# The Normans in European History/Chapter 4

IV
THE NORMAN EMPIRE
The lecture upon Normandy and England sought to place in their Norman perspective the events leading to the Norman Conquest and to show how that decisive triumph of Norman strength and daring was made possible by the development of an exceptional ducal authority in Normandy and Maine and by the personal greatness of William the Conqueror. We now come to follow still further this process of expansion, to the Scotch border, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees, until the empire of the Plantagenet kings became the chief political fact in western Europe. The Norman empire is the outstanding feature of the twelfth century, as the conquest of England was of the eleventh.
This great imperial state is commonly known, not as the Norman, but as the Angevin, empire, because its rulers, Henry II, Richard, and John, were descended in the male line from the counts of Anjou. The phrase is, however, a misnomer, since it leads one to suppose that the Angevin counts were its creators, which is in no sense the case. The centre of the empire was Normandy, its founders were the Norman dukes. The marriage of the Princess Matilda to Count Geoffrey Plantagenet added ​Anjou to Normandy rather than Normandy to Anjou, and it was as duke of Normandy that their son Henry II began his political career. The extension of his domains southward by marriage only gave Normandy the central position in his realm, and it was the loss of Normandy under John which led to the empire's collapse.
Against the application of the term 'empire' to the dominion of Henry II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—from one point of view neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked, yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor will the government of the Norman- Angevin ruler square with the modern definition of an empire as "a state formed by the rule of one state over other states." His various dominions, if we except Ireland, were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in England, duke in Normandy, ​count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord—very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. It is an empire only in the broader and looser sense of the word, a great composite state, larger than a mere kingdom and imperial in extent if not in organization.
That Henry's realm was in extent imperial can easily be seen from the map. It extended from Scotland to the frontier of Spain, as the empire of his contemporary Frederick I extended from the Baltic and the North Sea to central Italy. And if the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy which made up Frederick's empire covered in the aggregate more territory, the actual authority of the ruler, whether in army, justice, or finance, was decidedly less than in the Anglo-Norman state. Henry had a stronger army, a larger revenue, a more centralized government. Moreover, the Norman empire was less artificial than it seems to us at first sight, accustomed as we are to the associations of the modern map. There was, especially with mediaeval methods of communication, nothing anomalous in a state which straddled the English Channel: Normandy was nearer ​England than was Ireland; it was quite as easy to go from London to Rouen as from London to York. The geographical bonds were also strong between Henry's continental dominions, for the roads of the twelfth century did not radiate from Paris, but followed mainly the old Roman lines, and from Rouen there was direct and easy connection with LeMans, Tours, Poitiers, and Bordeaux. In the matter of race, too, we must beware of being misled by our modern ideas. The English nation was at most only the vaguest sort of a conception, the French nation did not exist till the fifteenth century, and personal loyalty to the lord of many different lands was a natural expression of the conditions of the age. It is contrary to our prejudices that a single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic fisherman of the Breton coast,—the 'Pêcheur d'Islande' of a later day,—the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine, and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades foreshadow the d'Artagnan of the Three Musketeers and the 'cadets de Gascogne' of Cyrano de Bergerac. But it was little harder to rule these diverse lands from London or Rouen than from Paris; it was for the time being as easy to make them part of a Norman empire as of a French kingdom. Over the various languages and dialects ran the Latin of law and government and the French of the court and of affairs; while in political matters ​these countries were, as we shall see, quite capable of united action.
Let us call to mind how the empire of Henry II was formed. At the death of the Conqueror in 1087 the lands which he had brought together and ruled with such good peace were divided between his two eldest sons, Robert receiving Normandy and William the Red, England. Save for William's regency over Normandy during his brother's absence on the Crusade, the two countries remained separate during his reign, and were united once more only in 1106 when William's successor, his younger brother Henry I, after defeating and deposing Robert at Tinchebrai, ruled as duke of Normandy and king of England. This was the inheritance which, after the death of Prince William in the White Ship, Henry sought to hand down to his daughter Matilda, but which passed for the most part to his nephew Stephen of Blois. Stephen, however, never gained a firm hold in England and soon lost Normandy to Matilda's husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom it was conquered and ruled in the name of his son Henry, later Henry II. Crowned duke of Normandy in 1150, Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou in the following year, and at Stephen's death in 1154 became king of England. Meanwhile, in 1152, he had contracted a marriage of the greatest political importance with Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, whose union with the French king Louis VII had just been annulled by the ​Pope; an alliance which made him master of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony and therewith of two-thirds of France. Apart from certain adjustments in central France, the only addition to these territories made during Henry's reign was the conquest of eastern Ireland in the years following 1169. Into these Irish campaigns and their consequences for the whole later history of the island we cannot attempt to go. Let me only point out that the leading spirits were Norman, except so far as they were Irish exiles, and that the names which now make their appearance in Irish annals are Norman names—the Lacys and the Clares, the Fitzgeralds and the de Courcys, as Irish before long as the Irish themselves.
