The History of England A Study in Political Evolution

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hitecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but these things were no more English than the government of India to-day is Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear from English history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops, earls, and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with "fitz" and distinguished by "de." No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey, Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert ha

loitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen bring the same ideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases the steady pressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate local and class divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made an English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has made a

n that age. They could not have stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment and the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for h

al system was really introduced into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar. Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introduced from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was introduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalism was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations from a vast

theory was applied that all land was held directly or indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there was no land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some sort of service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held by military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief. When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it to the heir after th

e population were, however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords, and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and none at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry, nor enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All these forms of tenure and kinds of servi

it could be levied. But the hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of local details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purpose the germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up in England; and the agricultural organization of the township was dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the manor. The lord became the lord of all

old upon their masters. For this reason William imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant was bound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king. William was determined that every man's duty to the king should come first. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secu

other spheres of politics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as the private property of the family rather than a position of national trust, thus escaping national control and being prostituted for personal ends. The earldoms in England were so perverted; originally they were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires; gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had was to deprive the earls of their power

had some value as reminders to kings of their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually, too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage, and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order and communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commerce was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London w

monarchical yoke on the barons; and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo- Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear each other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased with his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once in English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence. The church was

retences of a radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of his grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. This reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, and the untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success of Henry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy must not be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; he wanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed the power of moving them in this direction; and

d him but not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, to explode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office. By the assize of arms he called the mass of Englishmen to redress the military balance between the barons and the crown. By other assizes he en

compurgators and each compurgator's oath was valued according to his property, just as the number of a man's votes is still proportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the ritual was its su

e administration of justice, because justitia magnum emolumentum, the administration of justice is a great source of profit. Henry II's zeal for justice sprang from similar motives: the more justice he could draw from the feudal courts to his own, the greater the revenue he would divert from his unruly barons into the royal exchequer. From the central stores of the curia regis he dispensed a justice that was cheaper, more expeditious, and

s took them, and became in time the common law of England, common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices. One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation, when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among other foreign legal concepts-assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff, defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate, recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest, judge, jury, justice, verdict

lp of his barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient despotism, and is allowed to create

anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite person or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges, such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemption from the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred, of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majority were liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoyment you were not as other men; the barons would have eared little for liberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them liberty meant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyed in common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty," but of

n-chief, were not to pay more than the ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the

enough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority, even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it is as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new rel

, in the reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England as a province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriff of six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castles and keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour w

and those who preferred England became more English than they had been before. The French invasion of England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the cleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English, in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the nav

l foul of both the barons and the king; Simon de Montfort detached himself from the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placed himself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English. He summoned representatives from cities and boroughs to sit side by side with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the realm, which now became an English parliament; and for the first time since the Norman Conquest men of the subject race were c