Chapter 30
Part 30
[2093] “Non multum distabat a loco illo” says Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, as above), p. 83. The date must fall between August 16, when John was at Alençon, and September 5, when he was at Bonneville. His whereabouts during the interval vary between Chambrai, Trianon, Montfort and Rouen. Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 5 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2094] Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 84; _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 737–746 (_ib._ p. 181; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, p. 145).
[2095] “Maximum congregaverat exercitum.” Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._, as above, p. 83.
[2096] _Ibid._; _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 140–143, 188–194 (_ib._ pp. 170, 171; Deville as above, pp. 129, 130).
[2097] On this man see Géraud, _Les Routiers_ (_Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes_, ser. i. vol. iii. p. 132). In his native tongue he was called “Lobar”; in Latin he appears as “Lupicarius,” “Lupescarus,” “Lupatius.” M. Géraud calls him in French “Louvart”; the name was doubtless an assumed one, meaning “wolf.” He was a fellow-countryman and old comrade-in-arms of Mercadier; Mat. Paris introduces them both at once, in 1196, as “natione Provinciales”--“qui duces fuerunt catervæ quam ruttam vocamus, militantes sub comite Johanne regis fratre.” _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 421. Lupicar however had made his first historical appearance some years earlier than Mercadier, as a leader of the Brabantines in the Limousin, about 1177. See Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70 (Labbe, _Nova Biblioth._, vol. ii. p. 324).
[2098] It seems a strange return to long-past times to hear of “_pirates_” sailing up the Seine to attack a king of the French. Of what nationality are these men likely to have been?
The flower of the French host, as John knew, had crossed the river with its king. Those who remained in the peninsula were hampered by the presence of a crowd of unwarlike serving-men, sutlers and camp-followers, many of whom, after spending the day in drunken revelry, were lying asleep in the fields outside the camp. The night was drawing to its close--for the cock had crowed thrice--when the Marshal’s troops fell upon these sleepers and slew more than two hundred of them as they lay. The soldiers within the camp quickly caught the alarm; in their terror they rushed to the pontoon in such numbers that it broke under their weight, and they sought safety in swimming across the river to join their comrades on the opposite shore. These however had now been aroused by the tumult; the bravest of the French knights, headed by William des Barres, confronted the fugitives with indignant reproaches for their cowardice, and drove them back across the stream. By the light of torches and fires, hastily kindled, the whole host was soon got under arms, the bridge repaired, and the Marshal’s troops, surprised in their turn while groping about in the darkness of the deserted camp, were routed with heavy loss. The victors, thinking the fight was over, went back to their sleeping-quarters, but had scarcely reached them when they were roused up again, to see, in the dim light of the August sunrise, the hostile fleet bearing down upon them. In a few minutes the two river-banks and the pontoon were lined with armed Frenchmen. Still the boats held on their course till the foremost of them touched the bridge; and despite a ceaseless shower of arrows from either shore, and of stones, iron missiles, and boiling oil and pitch from the engines mounted on the wooden turrets of the bridge, the crews began to hew at the cables and stakes in a desperate effort to break it down, and kept its defenders at bay till the Seine ran red with blood. At last an enormously heavy oaken beam fell directly upon the two foremost ships and sank them. The rest, stricken with sudden terror, rowed away in disorder as fast as oars could move them. Gaubert of Mantes and three other gallant French sailors sprang each into a little boat, set off in pursuit, and succeeded in capturing two of the fugitive ships, which they brought back in tow, with their stores and all of their crews who survived.[2099] The delay in the arrival of the fleet, caused by the difficulties of navigation in the Seine,[2100] had ruined John’s plan for the relief of the Isle of Andely. The fate of its garrison was soon decided; and again the hero of the day was Gaubert of Mantes. The fort was encircled by a double palisade or rampart of wood, outside the walls. Gaubert tied a rope round his waist, took in his hand two iron vessels coated with pitch and filled with burning charcoal,[2101] swam to the easternmost point of the island, which the garrison, trusting to the proximity of Château-Gaillard on this side, had ventured to leave unguarded, and threw these missiles against the palisade. The wood instantly caught fire; the wind carried the flames all round the ramparts and into the fort itself. Some of the garrison made their escape by swimming or on rafts; some were stifled in the cellars and galleries in which they sought a refuge from the fire; the rest surrendered to the French king. Philip lost no time in repairing and garrisoning the fort and rebuilding the bridge on its western side. At the sight of his success the whole population of the Lesser Andely fled in a body to Château-Gaillard; Philip entered the town in triumph, sent for new inhabitants to fill the places of the fugitives, and intrusted its defence to two companies of mercenaries, whose strength may be estimated from the statement that the leader of one of them, Cadoc by name, received from the royal treasury a thousand pounds daily for himself and his men.[2102]
[2099] Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 144–335 (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. pp. 171–174; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 129–134). Cf. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne as above), p. 83.
[2100] Will. Armor. as above, vv. 206, 207 (Duchesne as above, p. 172; Deville as above, p. 131).
[2101] See Deville’s note, _Château-Gaillard_, p. 66.
[2102] Will. Armor., _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 336–398 (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. pp. 174, 175; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 134–136). Cf. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne as above), p. 83.