Substantially, then, the empire of Henry II remained in extent as he found it at his accession to the English throne at the age of twenty-one; it was not created by him but inherited or annexed by marriage. Accordingly it is not as a conqueror but as a ruler that he can lay claim to greatness. But although Henry attempted little in the way of acquiring new territory, he did much to consolidate his possessions and to extend his European power and influence. His daughters were married to the greatest princes of their time, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, King Alphonso VIII of Castile, King William II of Sicily. He made an alliance with the ruler of Provence and planned a marriage with the house of Savoy that would have given him control of the passes ​into Italy. He took his part in the struggle of Pope and anti-Pope, of Pope and Emperor; he corresponded with the emperor of Constantinople, refused the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and died on the eve of his departure on a crusade. No one could lay claim to greater influence upon the international affairs of his time.
Occupying this international position, Henry must not be viewed, as he generally is, merely as an English king. He was born and educated on the Continent, began to reign on the Continent, and spent a large part of his life in his continental dominions. He ruled more territory outside of England than in, and his continental lands had at least as large a place as England in his policy. It is perhaps too much to say, in modern phrase, that he 'thought imperially,' but he certainly did not think nationally; and when his latest biographer speaks of Henry's continental campaigns as "foreign affairs," he is thinking insularly, for Normandy, Anjou, Gascony even, were no more foreign than England itself. Henry is not a national figure, either English or French; he is international, if not cosmopolitan. Only from the point of view of later times can we associate him peculiarly with English history, when after the collapse of the Norman empire under his sons, the permanent influence of his work continued to be felt most fully in England.
​Both as a man and as a ruler, the figure of Henry II has come down to us distorted by the loves and hates of an age of the most violent and bitter controversy. Brilliant though scarcely heroic to his friends, to his enemies he was a veritable demon of tyranny and crime, whose lurid end pointed many a moral respecting the sins of princes and the vengeance of the Most High. Eminently a strong man, he was not regarded as in any sense superhuman, but rather as an intensely human figure, tempted in all points like as other men and yielding where they yielded. Heavy, bull-necked, sensual, with a square jaw, freckled face, reddish hair, and fiery eyes that blazed in sudden paroxysms of anger, he must, in Bishop Stubbs's phrase, "have looked generally like a rough, passionate, uneasy man." The dominant impression is one of exhaustless energy accompanied by a physical restlessness which kept him whispering and scribbling during mass, hunting and hawking from morning to night, and riding constantly from place to place throughout his vast dominions with a rapidity that always took his enemies by surprise. On one occasion he covered one hundred and seventy miles in two days. Well-educated for a prince of his time and able to hold his own in ready converse with the clerks of his court, his tastes were neither speculative nor romantic, but were early turned toward practical life. He was primarily "an able, plausible, astute, cautious, unprincipled ​man of business," fond of work and delighting in detail, with a distinct gift for organization and a mastery of diplomacy, wise in the selection of his subordinates, skilful in evasion, but quick and sure in action. Strong, clear-headed, and tenacious, Henry represents the type of the man of large affairs, and in another age might have amassed a large private fortune as a successful business man. In the twelfth century the chief opportunity for talent of this sort was in public life, where the king's household was also the government of the state, the strengthening of royal authority was the surest means of attaining national unity and security, and the interest of the king coincided with the interest of the state. To the present day, with its cry for business men in public office, this seems natural enough; but we must remember that feudalism meant exactly the opposite of business efficiency, and that the problem of creating an effective government in the midst of a feudal society turned largely on the maintenance of a businesslike administration of justice, finance, and the army. By his success in these fields Henry went a long way toward creating a modern state, and did, as a matter of fact, establish the most highly organized and effective government of its time in western Europe.
