CHAPTER XVII

NORMANS AND ANGEVINS

The Normans who conquered England were far more different from the English whom they conquered than the Danes, under Canute, had been. And yet Danes and Normans, both being "Northmen," were closely akin. But we have to note that the conquering Normans came, not from the north, but from the south from Normandy; and some years of residence there, among the Franks or French, had changed them. Moreover, we have to remember that, according to the estimates of historians, only about one-third of the force with which Duke William came to England was really Norman. The larger part was of Franks and any others whom the adventure attracted or whom William had hired to aid him.

The conquest must have made very much more difference to the upper classes of the English people than to the lower. Many lords were killed at that Battle of Hastings which decided England's fate. In their places the conqueror put his own barons and army leaders, thus rewarding them, at no expense to himself, for their services. Norman lords soon superseded English lords throughout the land, but the peasants, and also the townsfolk, would go on with their lives much as before. The English system was not, as we have seen, so different from the completely feudal system of France that the lower vassals would know much difference in the change from one to the other. {146} The English regarded the land as belonging in the first instance to the people; the Normans regarded it as belonging to the king. But in the practical result this different point of view did not count for much, because the English had already lost all the land rights which had once been valuable to them. We traced the way in which that happened a chapter or two back.

It is curious to note how the Norman influence made itself felt indoors, within the house, more than out-of-doors. The simpler things, which all would use, kept their old names, the Saxon names. It is the words denoting things belonging to the more cultured life that come from the Norman. Thus sheep, oxen, deer, are Saxon names of the animals which the English would use or hunt; but when these creatures are cooked and brought to table they appear there under the French names of _mouton_ or mutton, _bœuf_ or beef, and _venaison_ or venison.

[Sidenote: Game laws]

Mention of the deer and the venison suggests one particular in which the Norman Conquest probably did restrict the peasants' rights. There is evidence to show that the Normans were not the inventors of those game laws which forbade, under cruel penalties, any hunting in the woodlands. It is certain that this was no new thing of Norman invention, because there are the Forest Laws, as they are called, that is to say, laws for the preservation of the game and the timber, as early as the Saxon Heptarchy. There is also a code of very cruel game laws attributed to Canute. It has been suggested that this code was a forgery invented by the Norman kings to excuse the severity of their game laws. What seems perhaps most probable is that there were severe laws in existence before the Normans came, but that the Normans were the first to apply the laws very strictly. The statements about the numbers of villages and cultivated fields that William Rufus destroyed in order to make himself a hunting estate in {147} the New Forest are almost certainly exaggerated misstatements. We must remember that all the earliest records that we have were written by monks or other clerics. Now the Church was often at variance with the lay authority and with the authority of the king. It was constantly trying to get more and more power into its own hands. Therefore all the stories are likely to have been written in a spirit antagonistic to the laity and in favour of the Church and all the Church's interests.

Just to show you the character of the game laws in those days and also to show how the law imposed different penalties on different classes, I will cite one or two sections from the code attributed to Canute.

"23. If any free or unfree man shall kill any beast of the Forest, he shall for the first pay double (_i.e._ double of ten shillings), for the second as much, and the third time shall forfeit as much as he is worth to the King.

"24. But if either of them by coursing or hunting shall force a royal beast (which the English call a staggon) to pant and be out of breath, the freeman shall lose his natural liberty for one year, the other his for two years; but if a bondman do the like, he shall be reckoned for an outlaw (what the English call a friendless man).

"25. But if any of them shall kill such a royal beast, the freeman shall lose his freedom, the other his liberty, and the bondman his life."

Human life and liberty were cheap, but the value of the King's deer was high.

I have said that England, by reason of the Norman Conquest, was caught up into the political affairs of the Continent. This was not merely because Normandy was a part of that Continent. It was chiefly because of the relationship or connection by marriage of the {148} ruler of Normandy, who had now become the ruler of England also, with the ruler of another part of that country which we now call France--that is, of Anjou. In order to understand how this happened, we have to get these troublesome relationships into our mind.