Philip’s mastery of the river was still precarious and incomplete without the reduction of Château-Gaillard. For an attack upon the Saucy Castle itself, however, his courage seems as yet to have failed; and striking north-westward by the road which leads from Les Andelys into the valley of the Andelle, on the last day of August he again sat down before Radepont. In two or three weeks it surrendered.[2103] This time John made no attempt to save it, but fled away to the depths of his own old county of Mortain,[2104] leaving Rouen to its fate. Philip however dared not advance upon Rouen with Château-Gaillard still unconquered in his rear; and at the opening of the vintage-season he moved back to Les Andelys and girded himself up for his task. A brief survey of the Rock convinced him that assault was well-nigh hopeless; his best chance was in a blockade. On the north the Lesser Andely occupied by his mercenaries, on the west the river commanded by his troops in the island-fort, sufficed to imprison the garrison. The next step was to dig out a double trench two hundred feet deep, starting from the brow of the hill over against the south-eastern extremity of the castle-rock, extending northward to the margin of the lake of Andely and westward to the bank of the Seine, and completely enclosing the two ravines which furrowed the sides of the rock. Each line of entrenchment was garnished with seven _bretasches_ or wooden forts, placed at regular intervals, each surrounded by a ditch of its own, furnished with a wooden draw-bridge, and filled with as many soldiers as it could hold. The rest of the army took up their quarters in the trenches, where they built themselves little huts of wood and thatch for a shelter against the wet and cold of the coming winter--shelter against other foes they needed none, for they were out of bowshot from the castle[2105]--and whiled away their time in jesting and making songs in mockery of the straits to which the Saucy Castle was reduced--“So many thousands girt about with a single girdle,”--“The eyrie overcrowded with nestlings, who will have to turn out when the spring comes.”[2106] The greater part of the “nestlings” were turned out before the spring came. The blockade once formed, Roger de Lacy soon perceived the terrible blunder he had made in admitting within his walls the townsfolk of the Lesser Andely. According to one computation, the number of these non-combatants now huddled within the castle-enclosure was no less than two thousand two hundred souls; at the lowest reckoning, they seem to have amounted to fourteen hundred--all, in a military point of view, simply useless mouths, devouring in a few weeks the stores of food that should have furnished rations for a year and more to the little garrison which was amply sufficient to hold the castle for John. One day, therefore, Roger opened the castle-gate and turned out five hundred of the oldest and weakest. They were suffered to pass unmolested through the blockading lines, and were followed a few days later by five hundred more. Philip however, who meanwhile had returned to his own dominions, no sooner heard what was going on than he issued strict orders that every man, woman or child, of whatever age or condition, who might issue from the castle should be driven back again without mercy. A large number still remained of whom Roger was as eager to be rid as Philip was anxious that he should be obliged to keep them. He took account of his stores, and found that he had enough to feed the regular garrison for a whole year. Hereupon he called together all the remaining non-combatants, and sent them forth, as they thought, to rejoin their families and friends. To their horror, as soon as they approached the French lines, they were overwhelmed with a volley of arrows. They rushed back to the castle-gate, only to find it closed against them. For three months this multitude of people dragged out a wretched existence in the ravines around the fortress, with no shelter against the wet and the cold but what they might find in the clefts of the rock, and no food but the dry leaves and scant herbage which they could pick up at its foot, and the flesh of the dogs which the garrison soon let loose for the purpose of yet further economizing their rations. This last resource was exhausted, and the horrors of cannibalism were already reached, when Philip came back to see how the siege was progressing. As he was crossing the bridge to the island-fort these unhappy beings caught sight of him and lifted up their voices in agonizing appeal; the king, moved with a tardy compassion, and perhaps also by fear of the not improbable outbreak of a pestilence which might easily have spread into his own entrenchments, ordered that immediate relief should be given to all who survived. These however amounted to no more than half of the original number, which seems to have been something over four hundred; and most of them had been so long without food that their first meal proved fatal.[2107]
[2103] Rigord (Duchesne as above), p. 47, says the siege of Radepont began on the last day of August and lasted fifteen days. Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid._), p. 82, makes it last three weeks; in _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 399, 400 (_ib._ p. 175; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, p. 136), he extends its duration to a month.
[2104] He went to Falaise on September 13--the day after the fall of Radepont, according to Rigord’s reckoning. Thence he went on the 17th to Mortain, on the 19th to Dol, and back to Mortain again on the 22d. Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 5 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2105] Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), pp. 83, 84; _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 414–450 (_ib._ pp. 175, 176; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 136, 137).
[2106] Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 451–456 (Duchesne, p. 176; Deville, p. 137).
[2107] Cf. Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 84, and _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 467–606 (_ib._ pp. 176–179; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 138–142).
The last act of this tragedy must have taken place soon after Christmas. For three months the whole military power of the French Crown had been concentrated on the investment of Château-Gaillard; and in all this time John had done absolutely nothing. From his expedition to the Breton border he had indeed returned to Rouen for a few days in the beginning of October. Not a hand did he lift, however, to check the progress of the blockade which was being formed almost before his eyes. Soon he was again far away in the Bessin; thence he suddenly moved across the duchy to Verneuil, and in the second week of November he was once more at Rouen.[2108] It was probably during one of these visits to the capital that he wrote to Roger de Lacy: “We thank you for your good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies, you will persevere in the fealty and homage which you owe us, that you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourselves, and from all who know your fidelity to us. If, however, which God forbid, you should find yourselves in such straits that you can hold out no longer, then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of Préaux, William of Mortemer and Hugh of Howels our clerk shall bid you in our name.”[2109] Whether this letter ever found its way through the blockading lines into the castle it is scarcely worth while to inquire. If it did, it failed to shake the courage or the loyalty of the garrison, although it must have proved to them what they doubtless guessed already, that their sovereign had forsaken them, and that they were serving him for nought. Of the crowning proof of his desertion they probably remained unconscious until all was over for them. After dismantling Pont-de-l’Arche, Moulineaux and Montfort,[2110] John, on November 12, again left Rouen; for three weeks he flitted aimlessly up and down the country, from Bonneville and Caen to Domfront and Vire, and back again to Barfleur and Cherbourg;[2111] on December 6 he quitted Normandy altogether;[2112] and while the burghers of the Lesser Andely were starving and freezing to death in the valleys round Château-Gaillard, and the garrison of the castle were anxiously reckoning how much longer their provisions would enable them to hold out for his sake, he was keeping his Christmas feast at Canterbury at the expense of Archbishop Hubert.[2113]
[2108] Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 5 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2109] Letter in Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._, p. 1059.
[2110] Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 826–828 (Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 147, 148; Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. p. 182).
[2111] Hardy as above.
[2112] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 173, says he landed at Portsmouth on S. Nicolas’s day. The _Itinerary_ (as above) shews him at Barfleur on December 5 and at Portsmouth on the 7th.
[2113] “H. archiepiscopo omnia necessaria festivitati regiæ ministrante.” Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 174.
By the end of February 1204[2114] Philip grew impatient of the blockade of Château-Gaillard, and probably also uneasy lest John should return from England with an overwhelming force for its relief. He therefore resolved to try whether it could not, after all, be taken by assault. He himself took up his station at the central point of the entrenchment, on the crest of the hill, facing the narrow neck of land by which it was joined to the castle-rock. This isthmus, the only direct approach to the castle itself, he caused to be levelled and widened till he could erect upon it a wooden gallery or covered way leading from his own lines up to the edge of the outermost ditch of the fortress. When, with considerable difficulty and loss of life, this was accomplished, he caused a _beffroy_ or wooden tower on wheels to be carried through the gallery, set up when it reached the further end, and moved along the edge of the fosse, the cross-bowmen with whom it was filled doing deadly execution upon the soldiers on the ramparts, who however made a gallant defence. Meanwhile, the French were bringing through their covered way earth, wood, stones, turf, everything they could find to fill up the ditch. Before it was half full they lost patience and adopted a quicker method of approach. They dropped down the perpendicular counterscarp by means of their scaling-ladders, and set these up again on the sloping inner side of the ditch, under the foot of the great round tower which formed the head of the first ward. The ladders were too short for the ascent; but despite a heavy fire of stones and arrows from the tower, the storming-party scrambled up, crawling on hands and knees, or using their swords and daggers by way of Alpine-staves, till the base of the wall was reached. Then, while a shower of missiles rattled down upon the shields held over them by their comrades, the sappers dug and hewed at the foundations till the tower was undermined; the fuse was inserted and fired, and the miners had just had time to withdraw when a large portion of the wall fell crashing into the ditch. The French rushed to the breach; Roger de Lacy, seeing that the first ward was lost, ordered the wooden buildings within it to be fired; he and his men withdrew across the drawbridge into the second ward, and when the fire died down, they saw the ruined fragment of the tower crowned by the banner of Cadoc.[2115]
[2114] “Superveniente cathedrâ S. Petri” (February 22). Rigord (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 47.