Our conceptions of the nature of Henry II's public work have been in certain respects modified as the result of modern research. It has become clear, in the first ​place, that he was an administrator rather than a legislator, and that such of his legislation as has reached us belongs in the category of instructions to his officers rather than in that of general enactments. These measures lack the permanence of statutes; they are supplemented, modified, withdrawn, in accordance with the will of a sovereign whose restless temper showed itself in a constant series of legal and administrative experiments. Many of his changes seem to have been effected through oral command rather than written instructions. In the second place, Henry's originality has been somewhat diminished by a more careful study of the work of his predecessors, notably of Henry I, in whose reign it is now possible to trace at work some of the elements that were once supposed to have been innovations of his grandson. As a whole, however, the work of Henry II stands the test of analysis and gives him an eminent place in the number of mediaeval statesmen.
Precocious in many ways as was the political organization of Henry's dominions, it was conditioned by the circumstances of its time, and we must be careful to conceive it in terms of the twelfth century and not of the fifteenth or the twentieth. The Norman sovereign had at his disposal none of the legal or bureaucratic traditions which were still maintained at Constantinople and were not without their influence upon the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Nor was the time ripe for the creation ​out of hand of a strong central government for his various territories, such as became possible in the Burgundian state of the fifteenth century and in the Austrian state which was modelled upon it. Henry was in the midst of a feudal society and had to make the best of it. He had to reckon with the particularistic traditions of his several dominions as well as with the feudal opposition to strong government, and western Europe was still a long way from the economic conditions which lie at the basis of modern bureaucracies.
When we speak of the Anglo-Norman or the Angevin empire, we must accordingly dismiss from our minds at the outset any notion of a government with a capital, a central treasury and judicature, and a common assembly. A fixed central treasury existed only in the most advanced of the individual states, and it was many years before the courts established themselves permanently at Westminster and Rouen. Government was still something personal, centring in the person of the sovereign, and the ministers of the state were still his household servants. The king had no fixed residence, and as he moved from place to place, his household and its officers moved with him. Indeed kings were just beginning to learn that it was safer to leave their treasure in some strong castle than to carry it about in their wanderings; it was not till 1194 that the capture of his baggage train by Richard the Lion-Hearted taught the French king Philip Augustus to leave his money and his ​title-deeds at Paris when he went on a military expedition. We must not be surprised to find that the principal common element in Henry's empire was Henry himself, supplemented by his most immediate household officers, and that many of these officers, such as the seneschals and the justiciars, were limited in their functions to England or Normandy or Anjou, and usually remained in their particular country to look after affairs in the king's absence. There was, however, one notable exception, the chancellor, or royal secretary. Regularly an ecclesiastic, so that there was no chance of his turning the office into an hereditary fief, the nature of the chancellor's duties attached him continuously to the person of the sovereign and made him the natural companion of the royal journeys. He was far, however, from being a mere private secretary or amanuensis, but stood at the head of a regular secretarial bureau, which had its clerks and chaplains and its well-organized system of looking after the king's business. The study of the history of institutions goes to show that, on the whole, there is no better test of the strength or weakness of a mediaeval government than its chancery. If it had no chancery, as was the case under the early Norman dukes, or if its methods, as seen in its formal acts, were irregular and unbusinesslike, as under Robert Curthose, there was sure to be a lack of organization and continuity in its general conduct of affairs. If, on the other hand, the chancery was well organized, its rules and practices ​regularly observed, its documents clear and sharp and to the point, this meant normally that an efficient government stood behind it.