[Illustration: A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD. (A banquet is in progress upstairs.) (From Wright's _Homes of Other Days_.)]

Hugh Capet, as has been said, was chosen by the nobles of France, out of their own number, to be king when the family of Charlemagne became extinct. At first, being as it were but one among the rest of the nobles, the kings of the Capetian family had little more authority than one of those nobles.

William I. of Normandy and England was succeeded by William II., Rufus, who was shot by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. The elder son of {149} Rufus, by name Robert, was far away. He had gone on the first Crusade. Henry, the younger son, seized the English throne, and married an English wife. They had no son, but they had a daughter named Matilda. This Matilda then, on the death of her father Henry I., had this clear and distinct claim to the throne of England.

[Sidenote: The Crown of England]

But there was also in the world, and ready to take a crown if he could get one, a certain Stephen, who was the son of a daughter of William the Conqueror. Stephen therefore, as the Conqueror's grandson, had a claim to the throne.

The barons of England seem to have given their support now to one and now to the other of these two claimants, bringing their forces to the help of the side which, at the moment, was getting the worse of the struggle. Their idea seems to have been to keep the trouble going in order to make their own power greater.

At length the whole country wearied of the fighting, and a peace was made on the following terms: that Stephen should have the Crown during his life, and that at his death it should go to the son of Matilda. This son's name was Henry, and he did, in due course, succeed to the Crown, on Stephen's death, as Henry II.

Now, notice whom Matilda, his mother, had married. She had married first the Emperor, Henry V., and secondly, the Count of Anjou. Her son Henry inherited Anjou from her, and married Eleanor, who was heiress of Aquitaine and Poitou, in the south of France, and was the divorced wife of the King of France. By his marriage, therefore, Henry became lord of Aquitaine. Then King Stephen died, and this same Henry, our Henry II., had England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. That is to say his possessions on the Continent were more extensive than his English inheritance and also were more extensive than the lands of the King of France himself.

{150}

Thus was England taken up, as we may say, into the continental system and became a part of it. She became an actor in the struggles which such a situation as this was evidently sure to cause between the King of England, with all these French possessions, and the King of France. It was a contest between the Capets, the Capetian Kings of France, and the Angevins, the kings of England who had that name from the important lordship of Anjou, which belonged to them; and the contest continued from the middle of the twelfth century almost to the middle of the thirteenth--say from 1150 to 1240. In the course of that struggle a very remarkable, and a very remarkably different, change took place in France and in England in the power of the kings of the two countries over their barons.

In France the king gradually gained in power until, in the long reign of Philip Augustus, which stretched over the last twenty years of the twelfth century and the first twenty-three of the thirteenth, the king became all-powerful.

In England, on the contrary, where the king had been not nearly so much in the hands of the barons as the early Capetian kings of France had been, the barons gained more and more power until, in 1215, we find King John compelled by his barons to allow his seal to be affixed to Magna Carta. This charter gave Englishmen the beginnings of their liberty at the very time when the King of France was effectually establishing the autocratic power of the Crown over all French subjects.

Henry II., although his kingdom was so extensive in England and on the Continent, expanded it yet more widely by a complete and effective conquest of Ireland, and also by receiving homage from the King of Scotland, whom his armies had defeated at Alnwick and made prisoner.

{151}

We have seen very little of Scotland in the course of the great story, and little of Ireland since we saw the priests of the Irish Church coming westward and converting the heathen to Christianity. Scotland had for centuries, from the time of the Romans in Britain and probably long before that, been a troublesome neighbour to England on the north boundary. We have seen that boundary shifted once or twice as the forces on one side or on the other prevailed. But Scotland, in her attacks upon England, never succeeded in penetrating very far south, and therefore did not take any very important part, at that time, in the making of the story. And now Henry had the Scottish king prisoner and doing homage to him. That homage gave the King of England the position of feudal lord over the King of Scotland. But feudal vassals, as we have seen, were not always quite subservient to their lords. The Scottish kings were no exception, and they acted very much as if they were no less independent than before.