[2115] Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 84; _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 612–726 (_ib._ pp. 179–181; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 142–145).
The French were one step nearer to the goal; but the next step looked as impracticable as ever. Between them and the besieged there yawned another ditch as wide and deep, there rose another rampart as mighty and as inaccessible as the first. In vain they prowled about the edge of the fosse seeking for a point at which they could venture upon an attack, till a young squire or man-at-arms, by name Peter, but more commonly known in the camp as “Bogis” or “Snub-nose,” caught sight of a little window just above the wall at the south-eastern corner of the rampart.[2116] This window was the sole external opening in John’s new building, which was otherwise accessible only on the inner side, by two doors, one leading into the storehouse which formed the lower story, one into the chapel above it, and both opening towards the courtyard. Bogis at once communicated his discovery to a few trusty comrades; they reconnoitred the ditch till they found a somewhat shallower place on its southern side, where it was possible to scramble down; thence they crawled along the bottom till they were directly under the window, and then clambered up the sloping side to the foot of the wall. By standing on the shoulders of a comrade Bogis managed to reach the window; he found it unbarred, unguarded, and wide enough for his body to pass through; he sprang in, let down to his companions a rope which he had brought for the purpose, and drew them up one by one till they were all safe inside the building, which proved to be the storehouse under the chapel.[2117] Finding the door locked, they began to hammer at it with the hilts of their daggers. This noise and the shouts with which they accompanied it soon alarmed the garrison. They, thinking that the French had entered the new building and occupied it in force, hastily set it on fire; unhappily, the wind caught the flames and spread them in a few minutes over the whole enclosure. The garrison fled to their sole remaining refuge, the citadel; Bogis and his companions escaped out of the blazing ruins into the casemates; the bulk of the French host, anxiously watching the scene from the opposite side of the ditch, thought they had all perished; but when the flames died down and the smoke began to clear away, Bogis himself appeared at the gate and let down the drawbridge for the army to pass over in triumph.[2118]
[2116] I cannot understand M. Deville’s idea of this window. In his plan of the castle he marks it about the middle of the south-western side of John’s building--the side looking towards the river. But Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (as above), p. 85, says it was “in latere orientali.” And if it had not been there, how could Bogis, from the foot of the rampart of the first ward, ever have seen it at all?
[2117] So says M. Deville (_Château-Gaillard_, p. 82), following the _Philippis_; but in the _Gesta Phil. Aug._ William makes it the chapel, _i.e._ the upper instead of the lower story. One would naturally expect the solitary window to be in the chapel rather than in the storehouse under it.
[2118] Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug_. (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 85; _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 727–791 (_ib._ pp. 181, 182; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, pp. 145–147).
Philip’s engines and their own too hastily-kindled fires had made havoc among the besieged garrison; they were now reduced to a hundred and eighty fighting-men.[2119] Even this small number, however, might have sufficed to hold for an indefinite time the remains of Richard’s matchless fortress, but for one strange error on the part of the royal architect. Richard had indeed taken the precaution of making the sole gate of his citadel open not directly towards the courtyard of the second ward, but at a much less accessible point to the north-eastward, where only a narrow strip of ground intervened between the counterscarp of the ditch and the outer rampart. Most unaccountably, however, instead of furnishing this gate with a drawbridge, he left a portion of the rock itself to serve as a natural passage over the ditch hollowed out beneath it. Across this immovable bridge a machine known by the name of “cat”--a sort of tent upon wheels, moved by the men inside it--was, as the epic bard of the siege expresses it, “made to crawl” close up to the gate, which the sappers, hidden under this shelter, at once began to undermine. Roger de Lacy, alarmed no doubt by the fate of the first tower which had been thus dealt with, tried the effect of a countermine, which was so far successful that the French were for a moment compelled to retire; but the “cat” was speedily replaced by a mighty engine discharging heavy stones with immense force. At the third discharge, the wall, undermined as it was from both sides, suddenly fell in. The French troops poured through the breach; Roger and his little band were quickly surrounded, and it was no fault of theirs that they were not slaughtered to a man, for every one of them refused to yield, and was only disarmed by main force. The hundred and twenty men-at-arms and thirty-six knights who still remained were, however, made prisoners without further bloodshed; and thus, on March 6, 1204, Philip became master of Château-Gaillard.[2120]
[2119] Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vii. v. 775 (Duchesne as above, p. 181; Deville, p. 146).
[2120] Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vii. vv. 792–811 (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. p. 182; Deville, _Château-Gaillard_, p. 147). Cf. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne as above), p. 85. The date is from Rigord (_ibid._), p. 47 (who, however, puts it under a wrong year, 1202), and Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 180. This last writer has a wholly different version of the capture, but it is not worthy of consideration. The number of prisoners is stated by Will. Armor. in the _Gesta Phil. Aug._ as forty knights, a hundred and twenty men-at-arms, “and many others.” (By his own account in _Philipp._, l. vii. v. 775, these “many” cannot have been more than twenty. See above, p. 422). Rigord speaks only of the knights, whom he reduces to thirty-six, saying that four had been slain during the siege.