Now, judged by the most exacting standards, the chancery of Henry II had reached a high degree of perfection. It has quite recently been the subject of an elaborate study by the most eminent medievalist of our time, the late Léopold Delisle, who cannot restrain his admiration for its regularity, its accuracy and finish, and the extraordinary range and rapidity of its work. The documents issued in the name of Henry II during his long reign of thirty-five years, says Delisle, "both for his English and his continental possessions, are all drawn up on the same plan in identical formulae and expressed with irreproachable precision in a simple, clear, and correct style, which is also remarkably uniform save for a small number of pieces which show the hand of others than the royal officers." If the judgment of this master required support, I should be glad to confirm it from the personal examination of some hundreds of Henry's charters and writs. Such uniformity, it should be observed, is evidence not only of the extent and technical attainments of the chancery but of substantially similar administrative conditions throughout the various dominions to which these documents are addressed: officers, functions, legal and administrative procedure are everywhere very much alike. Moreover, a study of ​these charters reveals another fact of fundamental importance. Even more significant than uniformity of procedure in a chancery is the type of document issued, for since the strength of government lies not in legislation but in administration, a sure index of a state's efficiency will be found in the extent and character of its administrative correspondence. This test places the Norman empire far in advance of any of its contemporaries. Every payment from the treasury, every allowance of an account, every summons to the army, every executive command or prohibition, was made by formal royal writ—per breve regis, as we read page after page in the account rolls. Of the many thousands of such writs issued in Henry's reign, exceedingly few have come down to us, but no one can read these, terse, direct, trained down to bone and muscle, without realizing the keen minds and the clear-cut administrative methods which they represent. Take an example:
H. Dei gratia rex Anglorum et dux Normannorum et Aquitanorum et comes Andegavorum R. thesaurario et Willelmo Malduit et Warino filio Giroldi camerariis suis salutem.
Liberate de thesauro meo xxv marcas fratribus Cartusie de illis l marcis quas do eis annuatim per cartam meam.
Teste Willelmo de Sancte Marie Ecclesia. Apud Westmoster.
The purpose of these writs might, of course, vary—seize A of this land; do right to B for that tenement; ​secure C in his possession; bring your knights to such a place at such a time; summon twelve men to decide D's right;—but each has its appropriate form, which is always crisp and exact. All speak the language of a strong, businesslike administration which expected as a matter of course prompt and implicit obedience throughout its broad dominions.
If such a system be given enough time, it will inevitably exert a strong and persistent influence in favor of centralization and uniformity, and it would be interesting to know just what was accomplished in these directions during the half century of the Norman empire's existence. The parting advice which Henry had received from his father Geoffrey was to avoid the transfer of customs and institutions from one part of his realm to another, and the wisdom of the warning was obvious under feudal conditions, if not in all imperial governments. But there is a difference between the field of local custom and the institutions of administration, and while even in matters of feudal law there is some evidence of a generalization of certain reforms in the rules of succession, in the conduct of government it was impossible to keep the different parts of the empire in water-tight compartments so long as there was a common administration and frequent interchange of officials between different regions. We must remember that Henry was a constant experimenter, and that if a thing worked well in one place it was likely to be tried in ​other. Thus the Assize of Arms and the ordinance for the crusading tithe were first promulgated for his continental dominions, while the great English inquest of knights' fees in 1166 preceded by six years the parallel Norman measure. The great struggle with Becket over the church courts seems to have had a Norman prologue. The chronological order in any given case might well be a matter of chance; but in administrative matters the influence is likely to have travelled from the older and better organized to the newer and more loosely knit dominions, from England, Normandy, and Anjou on the one hand to Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony on the other.
Of Henry's hereditary territories, Anjou seems the least important from the point of view of constitutional influence. Much smaller in area than either Normandy or England, it was a compact and comparatively centralized state long before Henry's accession, but the opportunity for immediate action on the count's part simplified its government to a point where its experience was of no great value under Anglo-Norman conditions. Certainly no Angevin influence is traceable in the field of finance, and none seems probable in the administration of justice. In the case of Normandy and England the resemblance of institutions is closest, and a host of interesting problems present themselves which carry us back to the effects of the Norman Conquest and even further.