[Sidenote: Ireland]

But the conquest of Ireland was different, and complete. Ireland, lying out in the western sea, had escaped the incursions of the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans that had fallen upon England. Sea-rovers had constantly harried her coasts, as they harried every coast within reach of their sails and oars, and made some settlements there; but the island as a whole had not been overrun by any invaders since the coming of the Celts.

In Ireland, thus cut off from the rest of the world, the Church went its own way in less dependence on the Pope at Rome than, any other in all the Western world. In the Eastern Empire and in all the vast territories of the Slavs the Patriarch at Constantinople was looked up to as the head of what came, in later days, to be known as the Greek Church. It conducted its services rather differently from the Roman Church, {152} and there were some differences in the doctrines of the two. The Church of Constantinople was too strong for the Church of Rome to prevail against it in the East, but Rome claimed universal spiritual authority in the West.

The Pope, moreover, by virtue of a before-mentioned deed signed by Constantine, and called the Donation, or gift, of Constantine, was reputed to have authority over all islands. It did not matter that this famous Donation, or the deed by which it was supposed to be instituted, was strongly suspected to be a forgery, nor did it matter that even if it really were drawn up by Constantine and signed by him, his right to give away authority over "islands" was not quite clear, although he were the emperor of the world. No matter. This gift of "islands," though the document, or deed, was doubtful, was destined to play an important part in the world's story when that story began to be concerned with the discoveries of new continents and islands.

For the moment it served to authorise the Pope to give our Henry II. a mandate to conquer Ireland, and to bring its Church into subservience to Rome. The Pope was Adrian IV., the first, and the only, Englishman who ever held that highest spiritual honour. His behests were willingly and easily obeyed. Ireland, divided between several local chieftains, or kings, did not resist Henry's armies long; and so became subjugated to England. And by thus bringing Ireland into the fold of the Church Henry made some atonement to Rome for that infamous murder, in Canterbury Cathedral, of the Archbishop Thomas, sometimes called à Becket, which was done by some of his knights who thought to give him pleasure by its doing, even if he had not directly bidden it.

The differences between Henry and his archbishop had risen out of that question of "investitures," that is of who should have the appointments to the high {153} offices in the Church (whether those appointments should be made by the Crown or should be kept in the hands of the clerical party), which was the cause of much trouble, and actual fighting, in many lands. The solution of the trouble, as has been noted already, was found in the arrangement that the Church should appoint its own officials for all spiritual offices, but that for its earthly possessions it should do homage to the sovereign of the country in which they lay. The appointment of the Pope himself was put into the hands of a College of Cardinals: that is, of high Church officials.

[Sidenote: Cœur-de-Lion]

Henry's successor on the English throne was his eldest surviving son Richard, surnamed _Cœur-de-Lion_ for his gallantry in war.

We have come now to the years of which the great story has been told to us in very picturesque language. It seems to be an age of heroes, and of heroes inspired by the highest motives. It is the time of that third Crusade in which the kings of England and of France combined with the emperor to try to win back Jerusalem from Saladin, that great Moslem ruler who held Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Mediterranean shore of Africa nearly as far west as Tunis. Westward again African Moslems held the southern half of Spain. There were gallant actions to be performed on behalf of the Cross both in East and West.

It was the age of those wandering minstrels the troubadours of the Langue d'oc in the south of France, the trouvères of the Langue d'oil in the north of France, the singers of the Lingua di si in Italy. Each of those was so called from the word used by the people of the locality for our English word: "yes." In the "oil" we have the origin of the modern French "oui." In England we have seen that there were wandering minstrels. In Germany there were the same, by the name of Minnesingers.