On that March day the king of England really lost not only his Saucy Castle, but his whole continental dominions north of Loire. Thenceforth all resistance in Normandy was at an end; and in three months the whole duchy laid itself without a struggle at the victor’s feet. Soon after John’s departure over sea Philip had opened negotiations with the citizens of the chief Norman towns, representing to them that the king of England had deserted them, that he himself was their rightful overlord and sovereign, and bidding them either receive him as such, or prepare to be all hanged or flayed alive when he should have overcome their resistance by force. After some discussion they made a truce with him for a year, promising that if no succour came from England within that time, they would submit to him without reserve.[2121] On the fall of Château-Gaillard they all, together with the constables of the remaining fortresses throughout John’s trans-marine dominions, sent messages to John setting forth the difficulties of their position and remonstrating earnestly with him on his tardiness in coming to their aid. He bade them look for nothing from him, but do each of them whatsoever they might think good.[2122] A few weeks later he despatched the bishops of Norwich and Ely with the earls of Pembroke and Leicester to see if there was any possibility of coming to terms with the king of France.[2123] But it was too late. Philip sarcastically retorted that the first preliminary to peace must be the restoration of Arthur;[2124] and on the Sunday after Easter he marched again into Normandy. Falaise surrendered after a week’s siege;[2125] Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Barfleur, Cherbourg, Coutances,[2126] opened their gates at his mere approach. Meanwhile Guy of Thouars, who had been governing Britanny since Arthur’s death,[2127] with four hundred knights and an immense host of Bretons attacked and burned the Mont-St.-Michel, sacked Avranches, and marched ravaging and burning through the Bessin to join the king at Caen. Philip sent them back again, together with the count of Boulogne, William des Barres, a large body of French knights, and a troop of John’s mercenaries who had changed sides after the surrender of Falaise, to finish the subjugation of Mortain and the Avranchin,[2128] while he himself returned to complete his conquest of eastern Normandy. Only three important places were still unsubdued there: Arques on the northern coast, Verneuil on the southern border, and Rouen itself. The three bodies of soldiers and townsfolk came to a mutual understanding whereby those of the capital, on the Tuesday in Rogation-week--June 1--made a truce with Philip for thirty days, stipulating that their brethren at Arques and Verneuil should receive the same benefit if they applied for it within a certain time, and promising in the name of all alike that if no succour came from John within the specified interval, they would give themselves up unreservedly to the king of France.[2129] None of them, however, waited for the expiration of the truce. On midsummer-day Rouen opened its gates;[2130] Arques and Verneuil followed its example,[2131] and Normandy was won.
[2121] Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. pp. 173, 174.
[2122] _Ib._ pp. 180, 181.
[2123] “Post mediam Quadragesimam,” _i.e._ in the beginning of April. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144. The earl of Pembroke (or Striguil), it will be remembered, was William the Marshal.
[2124] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 145.
[2125] _Ibid._ Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. viii. (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. p. 183); _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid._), p. 85. Rigord (_ibid._), p. 47. The dates come from the two last, both of whom however make the year 1203 instead of 1204.
[2126] Cf. Rigord as above; Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ as above; _Philipp._ l. viii. (_ibid._), pp. 183, 184; and R. Coggeshall as above.
[2127] As guardian of his own daughter by Constance, the infant Alice, whom the Bretons and the French recognized as heiress of Britanny, in place of her half-sister Eleanor, who was in the custody of John.
[2128] Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 85. _Philipp._, l. viii. (_ibid._), pp. 184, 185.
[2129] Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._, pp. 1057–1059.
[2130] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146. Rigord (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 47, giving the date. Cf. Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid._), p. 85, and _Philipp._, l. viii. (_ibid._), p. 186.
[2131] R. Coggeshall as above.
Cadoc and his mercenaries had established their head-quarters at Angers;[2132] the whole of Anjou and Touraine, except the strongholds of Chinon and Loches, was already secured; Aquitaine alone still remained to be conquered. This, indeed, was likely to prove a more difficult task; for however bitterly the men of the south might hate their Norman or Angevin rulers, their chances of regaining or preserving their independence under a sovereign who must henceforth be parted from them by the whole width of the Bay of Biscay would be obviously so much better than under one whose direct sway now stretched all along the northern bank of the Loire from its mouth almost to its source, that they were certain to veer round at once to the side of John, simply for the purpose of keeping Philip out. Such was in fact the result throughout the whole country south of the Dordogne; Savaric of Mauléon, lately John’s enemy and prisoner, at once became his most energetic and devoted champion;[2133] while Angoulême was secured for John as the heritage of his queen Isabel. But the link which had bound Guyenne to the Angevin house was broken at last; Queen Eleanor had died on April 1.[2134] There was no longer any legal obstacle to the execution of the sentence of forfeiture passed two years ago; and on S. Laurence’s day Philip assembled his host for the conquest of Poitou.[2135] Robert of Turnham, John’s seneschal,[2136] did what he could in its defence, but he was powerless against the indifference of the people and the active hostility of William des Roches and the Lusignans.[2137] Poitiers was soon taken; and in a few weeks all Poitou, except La Rochelle, Niort and Thouars, submitted to Philip as its liege lord.[2138] At the approach of winter Philip returned to his own dominions, leaving a body of troops to blockade Chinon, which was held for John by Hubert de Burgh, and another to form the siege of Loches, no less bravely defended by Gerald of Atie.[2139] At Easter 1205 the king marched with a fresh host upon Loches and took it by assault.[2140] On midsummer-eve Chinon fell in like manner.[2141] Robert of Turnham had already been made prisoner by the French;[2142] the viscount of Thouars now made his submission to Philip, and received from him the seneschalship of Poitou in Robert’s stead;[2143] Niort and La Rochelle were left alone in their resistance to the French king.
[2132] Will. Armor. as above, pp. 86 and 188.
[2133] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146.
[2134] Ann. Waverl. a. 1204 (Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. ii. p. 256). R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144, and Mat. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ (Madden), vol. ii. pp. 102, 103, give the same year; the latter takes occasion to describe Eleanor as “admiribalis domina pulchritudinis et astutiæ,” and says she died at John’s newly-founded abbey of Beaulieu. The Chron. S. Albin. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 53) places her death a year earlier, and at Poitiers.
[2135] Rigord (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 47.
[2136] Brother of Stephen of Turnham, and apparently seneschal of Anjou at the close of Richard’s reign; transferred to Poitou in 1201. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. iv. pp. 86, 142, 176.
[2137] R. Coggeshall as above.
[2138] _Ibid._ Rigord as above. Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid_.), p. 86. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii. p. 181.
[2139] R. Coggeshall and Rigord as above. Will. Armor. as above; _Philipp._, l. viii. (_ibid._), pp. 189, 190.
[2140] Rigord (as above), pp. 47, 48, and Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ as above; both under a wrong year. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 152.
[2141] Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. iii.), pp. 182, 183; R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 154, 155; cf. Rigord (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 48; Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid._), p. 86; and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1203 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 54).
[2142] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 152.
[2143] Will. Armor. as above.