​It is, of course, one of the fundamental problems of English history how far the government of England was Normanized in the century following the Conquest. To a French scholar like Boutmy everything begins anew in 1066, when "the line which the whole history of political institutions has subsequently followed was traced and defined." To Freeman, on the other hand, the changes then introduced were temporary and not fundamental. He is never tired of repeating that the old English are the real English; progress comes by going back to the principles of the Anglo-Saxon period and casting aside innovations which have crept in in modern and evil times; "we have advanced by falling back on a more ancient state of things, we have reformed by calling to life again the institutions of earlier and ruder times, by setting ourselves free from the slavish subtleties of Norman lawyers, by casting aside as an accursed thing the innovations of Tudor tyranny and Stewart usurpation." The trend of present scholarly opinion lies between these extremes. It refuses to throw away the Anglo-Saxon period, whose institutions we are just beginning to read aright; but it rejects its idealization at Freeman's hands, who, it has been said, saw all things "through a mist of moots and witans" and not as they really were, and it finds more truth in Carlyle's remark that the pot-bellied equanimity of the Anglo-Saxon ​needed the drilling and discipline of a century of Norman tyranny.
Whether he was needed much or little, the Norman drill-master came and did his work, and when he had finished the two countries were in many respects alike. He left his mark on the English language and on English literature, which were submerged for three centuries under the French of the court, the castle, and the town, and in the process were permanently modified into a mixed speech. He left his mark on architecture in the great cathedrals of the Norman bishops and the massive castles with their Norman keeps. He made England a feudal society, however far it may have gone in that direction before, and its law, from that day to this, a feudal law. And he remade the central government under the strong hand of a masterful dynasty which compelled its subjects to will what the king willed. Whatever permanence we may assign to Anglo-Saxon local institutions,—and we cannot help granting them this in considerable measure,—it is not now held that there was any notable Anglo-Saxon influence upon the central administration. At best England before the Conquest was a loose aggregation of tribal commonwealths divided by local feeling and by the jealousies of the great earls, and its kingship did not grow stronger with process of time. The national assembly of wise men, whose persistence Freeman labored in vain to prove, became the feudal ​council of the Norman barons, and this council, the curia regis, and the royal household which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration.
Yet in a vigorous state central and local are never wholly separable, and it is where they touch that recent study has been able to show some continuity of development between the two periods, namely in the fiscal system which culminated in the exchequer of the English kings. Of all the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the efficient conduct of their government. Nowhere in western Europe did a king receive so large a revenue as here; nowhere was it collected and administered in so regular and businesslike a fashion; nowhere do the accounts afford so complete a view of "the whole framework of society." The main features of this system are simple and striking.
In every administrative district of Normandy and England the king had an agent—in England the sheriff, in Normandy the vicomte or bailli—to collect his revenues, which consisted chiefly of the income from lands and forests, the fees and fines in the royal courts, the ​proceeds of the various feudal incidents, and the various payments which there were from time to time levied under the name of Danegeld, scutage, aid, or gift. Twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, these agents were required to come to the treasury and render their accounts to the king's officers. At Easter the sheriff was expected to pay in half of his receipts, receiving therefor down to 1826 a receipt in the form of a notched stick or tally, split down the middle so that there was exact agreement between the portion retained at the exchequer and the portion carried off by the sheriff to be produced when the acounts of the year were settled at Michaelmas. The great session of the exchequer at Michaelmas was a very important occasion and is described for us in detail in a most interesting contemporary treatise, the Dialogue on the Exchequer, written by Richard the King's Treasurer, in 1178-79. There the sheriff met the great officials of the king's household who were also the great officers of the Anglo-Norman state—the justiciar, chancellor, constable, treasurer, chamberlains, and marshal, reënforced by clerks, tally-cutters, calculators, and other assistants. The place and the institution took their names from a chequered table or chessboard—the Latin name scaccarium means a chessboard in size and shape not unlike a billiard table, covered with cloth which was ruled off into columns for pence, shillings, pounds, hundreds and thousands of pounds. On one side were set forth in this graphic manner the sums ​which the sheriff was required to pay, on the other he and his clerk tried to offset these with tallies, receipts, warrants, and counters representing actual cash. Played with skill and care on each side, for the stakes were high, this great match was likened to a game of chess between the sheriff and the king's officers. Its results were recorded each year, district by district and item by item, on a great roll, called the pipe roll from the pipes, or skins of parchment sewed end to end, of which it was made up. For England we have an unbroken series of these rolls from the second year of Henry II, as well as an odd roll of Henry I, constituting a record of finance and government quite unique in contemporary Europe. The series was doubtless as complete for Normandy, but there survive from Henry's reign only the roll of 1180 and fragments of that of 1184. For the other Plantagenet lands nothing remains.