{154}

These Romance languages, as they were called, of the Langue d'oil and the Langue d'oc, were the result of the mixture, in the different localities, of the Gothic, or German language with the Roman, the Latin. The _trouvères_ of Northern France, like the minnesingers and the English minstrels, were singers or reciters of stories. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" may give us an idea of the tales that they recited. But, at this moment of our story, say the end of the twelfth century, we are in the midst of the age of chivalry, as it is called. It was the age when the knight thought it right to devote all his services to some lady of his love whose colours--probably a knot of ribbon which she had worn--he carried conspicuously. It was the age of tournaments, which were encounters between mounted and heavily armed knights held before some great lord's castle. It was an age too of constant fighting, some of which was in the sacred name of the Cross against that Crescent which was the badge and the sign of the Saracens. So these rhymesters had plenty of stories for their telling.

There was a whole series of tales about the Court of King Arthur in Britain, some of which Tennyson has put for us into modern verse in his "Idylls of the King." There was a series, too, about the Court of Charlemagne and his paladins, as his knights were called. Many, indeed most, of the stories, which may have had some historical and real incident underlying them, were so overlaid with invention that it is quite impossible to tell where truth leaves off and fiction begins. The knights are of quite incredible stature and strength, and the feats they perform are far too good and great to be true.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

{155}

[Illustration: A JOUST BETWEEN KNIGHTS IN THE LISTS]

(From _The History of Everyday Things_ (Quennell), by permission of Messrs. B. T. Batsford, Ltd.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

We ask ourselves, then, seeing that we cannot accept these stories as true in all their detail, whether or no they are so far true that they do give us an accurate idea of what life was like in those days: {156} whether knights-errant--that is to say, knights "erring" or wandering--really did go about, as they are represented to us, seeking adventures.

Certainly many of the adventures of which the stories tell us cannot be believed. The knights slay for us such creatures of fairy-tale as dragons and the like. But still there is no reason why something of the kind may not have been true. We have to imagine a country thinly populated and cultivated only in parts. We have to remember, too, that these knights, and their horses also, were covered with armour, so that no weapons of the villeins or men of low degree could hurt them much. Moreover, the reputation of the knights made them very bold against the men of less degree, and made those men of humbler class the more timid and humble. Therefore it is not altogether beyond belief that there may have been much of this going about from castle to castle by wandering knights in armour, and the wastes and woodlands were wild places, where wild beasts and yet wilder outlawed men might be met with. The tales of the minstrels had some foundation; but it is probable that what they were interested in was not so much to tell their audience true stories, as to tell them stories which should amuse them and thrill them.

That is the kind of story that the singers of England, Germany, and Northern France told; but the singers of the south of France, the troubadours of the Langue d'oc, were not so much singers or tellers of stories, as singers of love songs. They could sing hymns of hate, too, against those whom they disliked, and this gave several of them much power. Some were of high rank. They went from castle to castle, providing entertainment in return for the amusement and delight which their verses gave. Remember that the castles were poorly lighted, after dark, that there were few books and few people able to read what books {157} there were, and you may realise that the troubadour would be very welcome.

[Sidenote: Troubadours, etc.]

"Troubadour" and "trouvère" are both from the French root which we still see in French "trouver," "to find." They were finders or inventors of songs and stories. With them, in their company sometimes, travelled a lower class of musician and entertainer, who did conjuring tricks, played antics, as well as performing on musical instruments. He was called a "joglar," or "jocular," a joking person. Our modern form of the word is "juggler."

With these shows and performances of the minstrels and the juggler, and with dancing, wrestling, and cruel sport like bear-baiting and cock-fighting, the people passed their leisure.

[Illustration: RICHARD CŒUR-DE-LION'S PRISON AT TRIEFELS, RHENISH BAVARIA.]

Now our King Richard, of the lion-heart, was reckoned as a troubadour. He was a verse maker and a singer. That Crusade on which he went with the {158} King of France had a certain measure of success. It did not gain back Jerusalem from Saladin; but it did win towns on the coasts of Palestine, and it ended in an arrangement with Saladin that the Christians should retain these coast towns and that Christian peaceful pilgrims should be allowed to go to Jerusalem without being ill-treated.