John, however, was now at last threatening an attack from over sea. Three weeks after his return to England, in January 1204, he had held a council at Oxford and compelled all the tenants-in-chief, including the bishops and abbots, to promise a scutage of two marks and a half on the knight’s fee,[2144] and a contribution, from which even the parish churches were not exempt, of a seventh of all moveable goods;[2145] all under the plea of gathering a great host for the recovery of his lost dominions.[2146] In May he held a council at Northampton,[2147] which resulted in a summons to the fleet and the host to meet him at Porchester at Whitsuntide, prepared to accompany him over sea. When all was ready, however, the expedition was countermanded, at the urgent entreaty, it was said, of Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal, the latter of whom had lately returned from Gaul, and might therefore be supposed to know the condition of affairs there better than the king could know it himself. John, after a great shew of resistance, yielded to their entreaties; the soldiers and sailors were made to pay a fine in commutation of their services, and dismissed, grumbling bitterly, to their homes.[2148] The king gained a considerable sum of money by the transaction; and the primate and the marshal, in their boundless loyalty, were content to take upon themselves the burthen of its shame, which John felt, or affected to feel, so keenly that he actually put to sea with a small escort several days after the dispersion of the fleet. He landed again, however, at Wareham on the third day,[2149] and contented himself with sending his half-brother Earl William of Salisbury and his own son Geoffrey with a body of knights to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle.[2150] A year later he again assembled his fleet at Portsmouth;[2151] and this time he led it in person direct to La Rochelle. He landed there on June 7,[2152] and marched to Montauban, which he besieged and captured;[2153] the fickle viscount of Thouars, being now in revolt against Philip, speedily joined him;[2154] they advanced to Angers together, won it on September 6,[2155] ravaged Anjou with fire and sword, and were doing the like in south-eastern Britanny[2156] when Philip again crossed the Loire and harried the viscounty of Thouars under their very eyes.[2157] John at once proposed a truce; the terms were formally drawn up at Thouars on October 26;[2158] but when the English king’s signature was required, he was no longer to be found. He had slipped away the night before, and was out of reach at La Rochelle;[2159] and thence, on December 12, he sailed for England once more.[2160]
[2144] Rog. Wend. as above, p. 175.
[2145] Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 483.
[2146] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 144.
[2147] _Ibid._ Date, May 21–25; Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 7 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2148] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), pp. 152, 153. Cf. Rog. Wend. as above, p. 183.
[2149] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 154. Rog. Wend. (Coxe), vol. iii., p. 183. This happened June 13–15; see note 1 to R. Coggeshall as above, and Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 7 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2150] R. Coggeshall as above.
[2151] Rog. Wend. (as above), p. 186. John was at Porchester from Whit-Monday, May 22, to Friday, May 26. Hardy, _Itin. K. John_, a. 8 (_Intr. Pat. Rolls_).
[2152] He crossed from Stoke to Yarmouth on Trinity Sunday, May 28, and thence to La Rochelle on Wednesday, June 7; cf. Hardy, as above, with Rog. Wend. as above, who has twice written “Julii” for “Junii.”
[2153] On August 1, after fifteen days’ siege, says Rog. Wend. (as above), p. 187; but see Hardy as above.
[2154] Rigord (Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v.), p. 48. Will. Armor. _Gesta Phil. Aug._ (_ibid._), p. 86.
[2155] _Ibid._ Date from Chron. S. Albin. a. 1206 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 54, 57).
[2156] Will. Armor. as above.
[2157] Rigord (_ibid._), p. 48. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1206 (as above, pp. 56, 57).
[2158] Rymer, _Fœdera_, vol. i. p. 95.
[2159] Will. Armor. as above. He was at La Rochelle on October 25; Hardy as above.
[2160] Rog. Wend. as above, p. 188.
Of the two devoted English ministers who had stood by him through so much obloquy, only the Marshal was now left. A month after the humiliating scene at Porchester in 1205, Archbishop Hubert died.[2161] “Now for the first time am I truly king of England!” was the comment of his ungrateful master upon the tidings of his death.[2162] The words were words of ill omen for John himself, even more than for his people. He was indeed king of England, and of England alone. The prophecy of Merlin, which had been working itself out for a hundred years in the history of the Norman and Angevin houses, was fulfilled in yet one more detail: “the sword was parted from the sceptre.”[2163] The sword of Hrolf the Ganger and William the Conqueror, of Fulk the Red and Fulk the Black, had fallen from the hand of their unworthy descendant. The sceptre of his English forefathers was left to him. But the England over which he had to wield it was no longer the exhausted and divided country which had been swallowed up almost without an effort in the vast dominions of the young Count Henry of Anjou. It was an England which was once more able to stand alone--a new England which had been growing up under the hands of Henry himself, of his ministers, and of the ministers of his successor, silently and imperceptibly, they themselves knew not when or how; and between this new England and its stranger-king the day of reckoning was now to come.
[2161] _Ib._ p. 183. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 156.
[2162] Mat. Paris, _Hist. Angl._ (Madden), vol. ii. p. 104.
[2163] R. Coggeshall (Stevenson), p. 146.
NOTE.
THE DEATH OF ARTHUR.
Only two contemporary writers even pretend to give a circumstantial account of Arthur’s death: the Annalist of Margam and William of Armorica. The former tells us that John, “post prandium, ebrius et dæmonio plenus” [did John, as well as Richard, make the demon-blood answerable for his sins?], slew Arthur with his own hand, and having tied a great stone to the body, flung it into the Seine; thence it was drawn up in a fisherman’s net, recognized, and buried secretly, “propter metum tyranni,” in Notre-Dame-des-Prés (Ann. Margam, a. 1204; Luard, _Ann. Monast._, vol. i. p. 27). William allows the murderer no such excuse, if excuse it be, but works up the story into a long and horrible romance, in which John deliberately and of set purpose takes Arthur out alone with him by night in a boat on the Seine, plunges a sword into his body, and then rows along for three miles before he flings the corpse overboard (Will. Armor. _Philipp._, l. vi.; Duchesne, _Hist. Franc. Scriptt._, vol. v. pp. 166, 167). Both these writers place the scene at Rouen. The Chron. Brioc. (Morice, _Hist. Bret., preuves_, vol. i. col. 39) transfers it to Cherbourg: “Apud Cæsaris-burgum duxit, et ibi proditorie et tyrannice eum in mare submersit.” Rigord says not a word of the matter. R. Coggeshall (Stevenson, p. 145) only speaks of it incidentally, saying that Philip “sæviebat ... permaxime pro nece Arthuri, quem in Sequanâ submersum fuisse audierat.” Rog. Wend. (Coxe, vol. iii. p. 170) says merely “subito evanuit.” Mat. Paris in _Chron. Maj._ (Luard, vol. ii. p. 480) copies this, and adds: “modo fere omnibus ignorato; utinam non ut fama refert.” In _Hist. Angl._ (Madden, vol. ii. p. 95) he gives three stories as currently reported: accidental drowning, death from grief, and the third, “ipsum manibus vel præcepto regis Johannis fuisse peremptum”--this last being the assertion of the French, “quibus propter hostilitatem plena fides non est adhibenda.” But his own words in the _Chron. Maj._ shew that he could not wholly reject the unavoidable conclusion of John’s guilt.
The date of Arthur’s disappearance or death is given only by the Margam annalist. He places it on Maunday Thursday; but unluckily he has damaged his own authority on chronological matters by putting the whole affair a year too late, viz. in 1204 instead of 1203. Will. Armor., on the other hand, tells us that for three days before the murder John was at Moulineaux, near Rouen. These two chronological indications do not exactly agree, for in 1203 Maunday Thursday was April 3, and the _Itin. K. John_, a. 4 (Hardy, _Intr. Pat. Rolls_), shews that the king was at Moulineaux on Wednesday, April 2, but on the two preceding days he was at Rouen. It is however plain from the after-history that the deed must have been done shortly before Easter.