This remarkable fiscal system comprised accordingly a regular method of collecting revenue, a central treasury and board of account, and a distinctive and careful mode of auditing the accounts. There was nothing like it north of Sicily, and contemporaries admired it both for its administrative efficiency and for the wealth and resources which it implied. Although something of the sort seems to have existed in all the territories of the Plantagenet empire and the different bodies seem to have maintained a certain amount of cooperation, all our records come from England and Normandy, ​and there can be no question that it is distinctively an Anglo-Norman institution. Whether, however, it is English or Norman in origin and how it came into existence, are still in many respects obscure questions. The exchequer is not an innovation of Henry II, for the surviving roll of Henry I and certain incidental evidence show that it existed on both sides of the Channel in the reign of his grandfather. In the time of the author of the Dialogue there was a tradition that it had been imported from Normandy by William the Conqueror, but this must be discounted by the fact that certain elements of the system can be traced in Anglo-Saxon England. The truth is that the exchequer is a complicated institution, some parts of which may be quite ancient and the results of parallel development on both sides of the Channel; at least the problem of priority has reached no certain solution. Its most characteristic feature, however, its peculiar method of reckoning, does not seem either of Norman or English origin, but derived from the abacus of the ancient Romans, as used and taught in the continental schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
One who tries to perform with Roman numerals a simple problem in addition or subtraction—or better yet, in multiplication or division—will have no difficulty in understanding why people unacquainted with the Arabic system of notation have had recourse to a counting-machine or abacus. The difficulty, of course, ​lies not so much in the clumsy form of the individual Roman numbers as in the absence of the zero and the reckoning by position which it makes possible. This defect the abacus supplied. By means of a sanded board or a cloth-covered table or a string of counters it provided a row of columns each of which represented a decimal group—units, tens, hundreds, etc.—by which numerical operations could be rapidly and accurately performed. Employed by the ancient Romans, as by the modern Chinese, the arithmetic of the abacus became a regular subject of instruction in the schools of the Middle Ages, whence its reckoning was introduced into the operations of the Anglo-Norman treasury. The most recent student of the subject, Reginald Lane Poole, connects the change with the Englishmen who studied at the cathedral school of Laon early in the twelfth century. To me it seems somewhat earlier, brought by abacists who came to England in the eleventh century from the schools of Lorraine. In either case its introduction was much more than a change of bookkeeping. Convenient as such reckoning was in general, it was the only possible method for men who could neither read nor write, like the Anglo-Norman sheriffs and many of the royal officers, and its use made it possible to carry on the fiscal business of the state on a large scale, in an open and public fashion, ​with full justice to all parties, and with accuracy, certainty, and dispatch. It was a businesslike system for busy and businesslike men.
In the history of judicial administration the personal initiative of Henry II is more evident than in finance. The king had an especial fondness for legal questions and often participated in their decision, yet his influence was exerted particularly to develop a system of courts and judges which could work in his absence and without his intervention. Although the institution is found previously both in England and Normandy, it is in Henry's reign that the system of itinerant justices is fully organized with regular circuits and a rapidly extending jurisdiction which broke down local privileges and exemptions and by its decisions created the common law. Hitherto chiefly a feudal assembly concerned with the causes of the king and his barons, after Henry's time the king's court is a permanent body of professional judges and a tribunal for the whole realm. It is no accident that his reign produced in the treatise of Glanvill on The Laws and Customs of England the first of the great series of textbooks which are the landmarks of English legal development. Henry's reign is also an important period in the growth of Norman law, the earliest formulation of which reaches us ten years after his death in the Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie, and the reduction of local custom to writing is a process ​which went on in his other continental possessions; yet, as in finance, England and Normandy plainly took the lead in legal literature and in legal development. Indeed, the distinction between justice and finance is less sharp than we might at first suppose, for the growth of jurisdiction meant increased profit from fees and fines, and heavy payments were necessary to secure the intervention of the royal judges. In this sense Henry has often been called, and rightly, a seller of justice, but his latest biographer has pointed out that "if the commodity was expensive it was at least the best of its kind, and there is a profound gulf between the selling of justice and of injustice. A bribe might be required to set the machine of the law in motion, but it would be unavailing to divert its course when once started." The wheels of government are turned by self-interest as well as by unselfish statesmanship.
