom six owed work in August, in addition to their rent; and there were five acres of meadow which had to be mowed and carried by five men of the township. At Benham, out of twenty-four tenants, eleven were “cotsetles”; three of these were servants of the chamberlain, holding their lands by their service; the rest were to hold by rent or by work, as the lord might choose[2259]--an arrangement which applied also to the cotters of Boxhole.[2260] Of the remaining thirteen tenants at Benham, six paid rent only; the rest were bound also to plough and sow an acre or half an acre apiece, and to carry corn and hay.[2261] One was excused the ploughing and sowing, doubtless in consideration of her sex and condition--she was “Ernive a widow.”[2262] The whole township owed a customary payment or church-shot of forty-six hens.[2263]
[2257] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 297, 298.
[2258] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 300–302.
[2259] _Ib._ pp. 303–305.
[2260] _Ib._ p. 303.
[2261] And this though one of them was no less a personage than _Gaufridus vicecomes_! What can this mean? _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ as above, pp. 304, 305.
[2262] _Ib._ p. 304.
[2263] _Ib._ p. 305.
On the manor of Weston the dues were thus distributed: Robert of Pont-de-l’Arche held four acres of the abbot “by the service of half a knight.” One acre belonged to the church of the township; half a hide was held by John of S. Helen’s, on what terms we are not told. Of the remainder, over which the chamberlain was lord, half a hide was in demesne; the rest was distributed in ten portions, held by thirteen tenants--a hide or half a hide being in three cases held by two persons conjointly. Two hides and a half were for work or for gavel, at the option of the lord; in actual practice, however, there were only two cotters who owed labour instead of, or in addition to, their money-rent. On the other hand, the right of poundage, or exemption from impounding of cattle, was paid for in this village by the ploughing of two acres.[2264] The township of Berton and several others were bound to furnish sumpter-horses for conveying fish to the abbey-kitchen thrice a year; the persons responsible for this service had to pay their own travelling expenses and those of their horses; but they got each a loaf from the abbey when they left; and those who could not fulfil the service were allowed to compound for it with the kitchener “as best they could.” The same manors rendered each five hundred eggs on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, at Christmas, Easter, Rogation-tide and Pentecost; and three hundred at Candlemas and Quinquagesima, besides eighteen hens apiece at the festivals of S. Martin and at Christmas. They also gave on the Wednesday before Easter a hundred herrings, which on the following Thursday were distributed to the poor;[2265] and each of them sent moreover to the monks’ kitchen, in the course of the year, besides the eggs and hens already enumerated, twenty-four bushels of beans.[2266] Eight fisheries were bound to furnish each a certain number of eels on Ash-Wednesday;[2267] the fishermen who carried the eels to the hall were entitled to receive thence two loaves apiece.[2268] From another fishery a money-rent of seventeen shillings was due, paid in three terms; and its holder owed church-shot of twelve hens.[2269] Berton furnished five loads of straw, and Culham as many of hay, three times a year--on Christmas Eve, Easter Eve, and All Saints’ Eve--for strewing the refectory.[2270] When the chamberlain went to Winchelcombe fair, the men of Dumbleton were bound to bring home for him whatever he purchased there; the same duty fell to the tenantry of Welford when he went to the fair at Winchester.[2271]
[2264] _Hist. Mon. Abingdon_ (Stevenson), vol. ii. pp. 305, 306.
[2265] _Ib._ pp. 307, 308.
[2266] _Ib._ p. 323.
[2267] _Ib._ pp. 308, 323.
[2268] _Ib._ p. 308.
[2269] _Ib._ p. 309.
[2270] _Ib._ p. 313.
[2271] _Ib._ pp. 326, 327.