CHAPTER X.
THE NEW ENGLAND.
1170–1206.
In the eyes of all contemporary Europe the most striking and important event in English history during the half-century which had passed away since the accession of Henry II. was the murder of Archbishop Thomas. The sensation which it produced throughout western Christendom was out of all proportion both to the personal influence of its victim during his lifetime and to its direct political results. The popular canonization bestowed upon the martyr was ratified by Rome with almost unprecedented speed, in little more than two years after his death;[2164] the stream of pilgrims which flowed to his shrine, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, was such as had hardly been seen even at the “threshold of the Apostles” or at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and it flowed on without a break for more than three hundred years. Yet Pope and pilgrims all alike were probably as blind as Thomas himself had been to the true significance for England of his life and his death. The great ecclesiastical struggle of which he was the hero and the martyr marks a turning-point in the social history of the reign of Henry II. even more than in its political history. With the quarrel between Henry and Thomas the direction of the moral and intellectual revival whose growth we have in earlier chapters endeavoured to trace from the accession of Henry I. to the death of Archbishop Theobald passed altogether out of the hands in which it had prospered so long and so well--the hands of the higher clergy and the monastic orders. The flight of Thomas scattered to the winds the little band of earnest churchmen who had been sharers with him in the inheritance of Theobald’s policy and Theobald’s work, and left the reforming party in the Church without a rallying-point and without a leader. One man alone still remained among the higher clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith.[2165]
[2164] He was canonized by Alexander III. on Ash-Wednesday, February 21, 1173. Epp. dcclxxxiii.–dcclxxxvi., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 544–550.
[2165] The story of Gilbert’s dream, in Mat. Paris, _Chron. Maj._ (Luard), vol. ii. p. 240, was probably suggested by a line in the French _Life of S. Thomas_:
--“Gilebert Foliot, De lettres sout assez e servi Astarot”--
(Garnier, ed. Hippeau, p. 77)--where again in all likelihood the last words were prompted by nothing more than the exigencies of rime. That some such charges were however brought against Foliot we have seen above, p. 70, note 5{295}.
The final settlement of the controversy was in some sense a defeat of both parties; but the one which seemed to have gained the victory really suffered the heaviest loss. The king was indeed compelled to abandon his scheme for reforming the morals of the priesthood by the strong hand of his royal justice; the privilege of the clergy was saved, to fall at last before another King Henry four centuries later. Yet its staunchest champions must surely have felt their cause reduced well-nigh to an absurdity when they found that the first result of its triumph was to secure the primate’s very murderers from the penalty due to their crime;[2166] and far greater than the seeming gain of Henry’s surrender at Avranches was the loss to the English Church involved in the break-down of Theobald’s plans for the reform of the episcopate. The cowardice of the bishops during the struggle left them at its close wholly at the mercy of the king. The vacant sees, of which there were eight besides Canterbury, were filled after long delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the royal will; and before the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as completely secularized as it had been in the worst days of his grandfather. The inevitable consequences followed. As were the bishops, so, and even worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign through the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year, as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical policy. To that policy there were, indeed, two honourably marked exceptions. In 1186 Henry raised to the bishopric of Lincoln one of the holiest and wisest men then living, Hugh of Avalon. His dealings with the important and difficult question of the succession to the metropolitan see itself appear to have been prompted by equally disinterested motives. It was not the apathy or procrastination of the king, but the determination of the monks of Christ Church to use to the uttermost the favourable opportunity for asserting their independence, and the difficulty of finding any willing candidate for such a siege--perilous as the chair of S. Thomas was felt to be, that delayed the election of his successor for two years and a half, and his consecration for nine months longer still.[2167] The new Archbishop Richard was a monk of unblemished character, and though possessed of little talent or learning, fulfilled his office creditably for ten years;[2168] while Baldwin, who took his place in 1185, was a Cistercian of the best type--a type which, however, was now rapidly passing away.
[2166] Henry, not knowing what to do with the archbishop’s murderers, counselled or connived at their flight into Scotland. The Scot king and people, however, shewed such a strong disposition to hang them that they were driven to re-cross the border (MS. Lansdown., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv. p. 162). They then, it seems, took refuge at Knaresborough, and there lay hid till hunger compelled them to issue from their lurking-place. Finding themselves everywhere shunned like wild beasts, they at last in desperation gave themselves up to the mercy or the vengeance of the king. But the murderer of a priest was legally amenable to none save an ecclesiastical tribunal; Henry could do nothing with them but send them on to the Pope; and all that the Pope could do with them was to sentence them to lifelong exile and penance in Holy Land. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 25 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 163, 164); cf. MS. Lansdown (as above), pp. 162, 163. See also a minor illustration of the inconveniences attaching to this other side of the clerical immunities, in a letter of Archbishop Richard to some of his suffragans; Ep. dccxciv., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. vii. pp. 561–564.
[2167] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 239–245, 247.
[2168] “Homo quidem mediocriter literatus, sed laudabiliter innoxius, et, ne ambularet in magnis, modulo suo prudenter contentus.” Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 8 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 235, 236).
The monastic revival which had shed such brightness over the earlier half of the twelfth century died down long before its close. S. Bernard had not yet been seven years in his grave when John of Salisbury, certainly not a hostile witness, was compelled to acknowledge that the love of power and the greed of gain had infected the whole monastic body, not excepting even the White Monks. Rome herself soon found it needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance of the military orders.[2169] Reformers in the next generation vied with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux.[2170] The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all; within the space of two generations their name, once the symbol of the highest moral and spiritual perfection which the men of their day were capable of conceiving, had become a by-word for the lowest depths of wickedness and corruption. Startling as was the change, its causes are not far to seek. Pledged though they were by the origin and primitive constitution of their order to be a standing protest against the wealth and luxury of the Benedictines, they had nevertheless become, in less than a hundred years from their first appearance in England, the richest and most powerful body of monks in the realm. At the time of their coming, almost the whole extent of arable land throughout the country was already occupied; the only resource open to the new-comers was the yet unexhausted and, as it seemed in England at least, well-nigh inexhaustible resource of pasturage. They brought to their sheep-farming the same energy, skill and perseverance which characterized all their undertakings; and their well-earned success in this pursuit, together with the vast increase of the wool-trade which marked the same period, made them in a few years masters of the most productive branch of English industry. Temptation came with prosperity. But the more obvious temptations of wealth, the temptations to ease and vanity and luxurious self-indulgence, had little power over the stern temper of the White Monks; it was a deeper and a deadlier snare into which they fell; not sloth and gluttony, but avarice and pride, were their besetting sins. In the days of Richard and John, when we find them struggling and bargaining almost on equal terms with the king’s ministers and the king himself, they were indeed a mighty power both in Church and state; but the foundation on which their power now rested was wholly different from that upon which it had first arisen; its moral basis was gone. As an element in the nation’s spiritual life the Order of Cîteaux, once its very soul, now counted for worse than nothing.