Of the many judicial reforms of Henry's reign none is more significant than the measures which he took for extending the use of the jury as a method of trial in the royal courts, and none illustrates better the relation of Norman to English institutions. Characteristic as the jury is in the history of English government and of English law, as at once the palladium of personal liberty and the basis of representative institutions in Parliament, it is a striking fact that originally it was "not popular but royal," not English but Norman, or rather ​Frankish through the intermediary of Normandy. Although it has a history which can be traced for more than a thousand years, the jury does not definitely make its appearance in England until after the Norman Conquest, and the decisive steps in its further development were taken during the union of England and Normandy and probably as a result of Norman experience. It is now the general opinion of scholars that the modern jury is an outgrowth of the sworn inquests of neighbors held by command of the Norman and Angevin kings, and that the procedure in these inquests is in all essential respects the same as that employed by the Frankish rulers three centuries before. It is also generally agreed that while such inquests appear in England immediately after the Norman Conquest,—the returns of the Domesday survey are a striking example,—their employment in lawsuits remains exceptional until the time of Henry II, when they become in certain cases a matter of right and a part of the settled law of the land. What had been heretofore a special privilege of the king and of those to whom he granted it, became under Henry a right of his subjects and a part of the regular system of justice. Accomplished doubtless gradually, first for one class of cases and then for another, this extension of the king's prerogative procedure to his subjects seems to have been formulated in a definite royal act or series of acts, probably by royal ordinances or ​assizes, whence the procedure is often called the assize. In England the earliest of these assizes known to us appears in 1164 in the Constitutions of Clarendon, followed shortly by applications of this mode of trial to other kinds of cases. In Normandy repeated references to similar assizes occur some years earlier, between 1156 and 1159, so that as far as present evidence goes, the priority of Normandy in this respect is clear. Moreover, Normandy offers two pieces of evidence that are still earlier. In the oldest cartulary of Bayeux cathedral, called the Black Book and still preserved high up in one of its ancient towers, are two writs of the duke ordering his justices to have determined by sworn inquest, in accordance with the duke's assize, the facts in dispute between the bishop of Bayeux and certain of his tenants. The ducal initial was left blank when these writs were copied into the cartulary, in order that it might later be inserted in colors by an illuminator who never came; and those who first studied these documents drew the hasty conclusion that they were issued by Henry as duke of Normandy before he became king. It was not, however, usual for the mediæval scribe to leave the rubricator entirely without guidance when he came to insert his initials, but to mark the proper letter lightly in the place itself or on the margin, and an attentive examination of the well-thumbed margins of the Bayeux Black Book shows that this was no exception to the rule, and that in both the cases in question ​the initial G had been carefully indicated. G can, of course, stand only for Henry's father Geoffrey, so that some general use of the assize as a method of trial in the ducal courts can be proved for his reign. As no such documents have reached us for his predecessors, it would be tempting to assume the influence of Angevin precedents; but this runs counter to what we know of the judicial institutions of Anjou in this period, as well as of the policy of Geoffrey in Normandy, which was to follow in all respects the system of Henry I. Although the first general use of the sworn inquest as a mode of trial thus antedates Henry II, it is still a Norman institution.
It would carry us too far to discuss the many problems connected with the use of the jury in Henry's reign or to follow the many changes still needed to convert the sworn inquest into the modern jury. It is sufficient for our present purpose to mark its Norman character, first as being carried to England by the Normans in its older form, and then as being developed into its newer form on Norman soil. It should, however, be remembered that its later history belongs to England rather than to Normandy. With the rise of new forms of procedure in the thirteenth century, the jury on the Continent declines and finally disappears; "but for the conquest of England,” says Maitland, "it would have perished and long ago have become a matter for ​the antiquary." In England, however, it was early brought into relations with the local courts of the hundred and the county, where it struck root and developed into a popular method of trial which was later to become a defence against the king's officers who had first introduced it. A bulwark of individual liberty, the jury also holds an important place in the establishment of representative government, for it was through representative juries that the voice of the countryside first asserted itself in the local courts, for the assessment of taxes as well as for the decision of cases, and it was in the negotiations of royal officers with the local juries that we can trace the beginnings of the House of Commons. It is no accident that the first employment of local juries for the assessment of military and fiscal obligations belongs to the later years of Henry II.