But the Crusade had other results also. Richard appears to have taken a more leading part in it than the King of France liked. The King of France returned from the Crusade before Richard. He found that Richard's brother, John, had conspired with the English barons against Richard, and he very gladly gave his aid to John to strengthen the conspiracy.

Richard, probably taking too much upon himself, in his lion-hearted way, had offended other people besides the King of France. One of these was the Duke of Austria. Clearly Richard realised that he was not a very popular person, for he disguised himself and tried to gain his way home from the Crusade undetected. But he was found out as he was going through Austria. He was brought before the Duke and imprisoned. Later the Duke of Austria handed him over to the emperor, and he was imprisoned in a castle in Germany.

There, according to the story, he was overheard, singing a song of his own making, by a youth who had at one time been his page and was passing by that castle in which he was held prisoner. However that be, it became known that the King of England, returning from fighting for the Cross, was being held shamefully a prisoner, and the indignation of the Pope and of the greater part of Christendom was fierce. Under threat of being excommunicated from the blessings of the Church, and on payment of a large ransom, the emperor released King Richard, who hastened back to England.

{159}

The barons had been conspiring with John, but John had none of the ability to be leader of a great conspiracy. The barons, moreover, had learnt from of old how to make their own power greater by aiding now one claimant to the throne and now another. As soon as Richard appeared they deserted John's very wrongful cause and went back to their proper allegiance to Richard. John had no hereditary right to the Crown, even on Richard's death, for John was the fifth son of Henry II. and Henry's fourth son had himself a son, and this son, by all the laws of heredity, had a claim on the Crown before John, his uncle.

But what we call the laws of heredity were not followed very strictly in those days, and we have seen again and again how ready a king was to portion out to his sons parts of his kingdom. It was a practice which naturally led to fighting and to dissension.

Henry had signified before his death the division that he intended to make, and his sons began to fight and intrigue for their portions while he was still alive. Philip, King of France, seems to have been ready to support any claimant against the King of England. While Richard was king Philip supported John against him. As soon as John became king he turned against John, and John crossed the Channel to fight Philip in order to try to maintain the English sovereignty over Henry II.'s continental possessions.

[Sidenote: The Plantagenet kings]

But the dukes of the duchies and the counts of the provinces favoured Philip rather than John. Their quick change from the English to the French allegiance shows how little real unity there was under a feudal king. John was a feeble leader, and the result of some months of fighting was that he surrendered nearly all the territory on the Continent held by his grandfather. The kings of England ceased to be Angevins, that is to say ceased to hold the lordship of Anjou. The name of Plantagenet, from the branch {160} of the _planta genista_, or broom, which they took for their badge and wore in their caps, superseded the name of Angevin for their dynasty.

You might think that now, when the French king was thus establishing himself as lord of nearly all that we call France, the kingdom was beginning to settle down into much the same condition, and with much the same boundaries, as we see it. As a matter of fact it had to be rent apart again, and again re-united, before that settlement could begin. You will do well to note that one of the most powerful of the lords who helped Philip in his fight with John was the Duke of Burgundy. This name of Burgundy was brought into the great story at a very early date, by a Gothic tribe called the Burgundi coming westward with the others. It is a name that remains to this day. But no other name of a territory has stood for such different areas, or has had such different significance. It was, of course, part of Charlemagne's Empire, and now it was held as a fief of the King of France. We shall see Burgundy coming to great power before the story's end, but for the moment the French king is pre-eminent over his lords.

The position between king and barons in England is very different, for the barons are there forcing the king to the acceptance of Magna Carta. By the provisions of that charter or agreement no Englishman shall henceforth be imprisoned without trial; and already travelling justices have been instituted to go through the land and conduct trials.

In England the foundations are being laid for liberty. On the Continent the foundations are being laid for that despotic power of the Crown which is only to be broken by the catastrophe of the French Revolution.

{161}