[2169] See a canon of the third Lateran Council (A.D. 1179), in Will. Newb., l. iii. c. 3 (as above, pp. 221–223). On the Templars and Hospitaliers see also W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i. c. 23 (Wright, pp. 36–38).
[2170] See especially Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, distt. ii. and iii. (Brewer, vol. iv. pp. 29 _et seq._). “Grex albus, ordo nefandus,” is a description of the Cistercians quoted apparently from W. Map by his opponent W. Bothewald; Wright, _Latin Poems attributed to W. Mapes_, introd. p. xxxv. See also King Richard’s opinion of these two orders and of the Templars, in Gir. Cambr. as above, dist. ii. c. 12 (p. 54).
Still the monastic impulse which had guided so many religious movements in the past was not wholly dead. On the continent it was giving indeed fresh proofs of its vitality in the growth of two remarkable orders, those of Grandmont and of the Chartreuse, both of earlier origin than that of Cîteaux, but overshadowed until now by its transcendent fame. These however had little influence upon English religious life. The “Good Men” of Grandmont--as the brotherhood were commonly called--although special favourites of King Henry, never set foot in his island realm; the Carthusians reached it only in his last years, and the few settlements which they formed there never rose to any great importance.[2171] Out of all the English monasteries, of various orders, whose dates of foundation are known, only one hundred and thirteen arose during the thirty-five years of Henry’s reign, while a hundred and fifteen owed their origin to the nineteen troubled winters of his predecessor. In Yorkshire alone no less than twenty new houses had been founded under Stephen; only eleven were founded there under Henry.[2172] Towards the close of the century, indeed, the reputation of English monachism had fallen so low that in the high places of the Church a reaction in favour of secular clerks began to set in once more. One bishop, Hugh of Coventry, not only ventured to repeat the experiment which had been vainly tried elsewhere under the Confessor and the Conqueror, of turning the monks out of his cathedral and replacing them by secular canons, but actually proposed that all the cathedral establishments served by monks should be broken up and put upon a new foundation of a like secular character. Hugh himself was however scarcely the man to meet with general recognition in the capacity of a reformer; and his bold anticipation of the ecclesiastical revolution which was to come four centuries later ended in ignominious failure.[2173] It was, however, no less a personage than Archbishop Baldwin himself who in 1186 proposed to endow out of his archiepiscopal revenues a college of secular priests at Hackington by Canterbury, with the avowed object of providing a dwelling-place and a maintenance for the scholarship which monkish jealousy and monkish sloth had all but driven out of the cloisters where from the days of Theodore to those of Theobald it had found a home. This scheme was at once met by a determined opposition on the part of the monks of Christ Church, who suspected, perhaps not without reason, that it was part of a design for curtailing the privileges and destroying the independence of the metropolitan chapter. They instantly appealed to Rome, and the appeal opened a contest which absorbed the unlucky primate’s energies throughout the remainder of his life. He was steadily supported by the king; but the weight of the whole monastic body, except his own order, was thrown into the opposite scale; the general drift of ecclesiastical feeling still lay in the same direction; and after nearly four years of wearisome litigation at Rome and almost open warfare at Canterbury, the building of the new college was stopped by order of the Pope. The undaunted primate transferred his foundation to a new site at Lambeth, where it might have seemed less open to suspicion of rivalry with the Canterbury chapter; but the jealousy of the monks pursued it with relentless hatred, and Baldwin’s absence and death in Holy Land enabled them to secure an easy victory a year later. The next archbishop, Hubert Walter, took up his predecessor’s scheme with a zeal doubtless quickened by the fact that he was himself a secular clerk. The dispute dragged on for five more years, to end at last in the defeat of the primate, and, with him, of the last attempt made in England systematically to utilize the superfluous wealth of a great monastic corporation for the promotion of learning and the endowment of study.[2174] The attempt was made under unfavourable circumstances, perhaps by unskilful hands; and it was moreover made too soon. In English national sentiment, monachism was inseparably bound up with Christianity itself. To the monastic system England owed her conversion, her ecclesiastical organization, her earliest training as a nation and as a Church. Even if the guides to whom she had so long trusted were failing her at last, the conservatism and the gratitude of Englishmen both alike still shrank from casting aside a tradition hallowed by the best and happiest associations of six hundred years. The bent of popular sympathy was strikingly shewn by an episode in Baldwin’s quarrel with his monks, when their insolent defiance of his authority provoked him to cut off all their supplies, in the hope of starving them into submission. For eighty-four weeks not a morsel of food reached them save what was brought by their friends or by the pilgrims who crowded to the martyr’s shrine; so great however was the amount of these contributions, some of which came even from Jews, that--if we may believe the tale of one who was himself an inmate of the convent at this time--the brethren were able out of their superabundance to give a daily meal to two hundred poor strangers.[2175] As a spiritual force, however, monachism in England was well-nigh dead. Though it still kept a lingering hold upon the hearts of the people, it had lost its power over their souls. It might produce individual saints like Hugh of Lincoln; but its influence had ceased to mould the spiritual life of the nation. The time was almost ripe for the coming of the Friars.
[2171] On Grandmont (founded in 1176, by Stephen of Tierny, near Muret in the diocese of Limoges) see _Gall. Christ._, vol. ii. col. 645; _Vita S. Steph. Muret._ (Labbe, _Nova Biblioth._, vol. ii. pp. 674–683); Bern. Guidon, _De Ordine Grandimont._ (_ib._ p. 275 _et seq._); W. Map, _De Nug. Curial._, dist. i. cc. 17, 27 (Wright, pp. 28, 29, 58, 59); and Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 21 (Brewer, vol. iv. p. 254). Henry’s reverence for the brethren showed itself not only in frequent visits and benefactions to their house, and also in his desire to be buried there (above, p. 270), but also by the remarkable way in which he deferred to their suggestions and sought their counsel on grave matters of policy. Examples of this are frequent during the Becket controversy; another may be seen in _Gesta Hen._ (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 194. For the Chartreuse (diocese of Grenoble--founded in 1084 or 1086 by Bruno of Cöln, a canon of Reims) see W. Map, _De Nug. Cur._, dist. i. cc. 16 and 28 (Wright, pp. 26–28, 59, 60); Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. iii. c. 20 (as above, pp. 248–252); _Gall. Christ._, vol. xvi. cols. 268, 269. The history of the English Carthusian houses is in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, vol. vi. pt. i.; a full account of one, Witham, is given in the Life of S. Hugh of Lincoln, who had been its first prior.
[2172] These figures are from Mr. Howlett’s introduction to Will. Newb., vol. i. pp. xiii, xiv.
[2173] Gir. Cambr. _Spec. Eccles._, dist. ii. c. 23 (as above, pp. 65, 67). Ric. Devizes (Stevenson), pp. 65–67. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 470, 488, 489, 550.
[2174] The history of this quarrel is told at wearisome length by Gervase of Canterbury, and in the _Epistolæ Cantuarienses_. It is summed up and explained by Bishop Stubbs in his preface to the last-named book.
[2175] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 405.
Meanwhile the decay of holiness and learning in the cloister was brought into more vivid light by a great outburst of intellectual vigour of a wholly new type. The literary activity of the reign of Henry I. had been all but quenched by the troubles of Stephen’s reign. Chronicler after chronicler lays down his pen, as if in disgust or despair, in the middle of the dreary story, till Henry of Huntingdon and the nameless English annalist at Peterborough are left to struggle almost alone through the last years of anarchy to welcome the new king; and he is no sooner crowned than they, too, pass away into silence.[2176] The first half of Henry’s reign has no contemporary historian at all. The other branches of literature continued equally barren; and a promise of better things had scarcely dawned in the miscellaneous treatises of John of Salisbury when the whole intellectual horizon was darkened by the great ecclesiastical storm. No sooner had it subsided, however, than the literary impulse revived under wholly changed conditions. Its bent was still mainly historical; and, as might be expected, the first subject-matter upon which it seized was the history of the new martyr. Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters--his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. Modern research has ascertained that the book which may fairly be called the foundation-stone of this new school, as well as the primary authority for English political history from the death of S. Thomas to the third year of Richard Cœur-de-Lion--- the “Acts of King Henry and King Richard,” long attributed to Benedict abbot of Peterborough--is really the work of Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of London and treasurer. Its continuator, Roger of Howden, was a clerk of the royal chapel and an active and trusted officer of the royal administration under both Henry and Richard.[2177] A third chronicler of the period, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1153 to 1180, when he became dean of S. Paul’s, an office of great political as well as ecclesiastical importance, which he filled with distinction until his death in the fourth year of King John.[2178] The works of these three writers are examples of a species of historical composition which is one of the most valuable literary products of the later twelfth century. They are chronicles in the strictest sense of the word:--records of facts and events arranged year by year in orderly chronological sequence, and for the most part without any attempt at illustration, comment or criticism. But the gap which parts them from the ordinary type of monastic chronicle is as wide as that which parted the highly-placed ecclesiastical dignitary, the trusted minister of the Crown, or the favourite court-chaplain from the obscure monk who had spent, it may be, well-nigh his whole life in copying manuscripts in the scriptorium of Burton or Dunstable or Waverley. Their writers were not merely chroniclers; they were statesmen and diplomatists as well. Their position as members of the royal administration, dwelling in the capital or at the court, placed them in constant and intimate communication with the chief actors in the events which they narrate, events of which not only were they themselves frequently eye-witnesses, but in which they even took a personal, though it might be subordinate, share; it gave them access to the most authentic sources of political intelligence, to the official records of the kingdom, to the state-papers and diplomatic correspondence of the time, whereof a considerable part, if not actually drawn up by themselves, must at any rate have passed through their hands in the regular course of their daily business. The fulness and accuracy, the balance of proportion, the careful order which characterize the work of these statesmen-chroniclers are scarcely more remarkable than its cosmopolitan range; Henry’s historiographers, like Henry himself, sweep the whole known world into the wide circle of their intelligence and their interest; the internal concerns of every state, from Norway to Morocco and from Ireland to Palestine, find a place in the pages of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, side by side with the narrative of their sovereign’s wars with France or with the text of the various assizes whereby he was reforming the legal and judicial administration of their own native land. While, however, the first works of this new historical school thus rose far above the level of mere annals, they still stood far below the literary standard of history in the higher sense, which had been set up by a monk at Malmesbury half a century before. The only writer who in the latter half of the twelfth century, like William of Malmesbury in its earlier half, looked at history in its true light, not as a mere record of facts, but according to its old Greek definition, as “philosophy teaching by examples,” must be sought after all not in the court but in the cloister. William indeed had left no heir to his many-sided literary genius; but if some shreds of his mantle did fall upon any historian of the next generation, they fell upon one who bore his name, in an Augustinian priory among the Yorkshire moors.
[2176] Henry of Huntingdon, we know, intended to “devote a new book to the new king”; but it seems that this intention was not fulfilled.
[2177] On the _Gesta Hen._ and Rog. Howden see Bishop Stubbs’s prefaces to his editions of them in the Rolls series.
[2178] Stubbs, _R. Diceto_, vol. i. pref. pp. xxvi–lxxxiii.
William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in 1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a child--probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew towards its close, he wrote his _English History_, from the Norman conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry, no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old, hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian; the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S. Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life; its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes proved unavailing--when the men of the north were only too thankful to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one--a brief account of Scarborough[2180]--contains no distinct proof of having been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic, though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious and trustworthy.
[2179] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. 1, pp. 284, 285.
[2180] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 3 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 104).
The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of these--Bæda and Gildas--he has of course no ground in common; while the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never been quickened by a sight of the _Gesta Regum_ and _Historia Novella_, of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation. Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract from them their moral and political significance for the instruction of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary, written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad. In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told, but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal; his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale; he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive true history altogether out of the literary field.
[2181] On Will. Newb. and his work see Mr. Howlett’s preface to vol. i. of his edition of the _Historia Anglicana_ in the Rolls series.
[2182] Will. Newb., l. i. c. 22 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 69, 70).
[2183] See _e.g._, l. ii. c. 10, and l. iv. c. 32 (as above, pp. 123–125, 385, 386), l. v. cc. 6 and 14 (vol. ii. pp. 424–427, 451–453).
[2184] L. i. c. 26 (vol. i. p. 81).
[2185] From Mr. Freeman, in the _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxxiii. (1878), p. 216.
Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature. Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the accession of Henry II. Long before that time--probably in the days when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude--Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I. Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole credit of the _History of the British Kings_ to which his name is attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of their calling--doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac--beguiled their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187] Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into French verse for her entertainment.[2188]
[2186] Geoff. Monm. _Hist. Reg. Brit._, l. i. c. 1 (Giles, Caxton Soc., pp. 1, 2).
[2187] Alf. Beverl. (Hearne), pp. 1–3.
[2188] Geoff. Gaimar, vv. 6436–6460 (Wright, Caxton Soc., pp. 224, 225).