It may seem a far cry from the Frankish inquests of the ninth century to the juries and the representative assemblies of the twentieth, but the development is continuous, and it leads through Normandy. In this sense the English-speaking countries are all heirs of the early Normans and of the Norman kings who, all unconsciously, provided for the extension and the perpetuation of the Norman methods of trial. At such points Norman history merges in that of England, the British Empire, and the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The chief events in the history of the Norman empire are treated in the general works of Miss K. L. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings (London, 1887); Sir J. H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire (London, 1903); G. B. Adams, History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (London, 1905); H. W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins (London, 1905). There is a brief biography of Henry the Second by Mrs. J. R. Green (London, 1888; reprinted, 1903); and a more recent one by L. F. Salzmann (Boston, etc., 1914). A notable characterization of Henry and his work is given by William Stubbs, in the introduction to his edition of Benedict of Peterborough, ii (London, 1867), reprinted in his Historical Introductions (London, 1902), pp. 89-172. For the continental aspects of the reign see F. M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy (Manchester, 1913); and his articles in the English Historical Review, xxi, xxii (1906–07). Cf. A. Cartellieri, Die Machtstellung Heinrichs II. von England, in Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher, viii, pp. 269-83 (1898); F. Hardegen, Imperialpolitik König Heinrichs II. von England (Heidelberg, 1905). The fullest account of Irish affairs is G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (Oxford, 1911).
The best general accounts of constitutional and legal matters are those of Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, i (last edition, Oxford, 1903), corrected by various special studies of J.H. Round, to be found chiefly in his Feudal England (London, 1895; reprinted, 1909) and Commune of London (Westminster, 1899); and by Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (second edition, London, 1898). The results of recent investigation are incorporated in the studies and notes appended to the French translation of Stubbs by Petit-Dutaillis (Paris, 1907); this supplementary material is translated into English by W. E. Rhodes (Manchester, 1911). There are admirable studies of the chancery in L. Delisle Recueil des actes de Henri II concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, introduction (Paris, 1909); and of the exchequer in R. L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1912). See also Hubert Hall, Court Life under the Plantagenets (London, 1890; reprinted, 1902). For the more distinctively Norman side of the government see Haskins, "The ​Government of Normandy under Henry II," in American Historical Review, xx, pp. 24-42, 277-91 (1914-15); and earlier papers on "The Early Norman Jury," ibid., viii, pp. 613-40 (1903); "The Administration of Normandy under Henry I," in English Historical Review, xxiv, pp. 209-31 (1909); "Normandy under Geoffrey Plantagenet," ibid., xxvii, pp. 417-44 (1912); Delisle, Des revenus publics en Normandie au XII$^e$ siècle, in Bibliothèque de L'École des Chartes, x-xiii (1848-52); Valin, Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, supplemented by R. de Fréville, "Étude sur l'organisation judiciaire en Normandie aux XII$^e$ et XII$^e$ siècles," in Nouvelle Revue historique de droit, 1912, pp. 681-736. The best general account of Norman law is still that of H. Brunner, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte (Berlin, 1872).
* ↑ W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, p. i.
* ↑ Salzmann, Henry II, where the continental aspects of Henry's reign are dismissed in a brief chapter on "foreign affairs." The heading would be more appropriate to the account of Henry's campaigns in Ireland.
* ↑ Benedict of Peterborough, ii, p. xxxiii.
* ↑ Benedict of Peterborough, ii, p. xxxi.
* ↑ Recueil des actes de Henri II, Introduction, p. i; cf. p. 151.
* ↑ Delisle, p. 166, from Madox, Exchequer, i, p. 390.
* ↑ The English Constitution, p. 3.
* ↑ Origin of the English Constitution (London, 1872), p. 20 f.
* ↑ Stubbs, Benedict of Peterborough, ii, p. xxxv.
* ↑ Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century, pp. 42-57; Haskins, "The Abacus and the King's Curia," in English Historical Review, xxvii, pp. 101-06.
* ↑ Salzmann, Henry II, p. 176.
* ↑ Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, p. 142
* ↑ Pollock and Maitland, i, p. 141.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse